Weight Watchers, the Video Game
Here’s an interesting article from Clive Thompson over at Wired comparing Weight Watchers Online to MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. There are many similarities, Thompson notes, including leveling and rewards. He’s got a great point. I noticed the same thing about my kids’ tae kwon do classes. Of course the idea of designing work teams modeled after WoW guilds is not new, either. Here’s a closer look at the idea of “Corporate Warcraft.”
Beck and Wade pointed out, and are echoed by people like Karl Kapp, that young workers often approach work in a gaming framing of mind. Work objectives become “quests,” paychecks bring in “gold,” promotions equate to “leveling up,” and their bosses either become “guild leaders,” or “dungeon bosses,” depending on whether they help or hinder the employees (“players”) in attaining their quests.
So the idea of making other life goals into games, such as placing diet and fitness within a MMORPG framework, makes good sense. I agree with Thompson. Weight Watchers has something going there.
Tags: Clive Thompson, Karl Kapp, Weight Watchers, Wired
Business Games, Game Discussion, MMORPGs, Making Video Games, Medical Games, Serious Games, World of Warcraft | John Rice | 
August 11, 2008 7:02 pm
No Comments
Other Links to this Post
-
Weight Watchers, the Video Game — August 11, 2008 @ 11:48 pm
-
weightwatchers — September 3, 2008 @ 5:18 am
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By myspace games, August 12, 2008 @ 1:25 pm
this fitness framework makes sense i would definitely want to take this into consideration and take more classes dealing with this.
By B, September 4, 2008 @ 12:32 pm
That’s something