World of Workout: A Contextual Mobile RPG to Encourage Long Term Fitness

Bilbiographical Information:

Joey Bartley, Jonathon Forsyth, Prachi Pendse, Da Xin, Garrett Brown, Paul Hagseth, Ashish Agrawal, Daniel W. Goldberg, and Tracy Hammond. 2013. World of workout: a contextual mobile RPG to encourage long term fitness. In Proceedings of the Second ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on the Use of GIS in Public Health (HealthGIS '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 60-67. DOI=10.1145/2535708.2535718 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2535708.2535718

URL:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2535718

World of Workout is an alternative exercise application for mobile phones. It mixes the "game-ification" of an exercise application that is becoming increasingly more common with a dedicated game application. The idea behind World of Workout is to create an avatar in a game world whose statistics depend directly on the exercise data of that particular user.

The user's avatar has three main statistics: strength, speed, and stamina, all of which have a direct role in how the avatar plays in the game, and all are directly influenced by the exercise data. In order to detect user exercises, the application uses a phone's built-in GPS and accelerometer feature to track runs and stationary exercises. The in-game avatar attributes of speed, strength, and stamina are affected by how a user performs sprints, weights and push-ups, and long distance runs and biking respectively. The game also contains a random-reward function, in which a user is recommended one particular exercise with an immediate and significant bonus to the avatar's statistics if the exercise is completed. This is one of the two components that encourages users to try a variety of exercises, which is both safe for the user as well as creates a more well rounded exercise program.

The second of these components is the "fatigue" mechanic, which is integrated deeply into how the exercise translates to avatar progress. The rate at which the player's avatar raises his or her stats is linear in terms of how much exercise that person performs. Indeed, the biggest progress happens when the user performs the biggest variety of exercises possible. "Fatigue" in this case is an implementation of diminishing returns, where a user who does nothing but sprint will see his or her improvements in the avatar's speed diminish the more he or she does it, to the point where the improvement in avatar speed is negligible.

The reasons for implementing this mechanic are numerous. First, as mentioned previously, this is done to create a well rounded exercise program. Second, repeated and concentrated use of any one exercise can prove to strain the muscles and eventually become dangerous, so this is implemented to prevent users from over-exerting themselves for the sake of improving their avatar. Third, this system prevents cheating, where a user who has figured out how to "cheat' the phone's accelerometer to make it think that the user is running when really he or she is in place.

I think that the fatigue factor in this application is easily the most novel contribution to this space. Even though some applications have existed to game-ify exercise activities, there are not very many mobile games that are directly linked to an exercise application, and certainly not one where the game's avatar performance is directly linked to the user's exercise regimen. Finally, the fatigue factor performs many functions at once and creates a level of abstraction between player performance and avatar progress that is vital to making a video game "fun". I believe that a larger set of "fatigue"-like mechanics applied to this exercise application, as well as the development of a very robust game to go along with the exercise portion of the activity can prove to make a very useful tool for exercise.