Secret of Weight Watchers' Success: It's an RPG!

Clive Thompson of Wired's Games Without Frontiers blog was wondering why Weight Watchers very well work for some people who want to lose weight and came up with this conclusion: Weight Watchers is not a normal diet ... it's an RPG!

Why did Weight Watchers work so well? For a really fascinating reason: because it isn't a normal diet. It's something more. Something fun.

It's an RPG.

The Weight Watchers program is designed precisely like a role-playing dungeon crawler. That's why people love it, stick to it and have success with it. And it points to the way that we could use game design to make life's drudgery more bearable. [...]

Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers' points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you've used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up -- by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren't apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I'll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!

Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells -- whoops, I mean foods -- you can still use with your remaining points.

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Like most animals, humans enjoy and thrive under reward systems. It's nice to see it spelled out like that though. I'll admit, I'm suddenly more interested in weight watchers.
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That would be the best idea for those who love RPGs and want to loose weight, I think. By the way that's a good strategy to attract more customers. At the one hand I really like RPGs, but only these which are played without using the web like "Final Fantasy" or "Star Ocean", but on the other hand I can't believe that I would ever do such a diet, because it's not the same for me. Thinking of any fatty food as a boss battle makes really laugh, so how to fight against food? What weapons would you choose if you fight an hamburger? That's crazy, but also a good marketing idea.
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