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2017 Yearbook
5. Gamification brings fun
Another senior Happy Aging sports group characterizes their continuous use of sports cloud data in their
sports behaviors. This seems to indicate their attention to health management. In the interviews, IEK finds
that the services to provide sports records applies the design theory of gamification. This design makes
users to have more fun after obtaining their sports records and stimulate them to continue a specific
behavior. The sports-service interface based on the gamification design theory shows certain scores or miles
calculation which aims not only at records and analysis but also a complete set of badges and sports events.
The user devices upload the data so as to become player of the game; thus, sports records bring pleasure,
rather than a scientific statistics for analyzing health conditions. Users can clearly see his or her own profess,
accumulation and advanced process. In the past, electronical computer games rely on moving mouse and
clicking or shaking the bar or pushing the button in the game. However, sports records platform relies on the
accumulated behavior records and miles to interact with the users.
Gamification is rather unfamiliar concept to Taiwanese. Nevertheless, it is already a familiar design concept to
the Silicon Valley and the innovative circle in China. The design purpose of gamification is to apply the game
elements into the non-game situations so as to motivate the user to take part in a specific behavior more
frequently, that is, the designer wishes the user to increase the behavior frequency. In 2010, the American
innovative software, Foresquare, released an intelligence application service which allows users to check
in and evaluate restaurants, cafés etc. Foresqure can obtain information which contains more accurate,
updated, and massive objective evaluations. But the question is why users want to help Foresquare?
Foresqure designs so-called PBLs, a mechanism starting with the letter of points, badge and leaderboard.
Users can check in to obtain points. If the leader who wins the most points at a specific restaurants, he or
she might be the Mayor of this restaurant. And certainly, the leader might be surpassed by anyone at any
time. There are different playing methods. For example, users accumulate check-in points at the same type
of Japanese restaurants to get a special badge of Japanese cuisine. It can be designed with different levels of
difficulties, levels and badges.
The points of Foresquare is useless in the real world; however, once users like it, a great number of
registration and usage quickly enhance the correctness of the data on Foresqaure. Currently, there are
4.5 million users and more companies would like to pay for the application program interface (API) of
Foresquare.