Gamification of therapy or gaming for good

“Up to a quarter of young people will have experienced a depressive disorder by the age of 19…However, fewer than a fifth of young people with depressive disorder receive treatment, partly because of shortages in the workforce.”

This quote is taken from a BMJ review of a 3D fantasy game environment, SPARX. It has been developed in New Zealand to help adolescents with mild to moderate depression who would otherwise be referred to traditional cognitive treatments and is in fact based on CBT.  A simplistic definition of CBT is this: it works on the premise of identifying negative thoughts, recognising that they are just thoughts or repetitive thought cycles and thereby dealing with them, instead of letting the depression cycle downwards.

The game provides fantasy spaces where the players combat and destroy game elements that represent typical thoughts.

And according to the BMJ review and research, it works. The results are equal to or better than the results from traditional treatment methods. Around 44% of those who played SPARX recovered completely from depression, compared with 26% of those in regular treatment.

I love gaming and though I’m not recommending  World of Warcraft as a therapeutic environment for the depressed (the pleasure of zapping demons aside) there is something powerful that role-playing games achieve in placing you in a different “brain-space”. It can create a space in which to explore adventure and imagination so why not a safe space to engage in therapeutic activity.

It will be interesting to see if the story is widely picked up on in the media. It’s much juicier to say that a boy killed his friends because he’d been playing Grand Theft Auto than it is to say that a young depressed girl was prevented from self-harming or anorexia through playing a fantasy role-playing game.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/20/study-playing-a-video-game-helps-teens-beat-depression/#ixzz1tiOQFiOu

NFC NVG (not very good)

 I am very proud of my new NFC enabled phone, in fact I specifically chose it over a slightly earlier model because I think NFC is going get bigger and more important in the next  couple of years and I like to be in with the in-crowd. So imagine my delight when I discovered that the bus stop at the top of Tottenham Court Road, which I use to catch buses back to Marylebone, has an NFC touchpoint on it.

The touchpoint promises – Travel information and extra information from brands.  And curious I tried it out. All it offers is a link to the TFL mobile site.

Ok, that is travel information, but that’s not extra information from brands. I was disappointed.

I don’t know, but I suspect that Clear Channel are charging brands to put content onto the NFC touch points which is why there was absolutely nothing from brands there.  I would suggest that brands are offered free access and the opportunity to provide any content they want – even a tv ad I’ve already seen would be better than promising everything and delivering nothing. In that way a growing audience will be built. Of course you can argue that these things take time, but why waste time? It doesn’t make sense to offer more than you are going to deliver because my expectation from now on will be that the content behind ad funded NFC will be thin at best and non-existant at worst.

A collection of predictions for 2012

I have been mulling over what I might usefully write at the turning of the year. I feel the need to mark the completely arbitrary distinction between 31st December and 1st January in some way. And the easiest thing would be to prepare some predictions for you to display my foresight and unbelievable genius. And my talent for sarcasm.

The fascination with making predictions about what the coming year will deliver online/in social/on mobile is a bit like the prediction frenzy that goes on in women’s magazines. Not so, you say. We base our predictions on understanding of the market, new developments we know about and our own razor sharp insight, you say. Hmmm. Who remembers the predictions around the Year of the Mobile? 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005…

And what about the various woolly predictions from last year? Here is one I read about Google+, and I kid you not,

“Someone will do something interesting with Google+”

Well strictly speaking there’s no way you could fail on that one. The writer didn’t say they were related to Mystic Meg…

Anyway – rather than attempt predictions of my own I thought I’d point you at some interesting ones on a variety of topics. If nothing else maybe you’ll get a laugh. Happy New Year!

What 2012 holds for social media on thenextweb
5 predictions for the Chinese mobile market in 2012 on Forbes
Online video predictions for  2012 from ReelSEO plus some good tips and info on searching and marketing on YouTube
*&%@#! and Other Ads Trends for 2012 from The Wall Street Journal
9 Facebook predictions for 2012 that don’t suck from NorthSocial

And finally, almost as accurate and certainly more amusing

What does the year of the Dragon hold for you? from gotohoroscope
Mystic Meg’s money predictions for 2012 from The Sun
Gung hay  fat choy! (phonetic chinese)

Goovies are great!

Hoorrah! The Goovies are on again. These are Cadbury’s Creme Egg sponsored animations provided by my favourite of all web amusement sites www.weebls-stuff.com.

I think these are a good example of an agency teaming with creatives to deliver something that really enhances a campaign and is really effective in its own right. The Goovies are true to the cracking (geddit) amusement levels of weebl and bob and the brilliantly off-kiltre and slightly macabre Cadbury’s Creme Egg goo suicide campaign and they seem to have let the creators of weebl and bob just get on with doing what they do, making highly amusing animations – which is I assume, why they wanted to work with them in the first place. Too often agencies see the creative work of others and rip it off. This is an example of how the brand and the creatives have worked very well, over a few years.

Anyway, here’s the first one – Eggvatar.

good viral

Kid + dancing + intelligence=  good viral for Samsung’s Galaxy 580 phone.

Relevant to the product, in the right place, with the right tone and product information and with a cute kid. Could it really have failed?

Foursquare – what’s the point?

I have had two discussions about the point of Foursquare with two very different people,  but both are heavily involved in social media – Russ Goldsmith and Ciaran Norris. In both cases we kind of agreed that at the moment there seems to be little point and actually, do you need to have a point with a game?

And it is a game – even though there are some interesting examples of brands using it to promote their activities.

What I find interesting about it, however, is emerging methods of use. After all, Twitter really became the vibrant social space that it is when people started to connect beyond what they had for breakfast. When they began to connect for business and world real-time gossip.

I used Foursquare the other day to find a restaurant. Instead of going to Google which I also have on my phone I went to Foursquare because I was sure it would be tagged and more importantly would tell me how far away from it I was and give me the address without even having to type it in. Being a bit of a useless navigator this was incredibly useful.

The fascinating thing about social spaces is the way that the users make them their own and I believe that this is where the interest lies in networks like Foursquare. It’s not about what you are told they have to do by their creators – it’s about what you end up doing by accident that shapes their future.

Smell-o-vision is real!

A great example of mixing digital and physical to create a great  brand experience, and with a banner! I love this kind of creativity.

Women and Social Media

Firstly an apology – I have been absent from this blog I realise for about a month (maybe just over a month) I’m sure you weren’t all weeping into your cappucinos but it’s not good practise to simply leave a blog and jet off as I did to New Zealand for a holiday with no explanation. Well, that’s my excuse -I’ve been in New Zealand on holiday. We took the holiday because of another event that’s been rather on my mind recently – I am pregnant. So I think that’s 2 pretty good excuses for not rushing to update my  blog in the last four weeks. I hope you will excuse me.

And now on with the post.

For a long time I have thought that there is something about certain social media spaces that leaned more towards one gender than another. When I first joined Twitter I was struck by the kind of people I was linking up with and the kind of early adopters I knew in my network. They were all male. It struck me at the time that maybe this light-touch first past the post form of updating was particularly attractive to men rather than women. After all, it’s not about deep engagement but about long aquaintance, which can of course lead to deep engagement, but usually in a different kind of social space like a blog for instance.

On Facebook on the other hand I always had a more balanced gender divide. In fact I was invited to join by a female. And the stats at the moment suggest that it is a more female populated than male populated environment. There are more females (55.7%) than males (42.2%) on Facebook – 2.2% are of unknown gender *

So now I am on Foursquare and of my massive 31 friends only 4 are female  – 12%. Quantcast backs this gender bias up with their assessment  that only 42% of users are female. And none of the women in my network post a jot. What’s going on?

It’s another light touch update system not unlike Twitter. It’s kind of a boasting environment and its mildly competitive. And it’s a new frontier.

Being the pop-psychologist I am here’s what I think – It’s the light touch, it’s the competition and it’s wanting to be at the new frontiers that make it an environment more exciting to men. One of my female co-workers who Twitters a lot, said that it took her a while to see the point in Twitter and add it to her life. Maybe men don’t need a point they don’t want the handbook they just want to get their hands dirty.

Anyway, it’s an interesting thing to investigate for the purposes of placing social media activations in new and developing networks.

Oh, one other thought I have had – maybe I just have a lot of male friends…

IAB social media blog

So I am a bit late in announcing but the IAB Social Media Council (of which I am a member) has launched a blog which you can find at http://iabuksocial.co.uk. I am part of the team posting and as usual will try not to double post on here.

Current favourite posts of mine include Fleur Hick’s talking about online influencers and this very clear post from ain MacMillan, RMM and Robin Grant, We Are Social on the 10 ways that social media has changed the customer service game – send it to your clients!

Designing ARs – cool vs usable?

We have just finished a sweet AR that delivers 4 films/animations triggered by rotating the symbol to the right places. It’s almost more of a physical interactive than a digital one, because the symbol is anchored on a plinth that is turned by the user to the release the content.

I had a couple of discussions with – well, almost everyone – about this AR. It’s for a largely untechnical audience, with a short attention span, for a client that loves innovative tech and design but equally has highly technical stories to tell. How to combine all these things together? For me the audience is the most important – their expectation, their abilities, their needs, have defined this interactive. As a result some people have worried that it’s boring, that it’s not cool. It’s not something that our peers in design agencies will look at and go – Wow! Even though we have tested it with the  least tech savvy members of Imagination (no I won’t tell you who they are!) and it works incredibly simply, plus it’s really elegant and beautifully designed.

And it was something that they looked at and said – Wow!

What we forget is that we are all highly tech literate – we understand how to use AR we are happy for it to be primarily a brand building and mechanism, rooted in gaming and incredibly light touch. But the people we are designing for aren’t like that. We have to think of new ways of delivering AR to users that makes it easy and comfortable for them to absorb/play/manipulate without getting RSI!

• Rotable Plinths
• Books
• Finger tips
• Trump Cards
• Sliders on
• Jigsaw puzzles on pedestals

Everything boils down to the audience – who are they? what do they need? – forget your predjudice and design something usable – in being usable it will be cool.