Can you play your way to better health? What does it take to get people moving? That was the question kicked around (har!) at the gaming-health session at Health 2.0.
Chris Hewett’s demo of MindBloom had the room packed. He began by talking about being motivated by fear, or, instead, being motivated by purpose. You’re either running away from something, or toward something. Mindbloom is about spending two minutes every day looking at images that mean something to you, and that motivate you. One step every day is the key to enduring change. The key is sustained engagement. Many of the tools that exist today are not engaging. The core goal is to make life change fun, and engaging. As a gamer, Hewett wants to make behavior change appealling. And it needs to be authentic. I think that he is trying to make Mindbloom into the Farmville of health – a pervasive and widely appealing game, but one that happens to have a positive effect on people’s health and life. People use Mindbloom to discover what’s most important to them. A key differentiator is to take a view of the entire life. The key reason why most people want to be healthy is to spend more time with their relationships. Mindbloom just finished their public beta with 15,000 users.
