This is Part 2 of my interview with Anna Sort. If you haven’t already, check out Part 1 of the interview. Anna is a professional nurse who is working to bring together smartphone and video-game technology into healthcare. She is also an Associate Professor at the University of Barcelona, and works both as a gamification and as a serious games consultant.

Designing a Better Life Interview with Anna Sort – Part 2

Jonathan: What can go wrong with a system that utilizes technology and gaming mechanisms with a worldwide pool of contributors (aka “the crowd”)? For example, how do you design your game to prevent or deal with the abuse the rules or take advantage of bugs or loopholes?

Anna:
I think you cannot really prevent people from trying to cheat in a game, it is part of the challenge and the fun for some people to try to exploit games, so you just have to do your best designing to make it fun to play the regular way rather to make it “uncheatable.”

In our World of Warcraft diabetes add-on we are still deciding if we want the add-on in itself to be fun or not. However, what is clear is that if people wantsto cheat they are allowed to. The add-on is created to fit an exploring environment rather than a “win” situation, it is there for the player to decide whether to play using risky behavior and try what happens if you mix certain things/eat certain foods or to try their best to always “keep in track” with their glucose. It will definitely be exciting as well to see what people will do with the add-on in the end! We are here to learn about how people interact and react to “serious gaming” (using an already existing game for other learning purposes).

Jonathan: What are the biggest challenges you face from a design perspective to create something that people will interact with? How do they apply their virtual learning to their own real lives?

Anna:
This is a very interesting question and is something we ask ourselves. This isn’t explored that much in “serious games” in general. We hope to find out more about this with this experiment. However, we hope to help people understand how the diet and exercise affects diabetes, so in this first experiment we aren’t looking to change behavior in real life, but we will have a couple of questions regarding whether users have made any changes in their lifestyle at the end of the experiment.

Jonathan: What does success look like for your World of Warcraft Diabetes mod project?

Anna:
This is a very difficult question. In this first trial it will be complicated to have a bar to measure to say: “Yes, I’ve succeeded”. At the moment we are working on the add-on but there is a lot of work to do regarding questionnaires. How many will download it? How many will play it? What will be their reaction? There is a lot of work still to be done to determine a good answer for this question.

Jonathan: No problem. When you are truly innovating, you don’t really know until you try out an idea, discover what happens, and refine. Moving on, what new thing/trend/innovation are you keeping your eye on at the moment? Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?

Anna:
I’m very much into gamification and self-tracking apps. I’m a nurse so I’m all about prevention and I think mHealth (mobile health) offers us a great opportunity to focus on that and giving the user tools to take charge in their well being, lifestyle and health.

For more on these ideas and more, check out Anna’s latest presentation: Video Games and Gamification for Health Care .

Jonathan:
Thank you again Anna. I hope for the best in your work, and thanks for contributing to something that is important to all of us!

If you’d like to help out Anna with her WoW diabetes mod project, contact me and I’ll put you in touch with her and her project team.

For my first blog interview in my Designing a Better Life series, we will be chatting with Anna Sort. Anna is a professional nurse who is working to bring together smartphone and video-game technology into healthcare. She is also an Associate Professor at the University of Barcelona, and works both as a gamification and as a serious games consultant. I find Anna inspiring because she is working hard in the area of mHealth (mobile health) and games for health.

Anna Sort speaking at the Gamification World Congress

Anna is based in Spain, and graciously agreed to this interview in English for me, and for you, our readers. For more about Anna, check out her blog: Lost Nurse in the Digital Era and these two videos on youtube of her presenting: Designing Games as a Nurse, Gamification of Health Products.You can find her on Twitter here: @LostNurse.

Designing a Better Life Interview with Anna Sort – Part 1

Jonathan: Please tell us a bit about yourself. How did you get involved in the games for health field?

Anna:
I have always been a gamer but programming never attracted me. I was looking for a job as a nurse abroad when Blizzard Entertainment called me to be a customer support representative in France. They offered to take care of housing and banking, making it easy to move and start work in a new country. Also the multinational office work was something I had always wanted to try (and being a CS for the game World of Warcraft also seemed very cool). After 6 months I took the nurse spot in the company, and being a gamer working with gamers made me realize how much easier it would be to communicate and experiment some health information through games rather than 30 minute talks plus a flyer to never read at home.

After a while I started to look for Masters degrees that would allow me to go into a “techie-nurse” path. I found an interesting Master’s degree called CSIM, which was focused on a multidisciplinary approach to problem solving. I was the only healthcare student in the class, most of my classmates were designers, artists and programmers, but surprisingly 2 of the 8 Masters Thesis projects would have benefited from a healthcare professional, a rehabilitation system and an exergaming platform. In a way that reassured my idea that this “new profession” I wanted to pursue would eventually exist.

My thesis was about the quantity of exercise the children did while playing on an inflatable slide that had a game projected on and kids interacted with through an infrared system (it’s called an “exergaming platform”). I took part in the game design as well as the exercise experiment for my thesis so it was really interesting. I worked on a multidisciplinary team and I loved it. After my master’s I started my career alone, and soon enough I was contacted by Homero Rivas in Stanford, whom I talked about my vision in games and we are currently developing with MIT the first World of Warcraft health add-on to raise awareness on Diabetes.

Jonathan: The research and work that you do sounds fascinating. Can you explain how your work can help make our lives better?

Anna:
Behavior-wise humans are prone to play, and games offer a wide variety of play, such as exploring, competing, collaborating and self expression. Taking gaming into healthcare is a way to make taking charge of one’s health more interesting, intriguing and motivating. It is not about making fun of having diseases or trivializing them, making it less important because it’s a game. It’s about providing the tools and inspiring the motivation and behavior change to be healthy and improve your lifestyle.

Jonathan: I love your World of Warcraft Diabetes mod project. Can you tell us about this project and your goals? Is there anything we can do to help you?

Anna:
Thank you. It is a very exciting project indeed, and challenging! Especially because the game World of Warcraft has a pool of 9 million users, which means if 5% of these users download and play the add-on, we will have the biggest Health Game research experiment ever made!

The add-on is an “add” on the game which you download that changes the user interface. What we have done is add a glucometer on the side that is impacted by the player’s actions, such as running, fighting and eating foods. World of Warcraft has a lot of foods, drinks and alcoholic beverages so it makes the experimentation part very interesting. It isn’t focused on the disease itself, as we are aware not everyone reacts the same way to foods and drinks, and compositions aren’t equal worldwide. We want to raise awareness, and maybe even make new users having youngsters encourage family to play to see what is it like to live with diabetes.

We are not sure what people we will attract and we also are still debating whether we should gamify the add-on or if the game is good enough as-is people will still enjoy the game with the add-on. All the steps should be taken care of very wisely as the amount of research information might overwhelm us otherwise and turn out to be unusable.

How can people help? We still need a good experiment designer to take part of the team, so anything on that regard is helpful. And programmers. Hands are always needed!

Jonathan: What design concepts do you find the most useful for this project?

Anna:
Possibly the most important part of our design process will be focused on the tutorial. World of Warcraft has an excellent tutorial to help new players get on board, and since the new players we might attract will already have a whole game to learn, we want to make sure the on-boarding of the add-on doesn’t collide with the game tutorial and so it doesn’t overwhelm the player.

Stay tuned for Part 2.