“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

You can’t as yet classify your clippings by area like you can with pictures on Pinterest, I think part of the aim is to create a serendipity of association. That’s even more likely when you consider that the tool has the involvement of Steven Johnson who’s book, Where Good Ideas Come From, includes the power of serendipitous assocations as one of the key ways good ideas are born. It’s still being developed, but I can see so many possibilities already. On the one hand the thing that makes it most interesting and, in my view, likely to suceed is that it allows for clips from Kindle to be included in your library and that they are seriously considering importing data from Evernote. On the other, the social and community level of this is missing almost completely.

I think they’ve missed a trick by launching without it. As soon as I found it I wanted to use it in a community way for a project, but I can also see multiple opportunities for collaboration – as long as there are areas and clippings etc that can be made private. There is certainly a sense in which a tool like this will be used for the development and thrashing out of personal ideas, concepts, team and individual theories and sometimes these need a little private incubation.

But all in all, hooray! I just love the fact that online territories continue to expand and evolve and just when you think we can’t come up with anything new, a bright shiny new experience pops up round the corner. Have a look at Findings if you are wordy person (like me) and maybe you’ll find a couple of things I’ve posted.

I have recently had a rather poor experience on a side-project that I run. I’m being moved from one provider to another against my will (the result of a buy out) and losing vast amounts of usability and some essential functionality as a result. Ok, I guess I can work with that and research ways around the problem eg other providers, different kinds of webhosting for downloading digital files.  I received assurances from the new provider that certain services would be extended to me for 3 months however these were then removed after 1 month. And when I called to ask if this could be dealt with in any way, reminding them of the previous conversation, I was basically told “computer says no” or not even that really. Finally, they emailed me to ask if I needed any questions answered about migration and I replied with 2 questions – that was 5 days ago and no reply as yet…So I am now in the process of having to migrate my project to another platform completely.

I’m lucky. I know the basics of programming and that gives me substantial benefits in terms of navigating my way around the multitude of website hosting providers, free software publishing platforms like WordPress and free creative tools that exist all over the web. So for me it’s more of an extreme annoyance than a complete full-stop to the project. But as I said, I’m lucky, most of the people using my old provider don’t have that kind of experience so they are left with reduced functionality and a new and rather slapdash provider.

While I appreciate that it’s not really an incoming company’s fault if they don’t offer the functions I need to make my project work, surely every company is now aware that even if they lose me as a customer, if they give great support/customer service then I am more likely to recommend them to someone else further down the line – net promoter score in a very literal sense! As it is I am highly unlikely to recommend the incoming provider to anyone.

There are so many simple, easy touches that make the customer experience better that there is no excuse any more for delivering a poor experience in usability and customer service. Web Hosting Rating asked me to look at their site and maybe write a review and frankly I am happy to, because they clearly demonstrate  just one easy way to make people feel more informed and better helped. It’s not rocket science, it’s a blog. And it’s not even a daily updated blog, it’s an information blog that provides guidance on making the most of the services they provide. More that this, it thinks widely. It references software you might want to host on the platform, how to install and apply it and suggests way to maximise your engagement. And of course all of this makes using their service more attractive and simpler.

There’s a lot of buzz about customer service via social media. It doesn’t have to cost the earth but I firmly believe it will make the difference between businesses succeeding and failing. I would be interested to learn how many of the people who were moved to my new provider are happy with the service they are receiving, how many will leave and how many will stay because they have to.

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.

What all this misses is that the motivation for writing a blog is not about competing with yourself for the number of posts you’ve made, but more likely because you want to share something interesting or you want to share something with a community or you want to drive traffic. The only one of these motivations that could be gamified is the final one, driving traffic. Perhaps if WordPress got together with Klout or Peerindex, or even if they used their own delivery of statistics or number of ‘likes’ they would have a game mechanic that would drive more engagement. But the activity of blogging is not primarily about activity levels.

Brands need to think more carefully about the motivation of their users when they are considering integrating game mechanics, otherwise they are likely to be ignored at best or to create irritation at worst.

Lovely ideas – one guy thinks we’ll be swiming with our cars. I really hope that happens! It’s exciting enough with dolphins!

Hope you enjoy it!

First film goes live tomorrow. I can’t twll you what’s in it or I’d have to kill you. Oh alright then, it’s the key premiere from the show. Looking forward to it.