Konvoy Ventures is a thesis driven venture capital firm focused on the video gaming industry. We invest in infrastructure technology, tools, and platforms.
Games as a way to manage and build healthy lifestyles
Earlier this year, we wrote about gaming’s role in education and how applying gaming principles can be a means to motivate users toward practical outcomes (i.e., learning a skill or saving money). This week, we want to propose a better framework for play-driven human behavior and apply it in the context of healthcare and gaming.
Introducing “play” to applications that are not traditional games should enhance or fundamentally alter human behavior. We believe that game mechanics can be evaluated on two criteria:
It is important to note that where a feature falls on each scale may not be the same across all users. For example, one user may want to complete a mini-quest because it helps them unlock new content, while another may complete the same mini-quest for the reward. Ideally, every application that introduces game-like features takes this into consideration and ensures that their feature set has enough diversity to appeal to the full spectrum of users.
Keeping this in mind, we have mapped a set of consumer applications by where their most notable features fall within these two criteria:
The importance of fun: Enjoyment directly impacts the effectiveness of a given mechanic. The amount of fun required to get a user to download and use the app depends on where the primary feature set falls on the ”level of influence on human behavior” scale. The closer a feature set gets to either extremity, the more fun they must be to be effective:
While any application ideally has multiple features that apply to different areas of this matrix in order to gain broad appeal, some industries including consumer-focused healthcare naturally tend to fall within a certain region.
The competition: There are >400,000 Health and Wellness apps on the Apple and Google app stores with ~250 new additions each day (The Economist). While trends show that users are actively seeking apps to fulfill these particular needs (5m app downloads per day), apps today are falling short of consumers’ expectations (95% of downloads are deleted within 24 hours). The shortcomings are primarily related to privacy, user experience, and evidence of effectiveness.
Factoring in game-like mechanics introduces even more complexity. There are 3 gaming best-practices that Health and Wellness developers should consider implementing:
Games as a way to manage and build healthy lifestyles
Earlier this year, we wrote about gaming’s role in education and how applying gaming principles can be a means to motivate users toward practical outcomes (i.e., learning a skill or saving money). This week, we want to propose a better framework for play-driven human behavior and apply it in the context of healthcare and gaming.
Introducing “play” to applications that are not traditional games should enhance or fundamentally alter human behavior. We believe that game mechanics can be evaluated on two criteria:
It is important to note that where a feature falls on each scale may not be the same across all users. For example, one user may want to complete a mini-quest because it helps them unlock new content, while another may complete the same mini-quest for the reward. Ideally, every application that introduces game-like features takes this into consideration and ensures that their feature set has enough diversity to appeal to the full spectrum of users.
Keeping this in mind, we have mapped a set of consumer applications by where their most notable features fall within these two criteria:
The importance of fun: Enjoyment directly impacts the effectiveness of a given mechanic. The amount of fun required to get a user to download and use the app depends on where the primary feature set falls on the ”level of influence on human behavior” scale. The closer a feature set gets to either extremity, the more fun they must be to be effective:
While any application ideally has multiple features that apply to different areas of this matrix in order to gain broad appeal, some industries including consumer-focused healthcare naturally tend to fall within a certain region.
The competition: There are >400,000 Health and Wellness apps on the Apple and Google app stores with ~250 new additions each day (The Economist). While trends show that users are actively seeking apps to fulfill these particular needs (5m app downloads per day), apps today are falling short of consumers’ expectations (95% of downloads are deleted within 24 hours). The shortcomings are primarily related to privacy, user experience, and evidence of effectiveness.
Factoring in game-like mechanics introduces even more complexity. There are 3 gaming best-practices that Health and Wellness developers should consider implementing:
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