Exploiting Users Natural Competitiveness to Promote Physical Activity

ClimbTheWorld is a serious game to promote physical activity, by asking users to climb stairs, simulating the climbing of a real building. In this paper, we describe the complete redesign of the game to improve its persuasion capability, by adding collaboration and competition between users, and micro-goals to encourage the user to do not give up. Our experiments show that the game is really effective in incentivizing people in taking stairs, in particular singleplayer modes increased the average amount of stairsteps made of about 61%, while multiplayer modes of about 64%.