I'm working on a game that helps with this. You leave your little bunker in a post-apocalyptic world and find the land around you contaminated. You walk, run, any workout, to claim territory around you, and gain energy you can use to clean up. You start building greenhouses to grow food and start rebuilding the ecosystem. It's all on the real world map underneath you, and all the interactions between people in the game are cooperative: you get more benefits helping another player with most actions than doing the same thing in your own territory.
The game tricks you into going for walks or runs regularly since you need those energy points for everything, and I'm building out more cooperative behaviors to give you reasons to go walk with someone else, go work together to fight an alien infestation, and more. You'll discover other players in the game who are near you in the physical world, and be able to request help, thank them, give them benefits, all positive.
I've learned a lot from Niantic's strategy, but they've never leaned into actually helping people improve their fitness, or work out together. I'm hoping I can help solve this problem you're talking about, at least for getting people fitter!
> I've learned a lot from Niantic's strategy
What's your monetisation plan and how can we be assured that the data collected won't be used for military purposes?
Oh yeah, that's a good point about them. And thank you, this is a great question. That's another reason I wanted to do this, I don't like what they've become!
Since I do actual workout tracking, all health and fitness data and raw location data stays on device. The only thing I send back to my web service is what interactions you've made with the game world, what you've captured and built. I have no plan to have you take photos of anything, either. I won't have any monetizable data, really.
My plan to monetize is an optional subscription that gives you more capabilities, like having more allies together, being able to build more than one thing at a time, and being able to hold more energy from a workout before your meter caps. If it gets successful I'll definitely do paid cosmetics. I also think there's an avenue for me to get grants from local health departments if I can prove I increase people's fitness through the game, but that would be opt in and way down the line.
I'm a big fan of not growing your company speculatively, and instead proving out your revenue and growing organically.
What else would you suggest? If this ever got big enough for its own corporate entity I think I would bake a lot of protections into the corporate structure, and definitely be a B corporation.
This sounds awesome! I’d love to playtest it when you’re ready.
I appreciate you! I'll come back here and comment soon. :)
Link if I want to stay updated? Sounds cool
Sure! I'm not quite ready to testflight. I'll reply to your comment when I've got a page up. :)
Ping me when you're ready for Android/web users :)
So far I don't know how to solve one problem there, but I'm open to ideas! It's very easy to inject fake fitness data in both of those platforms. With CoreMotion, iOS/watchOS give you a lot of inherent anti-cheat for free.