Check out this excellent article by Clive Thompson at WIRED about how Weight Watchers has built a successful weight-loss program on what is essentially an RPG framework – even down to the words and actions they use.
As I watched her poke around on the screen, managing inventory, calculating points, staying within her range, it hit me:
Weight Watchers is an RPG.
Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers’ points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you’ve used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up — by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren’t apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I’ll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!
Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells — whoops, I mean foods — you can still use with your remaining points.
And those 35 extra points you get every week? They’re like a special buff or potion — a last-ditch save when you’re on the ropes.
Indeed, I’m in awe of the sheer brilliance of Weight Watchers in adopting the word points as its metric for measuring food. The word immediately shoves the user into the semantics — and fun — of gameplay. You regard losing weight as an intriguing challenge, as opposed to a mere grind.
I’m a huge fan of games and trying to find ways to leverage game logic and game-related user behaviors in clever ways to make the experiences we design more engaging. This is a great example of doing just that.
Read it all here.