Yesterday I learned about a site that I feel is sort of a kindred spirit to Health Month.  It’s called Social Workout, is based in NYC, and seems to be interested in a lot of the same ideas that I’m interested in.  Basically, bringing the social and game element to health-improvement and behavior-change.

Today I talked with Oliver Ryan about what he’s doing, and we were definitely on the same page about ALL of our ideas.  It’s interesting to run into a business that in many ways is a competitor, but to have nothing but good will for the success of the business.

The way I see it, the world of health + social + games is going to be huge.  Nobody has yet gained traction on the idea though.  It’s a very unique place to be.  It’s like sitting in a canoe in a small pond with a few other canoes, knowing that a glacier is melting right around the corner, and would be filling the entire valley surrounding us with gushing, clear, beautiful water.  In the meantime, we’re building bigger boats.

I’m going to be in NYC for 1 day next month and can’t wait to meet the Social Workout team.  Best of luck to you guys and let’s keep working on this fascinating problem.

Check out their site!

What do you think of my tweetpitch for a chance to attend the Innovator’s Luncheon at Web 2.0 Summit?

I’m working on few slides for a pitch, and have looked at any pitch decks my entrepreneur friends are willing to share plus Dave McClure’s “How to Pitch a VC” talk.  As a (previous life) creative writing major, I like the constraints that pitching offers, and the emphasis it puts on writing (my strong suit).  I feel like I’ve got something great here to pitch.  Let’s see if they think so too.

Please give me feedback too.  Even though this is my third company, I’ve never done the pitching myself.

AKA Relatedness.  The sense of doing something that contributes to an idea that’s bigger than yourself.  In a weird way, this is how we get our sense of “belonging” and being related to the world/universe at large.

This is not really something you can add to game, or a site.  All you can do is place yourself near potential purposes that you think people might be traveling down.  Health Month, for example, sits next to the river of health, sustainability, quality of life.  750 Words sits next to the river of creativity, self-expression, and self-knowledge.

By being near potential sources of meaning in peoples’  lives, you can tap into the highly renewable motivational energy that is generated when people move along their purpose paths.

Jane McGonigal‘s EVOKE and many of her other games are good examples of games high on the purpose-meter.  Kiva is a good example of a website that highly aligns with purpose.

I think this is definitely an important motivation element in the playdeck, even though there’s really not much a game can do but align itself with purposes (therefore needing to both choose one and to get out of the way of it) that then use the game more than the game uses it.  Just doing that, however, is a big step, and one that I think games are going to be more interested in doing in the next few years.

Score: 13

• Effectiveness as a motivational tool: Very high (5 out of 5)
  
• Intrinsic or extrinsic: The very definition of intrinsic (5 out of 5)
• Difficulty to implement: Medium.  You have position your product along a purpose, and let it have its influence. (3 out of 5)

The behaviorist’s conception of humans as passive beings whose behavior must be elicited by external motivation in the form of incentives is, by any measure, outdated. Although the work done by some modern psychologists continues to rely implicitly on this assumption, more and more researchers have come to recognize that we are beings who possess natural curiosity about ourselves and our environment, who search for and overcome challenges, who try to master skills and attain competence, and who seek to reach new levels of complexity in what we learn and do. This is more true of some people than others, of course, and in the presence of a threatening or deadening environment, any of us may retreat to a strategy of damage control and minimal effort. But in general we act on the environment as much as we are acted on by it, and we do not do so simply in order to receive a reward. — Punished by Rewards, pg 25

This book has more insight per sentence than the average pop psychology or nonfiction book.  It’s pretty much blowing my mind on every page.

I’ve been thinking a ton about the space that Health Month is in, as I contemplate the pros and cons of various ways of spinning it up into a business.

As far as I can tell, there’s nobody doing exactly what I’m trying to do with Health Month, but there are a ton of people doing things very close to it… and they exist in a bunch of different markets that sort of converge around Health Month.

I did a little research last night and this is what I came with.  I could call them competitors, but that sounds sort of harsh.  I would rather collaborate and help each of these companies rather than compete with them.  In fact, I have met and talked with many of these people already, and all the way down the line they’ve been solid, good people running businesses that are attempting to improve the world in some specific way.  Good company, I think.

By category that I’ve arbitrarily placed them in…

1. Console games that play with health
   1. Wii Fit, launched 2006, very popular
2. Turning content into a game
   1. Squidoo, launched 2005, 7.5M visitors a month
   2. DevHub, launched 2009, 40K visitors a month
3. Fitness
   1. Nike+, launched 2006, very popular
   2. Livestrong, launched 2008, 2.8M visitors a month
   3. RunKeeper, launched 2008, 108K visitors a month, unknown downloads, raised $400K
   4. DailyBurn, launched 2008, 82K visitors a month, raised $540K
   5. Fitbit, launched 2007, unknown sales, raised $11M
   6. Walker Tracker, 3K visitors a month
4. Goal-making
   1. 43 Things, launched 2005, 980K visitors a month
   2. Diddit, launched 2007, 32K visitors a month
   3. Epic Win App, launched 2010, unknown sales, 8K visitors a month
   4. Streak.ly, just launched
   5. Goal Mafia, just launched
5. Location-based check-in games
   1. Foursquare, launched 2009, 1.2M visitors a month, 4 million users, raised $21.4M
   2. Gowalla, launched 2007, 208K visitors a month, raised $10.4M
   3. SCVNGR, launched 2008, unknown downloads, 92K visitors a month, raised $4.7M
6. Offline fitness programs with game elements
   1. Weight Watchers, launched 1963, 2.9M visitors a month
   2. P90X, launched 2008, 73K visitors a month
   3. Couch to 5K, 21K visitors a month
7. Gamification platforms
   1. BigDoor Media, launched 2009, unknown usage, raised $5.5M
   2. Bunchball, launched 2010, unknown usage, raised $6M
   3. Reputely, launched 2010, unknown usage
   4. Badgeville, launched 2010, raised $250K
8. Gamification networks
   1. Gameful, just launched, raised $64K on Kickstarter
9. Quantified Self
   1. Daytum, launched 2008, 6K visitors a month
   2. Me-trics, launched 2007, not many visitors
10. Social games
    1. MeYou Health, launched 2009, 21K visitors a month
    2. StickK, launched 2008, 10K visitors a month, raised $2.2M
    3. Mindbloom, launched 2008, 8K visitors a month
    4. Earndit, launched 2010, 2K visitors a month
    5. I Move You, launched 2010, 2K visitors a month
    6. Daily Feats, just launched
    7. Social Workout, 9K visitors a month
11. Weight loss
    1. Spark People, launched 2001, 1.9M visitors a month
    2. My Food Diary, 84K visitors a month
    3. Lose It!, launched 2009, unknown sales, 24K visitors a month
    4. Fat Droppr, launched 2010, 14K visitors a month
    5. Withings, launched 2008, unknown sales, 25K visitors a month
12. Wellness
    1. Limeade, launched 2006, unknown users, 2K visitors a month, raised $3.9M
    2. HealthTap, launched 2010, 3K visitors a month
    3. Cure Together, launched 2008, 6K visitors a month
    4. MedHelp, launched 1994, 2.9M visitors a month

40+ companies that are in my neighborhood.  From 50+ year old corporations to companies that just started this month.  From $20M investments to lots with no funding that I am aware of.

Considering how amazing I think this health + social + games + technology intersection is, and all of the really great new ways to put them together, I expect this list to be just the tip of the iceberg for the market in 5-10 years.

Who am I missing?

I think I just had a bit of a breakthrough in my thinking about intrinsic vs extrinsic.

First, though, cleaning up some of my vocabulary.

Intrinsic Reward Value

I’m not going to use the phrase “intrinsic reward” anymore.  I don’t think “reward” is the right way to think about it… it’s more of an intrinsic value than a reward, right?

Intrinsic Value vs Intrinsic Signifier vs Extrinsic Reward

Let’s say that you value exercise, and are interested in living healthier.  In addition, you enjoy the “high” you get from running, or from a tough workout.  The workout itself is the intrinsic value.  If you get points or badges for the workout, I think it’s better to call them intrinsic signifiers than extrinsic rewards.  Here’s why.  When you do something of intrinsic value, you get some reward in that thing that doesn’t need to be represented by anything other than the thing itself.  Enjoying a good run, for example, has intrinsic value (if you’re do in fact enjoy such a thing).  If you are playing a game that encourages you to do things that have intrinsic value to you, I think you need to call them intrinsic signifiers because they represent (but don’t replace, or distract from) the intrinsic value in the thing you’re doing.

Intrinsic signifiers are different from extrinsic rewards.  An example of an extrinsic reward would be if you got a free donut from the Nike Bakery every time you went on a run.  The donut becomes something that motivates completely separately from the run itself, and is therefore extrinsic.  It’s OUTSIDE the sphere of the original value that the activity gave in itself.  I think it’s really important to make this distinction.

Another example… say that you get a point or badge or special token for each new business contact you make at an event.  Assuming that business contacts have a value in themselves, outside of the game, those points/badges/whatever are intrinsic signifiers.  HOWEVER, if you can turn those points/badges/whatevers in and redeem them for X% off of your subscription to the Economist, or something, then the X% off the subscription becomes an extrinsic reward.  The act of redeeming, or substituting one thing for another, is what makes it extrinsic.

So long as your rewards represent the intrinsic value of the action you get them for, and have no value outside of what it signifies, then it’s intrinsic (either of direct value, or pointing to the thing of direct value).

This is important to me because it opens up a whole new understanding for me about the value of virtual points.  The fact that points/badges/icons are virtual is what allows them to remain of intrinsic value, rather than being dirtied by the substitution/replacement quality of most non-virtual reward systems.  Virtual points might be better at motivating than real rewards in the real world, and might be immune to the problems that are mentioned in Drive, and Punished By Rewards, simply because they aren’t extrinsic.

Another way to label them other than intrinsic signifiers, perhaps, is virtual rewards.  They are empty in themselves, and that’s a good thing.

Someone who knows more about this stuff might be able to point out flaws in this line of thinking.  Please do, if you are such a person.

But, if I am thinking about this correctly, it confirms a hunch that I’ve had for a while, that points/badges/etc are value-less in and of themselves.  They gain their value from the intrinsic rewards (or lack thereof) that they point to.  Getting the Swarm Badge on Foursquare is only valuable insofar as it is valuable to be at a big event, and to feel like you belong to such an event.  If you gain no intrinsic value from that experience, the badge is worthless.  If you do gain value from it, then it has that much value.  And, in what explains the magic power of the whole phenomenon, the badge is actually the most tangible and real representation of the otherwise intangible, intrinsic, value of the experience.

Getting the virtual badge makes it feel more real.

Intrinsic signifiers, because they are digital, and have a concrete form, allow us to detect, appreciate, and remember the intrinsically valuable experiences in our lives better.

And that is what gamification of life is all about.

It’s a phrase that I’ve been reading a ton about, and even using in a lot of conversations about motivation, game mechanics, etc.  But now I’m starting to feel like the meaning of the word is getting away from me.  So I figured I should think it through.

well-crafted #gamedesign delivers Intrinsic rewards (fun, learning, power, self-expression) that are deeply compelling

October 22, 2010 6:13 pm via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite

@amyjokim

Amy Jo Kim

The definition as I understand it is that an intrinsic reward is basically pure enjoyment of a thing for the thing itself.  The reward in itself.  It’s not a proxy for future enjoyment, or representative of work towards some other reward, but is the big salami itself.

What kinds of things fit into this category, and how subjective is the idea itself?

I am fairly convinced that autonomy (being able to make your own choices), mastery (getting better and better at a skill that matters to you), and purpose (doing something for the greater good) are all fairly convincing forms of intrinsic reward.  They are enjoyable in and of themselves.

Is fun/laughter/amusement an intrinsic reward? Is it enough to merely laugh?

Is power different from autonomy?  The ability to make your own choices is one side of power, but then there’s the ability to make choices for other people as well.  I would argue that this second half of power’s definition is NOT intrinsically rewarding.

What about self-expression? Yes, I think that is definitely an intrinsic reward.  It’s the reward of feeling alive, feeling understood (both by yourself and to others), and in communicating something true about yourself (whether it be thoughts, emotions, perspective, or other).

What is it that makes something enjoyable in itself, or not enjoyable in itself?  Need to think about this some more… it’s all foggy in my brain.

The Self-Determination Theory uses the word competence, and Daniel Pink uses the word mastery in his book, Drive.  Different states of the same journey.  And really, the motivational element here is simply the desire to get better and better at something.  Before you’re a master, and before you’re even competent, the joy and reward of just getting better at something is intensely powerful.

On 750 Words I use competence as a motivator by tracking how long it takes you to write 750 words, and how many times you were distracted.

On Health Month, I use competence as a motivator by giving you a “grade” at how closely you were able to follow each of your self-imposed rules each  month.

Nike+ and RunKeeper use competence by congratulating you on your fastest or longest runs.

The best way to play around with competence and mastery, in my opinion, is to provide people with a mirror of their activity.  Tell them what they just did, but didn’t realize, and remind them about how they have done in the past, but forgot.  Give them stats that summarize their behavior, and let them use that to make small incremental improvements over time.  It’s one of those things we’re really bad at… knowing if we’re making a small improvement or not.  We like big, obvious change.  But by keeping track of behavior and reporting back when you break a personal record, or improve your grade, or whatever… that feedback allows the long, slow, progress from competence to mastery to gain a little shape and form that it otherwise wouldn’t have.

Improving at something is highly rewarding… if you can detect it.  Game mechanics can help you detect the smallest improvements and magnify them so that they provide you with the fuel to keep improving.

A couple of my favorite books on this topic:

• Mastery
• One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

Score: 13

• Effectiveness as a motivational tool: Very high (5 out of 5)
  
• Intrinsic or extrinsic: The very definition of intrinsic (5 out of 5)
• Difficulty to implement: Medium.  It’s just about recording what has happened and highlighting small improvements. (3 out of 5)

Autonomy is the first element of the Intrinsic Reward Trinity outlined in Dan Pink’s book, Drive (autonomy, mastery, and purpose).  It is the ability to make choices about your life, the ability to direct our own lives.

An example of autonomy is rather amazing ROWE (results-only work environment), which is a management style that rewards employees based on results, and not on hours worked.  So, rather than expect someone to be in the office between certain hours every week, expect them to get a certain amount done.  This gives the employee the autonomy to figure out how they are best able to get the work done.

Another example, companies like Google that do the 20% personal time where you can work on non-primary-project specific things. Or hack days.

It’s not quite the same as independence, as it emphasizes choice rather than lack of connection or dependence on others.  Someone can choose to work closely with others, if it helps them get their work done.

In a game context, autonomy could be translated as the ability for a player to choose their level of commitment and their style of play within the game.  For example, Health Month allows people to choose their own rules every month.  They can choose both the number of rules adopted, as well as how difficult they want to play each rule (ie. No alcohol or limit to X number of drinks per week).

Score: 12

• Effectiveness as a motivational tool: High (4 out of 5)
  
• Intrinsic or extrinsic: The very definition of intrinsic (5 out of 5)
• Difficulty to implement: Medium, as it requires giving up control (3 out of 5)

I’ve gotten feedback from two people I highly admire (Gary Wolf and Jesse Schell) that perhaps Health Month might be focused too much on extrinsic rewards, and that I should read Punished by Rewards and Drive.  So, that’s what I’m doing.  I think I’m far enough in to be able to process their primary arguments.

I’ve been sort of obsessed with collecting motivators lately.  There’s SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck, there’s Jesse Schell’s Art of Game Design: Book of Lenses, and now there are these “3rd Drive” motivators that pull together all of the elements of intrinsic reward.

I think I’m going to go through them, one by one, and rate them and see how they apply to effective motivation, “intrinsic” or “extrinsic” motivation, self-tracking (ala Quantified Self), examples that I’m aware of, and finally how it can or should be applied to Health Month.

Let’s see how far I get.

My Facebook Page for Health Month (which had just barely launched) was unfairly taken down last week (October 3rd) because a false claim of IP infringement by a spiteful competitor.  Apparently, Facebook’s lawyers have convinced them that it’s safer to just act swiftly on any and every claim of IP infringement than to think about accurate claims versus false claims.  I wrote to Facebook a total of 15 times over the last 8 days, and got variations of this message sent to me at least half a dozen times:

Hi Buster,

When we receive a proper claim of IP infringement, we promptly remove or disable access to the allegedly infringing content. Unfortunately, we will be unable to restore this content unless we receive a direct request from this party. If you believe that this claim has been made under false pretenses, we recommend that you contact a lawyer or your local law enforcement agency and discuss this issue with them.

Thanks,

User Operations
Facebook

I never got to speak to anyone on the phone, or ever got a chance to escalate my case to someone who could do more than cut and paste blurbs to me.  I pleaded and reasoned with them and sent them every piece of evidence I could that the claim was false (even though they never actually told me the specifics of the claim) including the fact that the Facebook Group that was shut down along with my Page had been around for 2.5 years, and the accuser’s website had been up less than a month and didn’t have enough traffic to show up on compete.com.  CLEARLY, a false claim by anyone’s standards, and that’s not counting the half-dozen other pieces of evidence I had dug up in my research.

Reason didn’t work.  Lawyers would cost too much and take too long.  Law enforcement agencies?  Please.

Then what did work? Writing up the evidence, posting it to my blog, and asking people to retweet it.  Within a couple hours I had over 100 retweets, over a thousand views, the 2nd result on Google for his name, several contacts at Facebook forwarding it up the chain, and (most importantly) a reply from up-until-then silent accuser that he had contacted Facebook and asked that my page be put back up.

Twitter-bullying works.  The repercussions of this are pretty huge, I think.  Social networks keep people honest.  The fact that I could tell my accuser that if he didn’t reply within 12 hours that I would be writing to each of his family members on Facebook (I searched his friends for people with his last name) and inform them of his behavior… that’s pressure!

On the one hand, the Internet’s ability to connect any sketchy dude with a big corporation’s paranoid lawyers is what got my page taken down.  Legality doesn’t take advantage of the social network, it operates in fear and lets risk-adversity reign.  But on the other hand, getting the page back up… using the social network to spread a valid and true case, to use real names, to find real people with real relationships, to appeal to reputation and status… THAT keeps us honest.

The moral of the story. Don’t mess with the social network.  It will make you behave according to its rules.  It will FORCE you to, even, or kick you out.

Because I respect the power of all of this, I’ve taken down the post with all the accusing details, real names, etc, (who knows how long it will exist on Google though) and will give this guy a break.  Thank you, everyone, for helping.  Now, let’s disperse and enjoy the rest of our day.

Now that I’m starting to think about the business side of Health Month, I get to wade into the wonderful world of what success means to me, and what it means for Health Month, the business.  Noah Kagan from AppSumo was helping me think it through this morning.

Your success and the success of what you’re working on can be two different things, or they can be the same thing.

When success for you personally isn’t aligned with the success of what you’re working on, bad things happen.  Discontent, confusion, lost years, ulcers, etc.

When success for you personally IS aligned with success of what you’re working on, beautiful things happen. Meaning, fulfillment, purpose, drive.

Why then is it so difficult to align the two?  I guess maybe because we don’t really think about it sometimes.  When we build something, or work on something, we assume that its success is the same as our success.  Because it’s ours, we’re working on it, etc.  But how often have I found myself working on something (be it a job, a friendship, a relationship, a personal project, etc) only to realize after some time that its success was not the same as my own?  Okay, not a whole lot but a few big ones stick out in my head and were doozies.

So, I want to make sure that my success and Health Month’s success are aligned.

At Amazon there was this idea of a “fitness function”.  I think about it often.  It’s a number that represents the fitness of the whole system.  Your fitness function could strive to stay at a certain number, or it can strive to go higher and higher.

Body temperature is a good homeostasis fitness function for the body.  If it’s at 98.6, you can know that pretty much everything is in order and good.  If it’s too high or too low, you know something’s wrong.  You don’t know WHAT is wrong, you just know that something is.

The stock price of a company is another good fitness function (usually).  You want it to go up.  If it’s going up, it’s usually a sign that things are going well at the company.  You don’t know exactly what is going right, but you know that something is.

I am going to try to create two new fitness functions for my life.  One for myself, and one for Health Month.  The one for my life could include things like weight, money in the bank account, quality time spent with Kellianne and Niko, quality socializing time, etc.  In fact, Health Month itself may be able to track my fitness function for me, given that most of the variables that I think are important to my own success are tracked in there.  Those that aren’t…. should possibly be added.

Second, there’s the success of the site itself.  Is it helping people improve their health?  That’s the number one question.  Once that’s established, how many people is it helping?  That’s the second question.  Is it sustainable, making enough money to run itself and for my small family to live off.  That’s the third question.  Am I finding the work enjoyable and fulfilling and meaningful to the world?  If I can come up with a simple algorithm that combines those four variables (1 with a survey, 2 with a database query, 3 with a look at financials, and 4 with a subjective self-survey) then I’ll know how healthy Health Month is.  And the higher I can make that number go, the better.

Fitness functions are an amazing way to quantify the seemingly unquantifiable.  I will probably try to talk about it at the Quantified Self meetup I’m hosting (for the first time in Seattle!) next Wednesday.  You should come!