How Gamification Affects Physical Activity: Large-scale Analysis of Walking Challenges in a Mobile Application
Ali Shameli, Tim Althoff, Amin Saberi, Jure Leskovec

TL;DR
This study analyzes how gamification through walking competitions in a mobile app influences physical activity, revealing significant increases in activity levels and providing insights for designing more effective health-promoting challenges.
Contribution
It offers the first large-scale analysis of competition effects on physical activity and develops a predictive model for engagement based on participant composition.
Findings
Average user activity increased by 23% during competitions
Equal gender composition in competitions enhances effectiveness
Matching highly unequal participants reduces overall impact
Abstract
Gamification represents an effective way to incentivize user behavior across a number of computing applications. However, despite the fact that physical activity is essential for a healthy lifestyle, surprisingly little is known about how gamification and in particular competitions shape human physical activity. Here we study how competitions affect physical activity. We focus on walking challenges in a mobile activity tracking application where multiple users compete over who takes the most steps over a predefined number of days. We synthesize our findings in a series of game and app design implications. In particular, we analyze nearly 2,500 physical activity competitions over a period of one year capturing more than 800,000 person days of activity tracking. We observe that during walking competitions, the average user increases physical activity by 23%. Furthermore, there are large…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsEducational Games and Gamification · Mobile Health and mHealth Applications · Physical Activity and Health
