A word from the editor.

We are honored to present our newest guest contributor, Amy Jussel, Founder and Executive Director of Shaping Youth.  She has been a huge advocate of the games for health movement with numerous articles on Playnormous and now healthGAMERS. We are honored to have her!   -Melanie L.

G-Force: Can guinea pigs help kids get active? Humana hopes so!

Humana’s Innovation Center, Humana Games for Health, developed and designed the game as a 30-day pilot program “Operation Planet Savers” which was scheduled to end June 28.  It was just announced that, due to the success of the program, the program will be extended through the month of July.  OPS incentives, including an 8G iPod Touch and Nintendo DS, are tied into the movie launch of Disney’s hopeful 3D blockbuster of “Gadgets. Gizmos. Guinea Pigs.” ramping up to a G-Force release date of July 24. Humana saw an opportunity to blend with the Disney G-Force concept of secret agent guinea pigs on a mission to save the planet, by leveraging the secret agent popularity of SpyKids scenarios with a dash of game play.

How will kids ‘play their way to better health’ Humana style?

By challenging kids to be ‘special ops’ G-Force agents and get their keisters outdoors on missions of sprinkler-dodging, squirt-gun battling, water balloon tossing, belly-crawling and other real-world missions.

Though Disney’s involvement is more of a ‘licensed use’ agreement than any big stakeholder bucks or marketing lift, it’s still a win-win for a Health 2.0 entity like Humana because they already have their game developers and design teams in place.  Piggybacking on the G-Force premiere (pardon the pun) serves Humana’s pilot program’s purpose, while aligning with Disney for guinea pig giveaways gives insta-cred on the parent front as ‘family friendly’ “opps” for getting outdoors.

How the outdoor element works.

Each week on Humana Games’ site, kids were given new “training missions” with real-world activity  to earn points for completion exchanged for media lures and ‘virtual gifts’ when they ‘report back’ on the site.

Examples? Dodging water sprinklers in mission ‘Hose Off’ because agents need to know how to ‘escape and avoid danger’ or a mental recall game of “Memory on the run” to recap details of five people seen on a jog/walk through the park, etc. Prizes ranged from sneak peeks of the G-Force film and virtual G-Force holograms, to iPod nanos and the GRAND prize, walking the red carpet at the G-Force premiere in Los Angeles.

Kids can also sound off about what they liked/disliked in blog-style (or who they lassoed into engaging in the outdoor fun) which I dare say gives all of us in the healthy media sphere some vital research for feedback (from what’s considered ‘fun’ to the ‘code of ethics/honor system’ in play, to how kids choose to engage family/friends outdoors or ‘game the system’ for goods).

My chat with HumanaGames.com.

Specifically: Vicki Vogel & Shane Regala of the Innovation Center on June 12, 2009.

Amy: So how did this Disney deal come about?

Humana: Well, we’re always testing pilot programs, so we’re set up for that and this gives us a way to test the relationship with Disney too, tying it to the release of the movie…Working backwards, we needed to allow plenty of time to pick the winner, arrange travel and handle logistics, but yes, hopefully we can port parts of it to the site and learn from the experience.  It’s the first time we’ve ever dealt with the whole COPPA compliance issue and double-registration having parents give permissions, validate e-mails and all that, so it’s a learning experience for us. We want to see how and why kids engage, what motivates them, (if it’s Disney, etc.) and add it to our research to refine from there.

Amy: How are people hearing about the free game? Obviously, I heard about it from you directly, because I’ve written about Humana’s H4GH before…but what about other people…Is Disney promoting this in their distribution channels, or is Humana testing it with your own 10 mill+ subscribers or what?

Humana: Actually, neither one, really…We’re not using our own member base at all; and though Disney has some links on some of their properties like Radio Disney, we’ve done a few events in Chicago, L.A. and Louisville, using word of mouth with kids telling kids to enroll as  ‘agents’…At the events we gave out agent passports and five cards they could give to friends, and if they created an I.D. they’d earn points, so that’s our ‘viral’ experiment I guess.  We wanted to see if using cool characters to help promote the game and the whole spy/agent/training theme would seed the idea of fun things that are also healthy. After a thousand sign-ups or so at the events, one of the things we DID find is that the COPPA rules created some attrition with that ‘double check with parents’ registration, so we’re learning how to figure all of that out…We obviously have also reached out through social media (like you!) and are really thinking more ‘pilot’ than product.

Amy: What about the actions themselves? Are you tracking the outcomes of whether kids are actually DOING this online to offline activity with an accelerometer device or some hard data point, or is it more of an ‘honor system?’

Humana: Right now it’s the honor system, with parents being sent an e-mail when they complete a ‘mission’ in the hopes that will keep kids honest about it knowing they know that. We also have a pre-post survey on current activity levels, asking kids their favorite games, about the rewards, whether they’d be more likely to see the movie now, that kind of thing.

Amy: What kind of “on the ground” activities are you trying to foster specifically? Is it tied to the green-eco theme like a planet patrol kind of thing, or more physical fitness and mental gymnastics like Humana’s other games?

Humana: We actually looked into doing more of the green, recyclable angle having kids get exercise by physically contributing to the eco-system (cleaning up parks and such) and we want to do more green messaging for Humana in the future, but we tested it in Kentucky and it was less of an appeal than the challenges we were creating for physical fun… Surprisingly, traditional games we grew up with like LeapFrog and some of the ‘Old School’ Field Day relays were translating differently to this generation of kids…When we said LeapFrog, they thought we meant the digital toys! So we decided to try to revisit some of the fun field day races and relays and tie it into family connections and play/time under the training/mission and agent theme…Hide and seek, ground attack, all of that agent/mission message goes with the G-Force concept, but other than the broad-based theme it doesn’t draw on the movie’s storyline, just the visuals. We know active video games like the Wii and exergaming and all that are getting traction, but we really want to figure out how to get them OUTDOORS altogether…bridging from online to OFFline.

Amy: Exactly. It’s a challenge. We have an ‘old-fashioned’ 4th of July picnic of field games where I run the kids relays and I forget that some of these kids ‘don’t know what to do’ with a three-legged race or whatever because it’s not part of kid culture, so can you give me an example of some of the active games you’re trying to introduce using the OPS outdoor idea?

Humana: Sure! We have a ‘bear walk’ on all fours which is a great upper and lower body workout and a simple string between two points where they have to bob and weave around it, which is an awkward but fun motion bringing in agility, and a figure eight pattern kind of like the dizzy bat idea; going around eight times in 8 minutes…all tied to the training mission/agent theme.

Amy: Age group? Any user generated content where kids upload their own outdoor games or show and tell their missions? Video of the kids in play?

Humana: No, not UGC exactly, because we’re geared to 7-9 year olds, and don’t want to show faces because of COPPA and such, but we DO have an ‘agent of the week’ that’s audio right now, using the guinea pig avatar and the ‘agent’ telling their own story of what they did on their mission…it’s really cute, you should take a look at it.

I did. And it is. (See clip below) Help spread the word to kids to give it a go, and encourage them to leave a ‘comment’ as it will help ALL of our research on what works and what doesn’t for online to offline bridges…

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