I’m pretty excited to try this one out. Health Month is a behavior change game where you set rules to follow each month and do daily tracking, with rewards and penalties for how well you follow them. I’m just digging into it, but so far it looks like you can choose “do more of this” or “do less of that”. I like the idea of limiting the scope of the goal to a month (what BJ Fogg calls a “
Background: Recently, TechCrunch featured an article about the playdeck they use at SCVNGR that outlines the mechanics of gameplay. The article cites at TED talk by game designer Jane McGonigal, which I talk about here. I was a little disappointed with McGonigal’s conclusion, because she basically offered up the solution as specially-themed video games to leverage the power of game mechanics, or “gameplay superpowers”, to do good in the real world and incite behavior change.