Pulse

While the service was broadly well received, there were questions raised among potential users about some of the inherent risks of the service. If the service creates custom fitness goals for individuals, would it be able to understand people’s disabilities and be able to remain inclusive? For people with especially addictive personalities, while physical fitness addiction may be healthier than gaming addiction, is it fair to direct people towards it, and may it cause physical harm if taken too far?

A key discussion arising from the research was around the social element of the service. On one hand, people felt the service should be more social in ways that would promote competition between peoples fitness levels, but on the other hand people found that incentives for meetups could be an overstep. People value points as a way to promote events, however, as soon as people considered there was a health agenda behind it, which uses face-to-face socialising to help lift people’s wellbeing and activity outside online gaming worlds —they felt it was intrusive and patronising. This sheds light on the sensitivity of service interventions in interpersonal relationships, in particular with paternalistic approaches to social wellbeing.

Another interesting area of discussion is about what may be a precursor to this service. People considered that this type of service marks a clear crossing of boundaries between online gaming and offline gaming. Importantly, it’s not simply playing games in an offline environment, like playing football. It means adding a gaming layer to otherwise un-gamed parts of life to have a desired impact. To people, this seemed like a space that could be extremely exciting as it could inject fun into old experiences and build new layers of complexity to mundane parts of life. People seemed to connect deeply to the value of play in their life and perceived its re-emergence as exciting. The flip side, however, is that our compulsion as humans to engage in games and play could be taken advantage of to further agendas that may be less admirable or that the over use of such tangible incentives (like gaming currency) to influence may undermine more intrinsic motivations.