- A classroom pilot of a nutrition education game called Fitter Critters was conducted at a middle school to test its effectiveness.
- The game aimed to teach 8-12 year olds healthier eating habits through caring for a virtual pet by shopping, cooking, and feeding it.
- Results found that playing the game for one week increased students' nutrition knowledge, positive attitudes towards nutrition, and self-efficacy related to healthy eating and exercise. Most students enjoyed the game and logged on outside of class time.
8. Games for Health 2011
• Got exposure to a lot of great work
• Connected with researchers
• Started learning about grant opportunities
o Foundations
o SBIR/STTR
o R01/R21
9. • Player is responsible for maintaining the
health of a virtual pet
• Must shop for the critter's food, cook for
it, and feed it
• Each day the player must fill the
critter's green bars without filling the
red bars
13. • Games are a form of
procedural rhetoric
• Procedurality makes video games
unique as a communications medium
• Example: BANNED in Kansas!
14. 1. Define a core message
A persuasive game
must be designed around
a clear and concise statement
of what you want players
to do or to believe.
15.
16.
17. 2. Tie the message to strategy
Games drive players
to find the most efficient ways
to win.
If the message represents
the ideal strategy,
then the process of playing
serves as a proof of its truthfulness.
18. We built a tiered system of rewards
Social rewards
Trick out your pad
Earn more money
Greater productivity, more
sports wins, sick less often
Health goes up
Better food choices
19. Pilot
• Preceded by usability studies
• Worked with USDA to ensure accuracy of the data
• Added quests to make it self-running
• Conducted the study at an elementary school in
Northbridge, MA in November 2011
• Will be published in the Games for Health Journal
20. Pilot study
• Middle school in central Massachusetts
– 5th graders
• Played the game for one week during health class (52
minute class periods)
• Hypotheses:
– Students would find the game acceptable.
– Playing the game would increase nutrition and activity
knowledge, positive nutrition attitudes and self-efficacy for
healthy eating and physical activity.
22. Fitter Critters Acceptability
• Scale: 1=strongly disagree & 5=strongly agree
• Overall average for scale=4.52 (SD=0.60)
• Lowest rated item:
• I liked what the critter looked like (M=4.04, SD=1.28).
• Highest rated items:
• I liked playing the shot put game (M=4.79=SD=.52).
• I want my critter to be healthy (M=4.78, SD=0.66).
23. Game tracking data (n=97)
Average number of game log-ons was 11.96 (SD=5.88).
73% logged on at least once outside of class.
Students completed an average of 14.71 (SD=3.30) quests
(out of 17 total quests).
Played an average of 86.41 (SD=114.06) sport games.
Critter’s health
Overall health scores began at 2 and increased on average to
3.54 (SD=1.64; 5 point scale).
Percent saturated fat began at 20% and decreased on average
to 15.63 (SD=7.63).
24. What did you like MOST about the game? (n=78)
Frequency %
Games (shot put / foot race) 38 43.18
Buying food / Cooking / Feeding the critter 14 15.91
Health related / learned something 11 12.50
Decorating Critter's home 7 7.95
Earning money 6 6.82
Quests 4 4.55
Everything 3 3.41
Certain game features (having choice, having own critter) 2 2.27
Critter 1 1.14
Nothing 1 1.14
I don't know 1 1.14
26. Future Directions
• “The thing I liked most about the game is how
you…get to actually cook your food. I may not
know how to cook in real life, but it's fun
cooking in here.”
So I'm going to be prsenting a case study of a nutrition education game we created called "Fitter Critters", that's intended to persuade kids to adopt healthier eating habits and empower them with the skills the need to make better choices about their own diets. I'm thrilled that the conference theme this year is "designing across channels", and I'd like to invite you to think of games as one of the gin which user experience desigers can make an important contribution and find new ways to solve problems. Now it's well established... I'm going to be talking about games that are created to persuade people to adopt a particular point of view, or to take some action in the real world. And I'll argue that games are actually ideal way to do this, and well worth the attention of user experience designers. To illustrate the point I'll be going through a case study of Fitter Critters, which is a nutrition education game designed to encourage kids to adopt healthier eating habits. Now it's well established that one of the great, cheap ways to curry favor with an unfamiliar audience is to show them cute pictures of your baby. ANd I'm certainly not above that.
Last year, Let's Move in coordination with the USDA launched the Apps for Healthy Kids contest.
Our entry was Fitter Critters, and out of 63 entrants it took 2nd place. SO we were really happy about that.
Fitter Critters was intended for use in classrooms, and our education consultant prepared an 8-lesson interdisciplinary unit plan calibrated to national standards for teachers to use to integrate the game into classroom instruction. It's full of worksheets, overheads, fun games and activities. I've brought along printed copies, and if you'd like to have a look just let me know.
So how does the game go about changing player behavior?
The design of Fitter Critters was heavily influenced by a book by Ian Bogost called "Persuasive Games". Bogost argues that games can contain procedural rhetoric, and are able to communicate persuasive messages. He further argues that it is the procedurality of video games, their ability to execute rules, that makes them unique as a communications medium. In public speeches and TV shows, meaning is communicated overtly. But in a procedural medium, it is communicated through participation.
Critical to guide design decisions toward the central persuasive objective. These are often best left implicit in the game itself -- but more about that in a minute.
When we were first sketching out the game on index cards, its two core messages were the only unchanging part of the design.
So everthing in the game is built toward these two ideas.
Players need to adopt your core messages as a working hypothesis, and then test it out in the game.
To prove eating better leads to a better quality of life, we built a tiered system of rewards into the game, where one success leads to another. If the critter is consistently served better food, then its health goes up. If its health goes up, then it's more productive at work and wins more games. Those things allow it to earn more money. It also gets sick less often -- getting sick means that the player can't compete in games or work -- so that also allows it to earn more. Players can then spend the money on decorating their homes. FInally, this feeds into a social reward because players' friends can visit their house and see all the fancy bling they'be got. But at the root of all of this is learning to make better chjoices about food, which is not stated explicitly anywhere in the game.
We hypothesized that students would find the game highly acceptable as evidenced by 1) positive scores on a video game acceptability questionnaire that measured satisfaction, usability and relevance to their eating and activity behavior, 2) playing the game outside of school and 3) positive teacher ratings. We also hypothesized that playing the game would increase nutrition and activity knowledge, positive nutrition attitudes and self-efficacy for healthy eating and activity.