社交游戏能否有益身体健康？——随着这种新兴游戏越来越受玩家欢迎，很多健康组织开始关注这一问题。

今年6月，温哥华游戏资讯公司Ayogo发布了一款Facebook游戏HealthSeeker。这款游戏将向改善自己生活习惯的糖尿病玩家奖励“生活经验”积分或虚拟商品。例如，游戏中可能会出现类似“咖啡不加糖”的任务，玩家一旦完成任务就会得到奖励。

这类游戏任务的根本主旨是要让玩家行动起来。Ayogo公司的创办者兼首席执行官Michael Fergusson认为，人们在情感上很注重身体健康，人人都很很清楚合理饮食、坚持锻炼的重要性，但践行这些却并不容易。因此，Ayogo愿意为玩家的健康行动买单。Fergusson强调，人们的一些细节活动最终可以形成一种习惯，提高人们的健康水平。

非营利社交媒介Diabetes Hand Foundation与Ayogo公司和Joslin糖尿病中心共同开发了这款游戏。对此，Diabetes Hand Foundation的合作伙伴兼董事Manny Hernandez表示，这款游戏可以激发玩家对自己进行不断的探究，促进人们不断完善自我。目前已有3000人登录该游戏。

HealthSeeker的商业模式在理论上具有一定价值。因此，德国制药公司Boehringer Ingelheim对这一项目进行了投资，希望促进这款糖尿病相关的创意网络游戏发展。该公司的公共事务交流代表Susan Holz表HealthSeeker希望通过利用玩家自身的社交网站，将其改造为一个鼓励和支持玩家改善生活习惯的能源。

实际上，这款游戏的开发动力主要来源于利益互惠原则。游戏设计师建立了一个便于玩家赠送礼物的平台。即使玩家知道这些礼物其实一文不值，但他们也很珍惜这种来自友人的鼓励礼品。

在HealthSeeker中，用户可以向完成任务的朋友送出一个“Kudo”奖励，这是一款用于搞怪的虚拟礼物。当用户完成某项艰难任务后收到这类礼品会令他们觉得被认可、受重视。因而形成一种微妙但强大的使命感坚持下去。

Healthseeker

此外，这款游戏在一定程度上也依靠于社交网站。在社交网站上，玩家可以接受来自朋友的挑战（数据指出，玩家执行普通游戏的平均任务数量是2个，而执行朋友发出的挑战任务的平均数则是4个。）此外，由于朋友的参与，玩家再次玩这款游戏的机率也更大。

虽然现在就认可HealSeeker的成功有点为时过早，但另一款游戏也向我们展示了其改变玩家行为的能力。MovieSet是一个电影预告视频网站，该网站在去发布后仅有少数浏览者，网站开发商预期的观看热潮并没有出现。

因此，MovieSet公司与Ayogo展开合作，在预告视频中嵌入了一款在线小游戏，玩家即可自测也可邀请朋友参与回答，比拼得分，优胜者可以在MovieSet网站上观看更多的电影预告。这一原本免费的权益现在必须依靠玩家去“赚取”。

这个活动执行后成效显著。据Ayogo报导，一个月内MovieSet网站的流量从2万4000攀升到12万5000注册用户，用户平均观看的预告片数也从原来的1到2条上升为5条。另外，网站的其他非游戏板块的流量也从2万4000人上升到了4万5000人。同时还有用户在观看预告视频后留下了颇有价值的留言。

其实，这个活动的道理很简单：人们不仅喜欢赢，而且讨厌失去机会，哪怕是漏掉观看一条预告片的机会。

最后，这个电影网站没有运用任何传统宣传方法，其电影预告片浏览次数就超越100万。对此，MovieSet的董事兼首席执行官Colleen Nystedt也称赞其是一种提高流量的成功机制。

随着越来越多不同行业的人士开始关注社交游戏，游戏成就了一个双赢市场：游戏玩家从胜利中得到满足，而公司或社会也实现预定目标。

纽约游戏资讯公司Area/Code的资深监制Kati London表示，游戏是一种刺激玩家参与性和行为的社会互动个性系统，它能强有力地影响和改变玩家的行为习惯。

此前，Discovery频道曾聘请Area/Code公司为其开发一款能引发人们对能源问题思考的游戏。因此，Area/Code开发了Power Planets。游戏中，玩家拥有一个星球，通过建造房子和开发能源赚取分数。一旦星球污染蔓延或自然资源耗竭时则会扣分。

比起直白地宣传演讲，游戏设计者希望通过游戏令玩家意识到环保决策的重要性和自己的社会责任意识。Discovery副董事Allison Rand表示，在游戏中，玩家如果想要持续经营一颗健康的星球就必须令居民安居乐业。在Facebook上玩家可以访问别人的星球——它们也许经营得并不好。如此一来，就像父债子偿，前人破坏的环境就要依靠子子孙孙来清理。

这款游戏的赞助商之一的Shell公司同时也推广7月上映的Discover系列节目Powering the Future。据Rand报导，该节目放送期间Power Planets成为Discovery网站上最受欢迎的游戏，同时也是科学频道历来最受欢迎的游戏。

随着社交游戏越来越受欢迎，很多公司都意识到它有着卓越的说服效果。对此，Fergusson表示，这种游戏通知的理念正在迅速蔓延，“我们希望可以将世界变得更好更有趣。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译）

Can your social network make you healthier? It’s a question that health organizations are asking more and more–as part of a wave of new gaming experiments that aim to persuade players to think and act differently while having fun.

In June, Vancouver game consulting company Ayogo launched a Facebook game called HealthSeeker that awards “life experience” points or virtual gifts when players with diabetes make small lifestyle changes. For example, it might assign a challenge such as not putting sugar in a single cup of coffee and then reward the player for completing the mission.

The challenge of this kind of game isn’t to convince people of something but to get them to act. “People are already emotionally committed to their health,” says Michael Fergusson, the founder and CEO of Ayogo. “They know they need to eat better and exercise.” But approaching that challenge all at once can seem overwhelming and thankless. “We pay them to take healthy actions,” says Fergusson. Reinforcing those small actions could turn them into habits that add up to better health.

“The game is an ongoing exploration for each player,” adds Manny Hernandez, cofounder and president of the Diabetes Hand Foundation, a nonprofit social-media group that worked with Ayogo and the Joslin Diabetes Center to develop the game. “We hope that through that it can become a very strong source of support for the player,” he says. So far, more than 3,000 people have signed up.

Businesses see value in the concept. “We were really trying to utilize the game players’ own online social network as a source of inspiration and support,” says Susan Holz, a public affairs and communications representative at the German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, which funded the project as part of an initiative to encourage creative online games related to diabetes.

The real power of the game lies in the principle of reciprocity, the tendency to do something positive for someone who did something positive for you. Game designers take advantage of reciprocity by making it easy for users to send gifts to friends (“You just accepted this pig” in Farmville, or “Thank Don by sending a free mystery bag back!” in Mafia Wars). Even if users know that the cost of a gift is minimal–often no more than a mouse click–”in general we found people will value the thing they receive,” says Fergusson.

In HealthSeeker, a user can send a “Kudo”–a virtual gift designed to be interesting or amusing–to reward friends for completing a task such as going a day without chocolate. When they receive a Kudo, users feel rewarded and acknowledged for doing something difficult, Fergusson explains. They will also feel a subtle but powerful obligation to return the favor, he says: “That obligation drives the loop of social games.”

The game also draws on the power of social networks in other ways. Users can accept challenges from friends, which Fergusson says make them more likely to take on the recommended mission (the average player is working on two active missions; players who have accepted a friend’s challenge average four). What’s more, users tend to return to the game more frequently when their friends are also playing.

While it’s too early for HealthSeeker to have more than anecdotal evidence of the success of the game, other games have shown conclusively that they can alter behavior–even more than expected at times. MovieSet is a website that chronicles movie production to generate advance buzz for largely unknown films before promos hit TV or radio. When it launched a behind-the-scenes Web show last year, it initially attracted few viewers. The prerelease excitement that MovieSet craved wasn’t there.

So the company turned to Ayogo, which created an online trivia game with answers hidden in the show itself. Players could test themselves, invite friends to take the quizzes, and compare scores. Successful players were rewarded with more video trailers of the MovieSet films. What would have been given away for free now had to be “earned.”

It worked. Within a month, MovieSet’s overall Web traffic skyrocketed from 24,000 to 125,000 unique visitors, according to Ayogo. The average visitor watched five trailers, up from one or two, while video views rose to 500,000, up from 30,000. The rest of the site benefited as well, with traffic to pages not featured in the game growing from 24,000 viewers to 45,000. What’s more, users readily volunteered valuable information on their movie-watching habits–an alternative way to win the trailer clip if they failed to answer the trivia questions correctly.

The psychology is simple but powerful: not only do people like to win, but they don’t like to feel like they’ve lost something, even if it’s just a chance to watch a trailer.

The movie game ultimately resulted in over a million views of promotional videos without requiring the producers to pay for any traditional marketing. “It was a very successful mechanism for jump-starting our traffic,” says Colleen Nystedt, the president and CEO of MovieSet. “It helped build the audience both for the hosted show and the films being discussed.”

As more and more industries look to social games to change habits, games can become a win-win situation: the user feels engaged and rewarded for winning while a company or a society can achieve a critical goal.

“Games are stylized systems of social interaction that incentivize engagement and behavior,” says Kati London, who serves as the senior producer at the New-York based game consulting company Area/Code. “That potentially makes them great engines for influencing and producing behavior change.”

Area/Code was hired by the Discovery Channel to produces games meant to stimulate new thinking about energy while promoting the network’s programs. Area/Code created a Facebook game called Power Planets, in which users are assigned a planet. Players gain points by creating buildings and developing energy sources. They lose the capacity for earning points when pollution increases or natural resources are depleted. Every few days the planets are shuffled among the players.

Rather than explicitly promoting conservation, the designers wanted the game to make users feel the effects of risky environmental decisions by tapping into their sense of social responsibility. “You make choices about how to keep your inhabitants happy while maintaining a healthy planet, but then you pass your planet to another player on Facebook and you get someone else’s planet–which may or may not be left in a good state,” says Allison Rand, a vice president at Discovery. “The response was much like the real-life feeling of treating your planet poorly and leaving it to your grandchildren to clean up.”

The game, sponsored in part by Shell, was also meant to promote the Discovery series Powering the Future, which aired in July and gave viewers codes that unlocked powers in the game. Power Planets was the most popular game across the Discovery websites while the show was being promoted and aired, according to Rand, and the most popular game in Science Channel’s history.

As social games grow increasingly popular, more and more companies are recognizing their inherent power to persuade. “This idea of gamification is spreading broadly,” says Ayogo’s Fergusson. “I hope that we can make the world better and more fun at the same time.”（Source：Technologyreview）