Talk by Adrian Hon, Six to Start

Health tracking devices are useful – but they don’t make exercise more fun. How do you fix that? Zombies, Run!!

You go for a run, with your phone and headphones. And then they use the data generated on your speed on location, and they turn that into a zombie apocalypse games. It’s not just zombies chasing you – that have 200 missions, with thousands of hours of audio, telling extensive stories.

Lots of people call this “gamification”. Adrian hates the word. People don’t associate it with Mario Kart, they associate it with leaderboards and dashboards. They’ve taken games, extracted the fun, and used what’s left.

It doesn’t work, either. People’s lifestyles and work lock them into particular positions on leaderboards, and that can be demotivating. Progress bars are not inherently fun.