Achieving a behavioral change to 150 minutes a week of exercise for frontline staff via strategic game mechanics

In Series 2 Episode 12 of the Health Points podcast Ben and Pete welcome Jonny Bloomfield of Oopla. We discuss the intersection of sports performance, health science, and gamification. Johnny created Oopla to encourage physical activity through a gamified approach that focuses on behavioral change via strategic game mechanics. Oopla’s features, like stealth mode on leaderboards and dynamic customization, aim to engage individuals of all activity levels.

The goal is to foster long-term engagement in physical activity by making it enjoyable and accessible through elements like season-based progress tracking and strategic point accumulation. It ensures fun in physical activities by tailoring gamification to different user preferences, especially in health-related contexts like exercise motivation to promote well-being.

You can listen to this episode below:

Outline:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Gamification in Health (00:06 – 05:55)Discussion on the background and journey towards integrating gamification in health and wellness.Emphasis on the importance of promoting wellbeing in the workplace.Chapter 2: Designing a Gamified Health Program (07:56 – 13:22)Challenges faced in engaging a diverse range of individuals in a gamified health program.Introduction of the concept of Oopla and its point scoring system to encourage physical activity.Designing milestones as key achievements in the gamified program.Chapter 3: Long-Term Engagement and Sustainability (20:19 – 21:40)Differentiating between short-term challenges and long-term engagement strategies in gamification.Focus on creating a program that encourages sustained participation over time.Chapter 4: Player Types and Rewards (23:10 – 26:16)Exploring the Bartlett’s taxonomy of players and their roles in gamification.Discussion on rewards and the balance between incentivizing engagement and program costs.Chapter 5: Maintaining Engagement and Future Trends (32:26 – 35:57)Importance of time elements in game mechanics for motivation.Reflecting on the future of gamification in health and exercise motivation strategies.Summary of the key points regarding exercise motivation mechanics and player engagement in the gamified health program.

Episode Transcript:

Ben
Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Health Points, where we talk about anything and everything, gamification, health. I’m Ben and here with me is my co host, Pete.

Pete
Hi, everyone.

Ben
And joining us today we have with us Jonny Bloomfield, CEO at Oopla. Who is a behavioural health and performance coach specialising in stress management, sleep, exercise, nutrition. He has a background in sports science with a PhD from the University of Hull and started his career as a fitness coach at Ulster Rugby, moving on to a sports psychologist at the Sports Institute of Northern Ireland and then taking on the role as a first sports scientist for England rugby before he moved on to occupational science roles ahead of starting Oopla. Jonny is fantastic to have you on the show today.

Jonny
Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Pete. Nice to be here.

Ben
If we can start, then. I mean, you have a really mixed background and a lot around sports performance, sports science, kind of. What were the elements that then led you to where you are now in gamification?

Jonny
Well, my passion when I was a younger man was sport. I was a hockey player and I played at international level and really my world revolved around that at one point. And then I naturally went on to do sports science at university. And then I think I really embraced academia whenever I was doing my research in my third year of my undergraduate. And I really took to the research process, which wetted my appetite to go deeper, so I progressed on to doing a phd in the world of football. I was very eager to gain employment in the Premier League someday. And, yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed the process of investigating different aspects of football. I was interested in the size and shape of players and the physical demands on the field, as well as effective physical conditioning methodologies.

Jonny
So really from there, I got my first opportunity back home, where I’m from in Ulster rugby, and I became a fitness part of the fitness team and that was great to go my first job straight into professional sports and working in a fantastic sport. My family background was in rugby, my father’s. He actually received an MBE for his services for rugby union in Ireland. And so it was nice to kind of get involved in a game that was a great passion of his. So really I went from there into a role with the Sports Institute in Northern Ireland, which was to do with sports science and physiology. So I kind of had that desire not just to be in the world of fitness, but into the world of sports science.

Jonny
And the years I spent at the Sports Institute exposed me to vast number of different sports, which was fantastic for my learning and development because I had to change how I communicated and different sports were at different stages and was meeting so many different types of people. So it was a brilliant opportunity for me to learn and grow through my twenty s. And then a phenomenal opportunity came along to join the RFU and to work within Martin Johnson’s backroom team and really loved doing that. It was a wonderful experience, although it was certainly an experience for anyone listening who knows their rugby. It was a tough time for us as well. But then after that role really had me traveling a lot. I got married in 2011, the same year as the Rugby World cup in New Zealand.

Jonny
And that 52 weeks I was living out of a suitcase for 35 weeks. So it was going to be difficult to sustain that career. So I really started thinking longer term from that point. I was very selfishly focused before that on me and my career and my passion for working in performance sport. But the reality of it is it’s a very demanding and unforgiving role in terms of family life. So I looked longer term and went, well, can I see myself raising children but never being around? And I had to think deeply and carefully about that. And I decided to step out of the world of professional sports for that very reason. And really living back home in Belfast, there isn’t a professional sports market on our doorstep. There is only that one professional team of Ulster rugby.

Jonny
So I had to think of pivoting so as a skill set that I felt I could apply to the workplace because other people I could see doing that around London a lot and being very successful. And it was a very growing market at this time, around 2011 2012. And I thought, well, this is untapped in Northern Ireland. I could be first to market and make a real impact there. I learned fast that the London market and the northern Irish market are quite different. So where I thought I would just step into something. It took a real effort to try and educate the market and teach the market that wellbeing at work was something important and needed to gain some focus.

Jonny
So it took a little while, but I got into the health service here in their leadership center where there was vast number of leadership programs and I got to work directly with senior leaders across the country here. The main talking point at that moment in time was self care and resilience. So I was able to utilize my skill set in that area. And really since then it’s blossomed for me. I’ve been working and still working with senior leaders and executives in terms of health and behavior and those components that you mentioned in the intro, stress, sleep, exercise, nutrition. And that has built up a trust in me and various organizations, and the natural question is, how best can you help all our staff? And that’s led to the opportunities such as the generation of the introduction of Oopla.

Jonny
That’s really the background, the story so.

Ben
Far, taking sports science and physiology, understanding stress management onto the front line of the northern irish health service. It’s quite a journey, Jonny. So in that case, what is his role? What is his purpose? How does it function?

Jonny
So I was working with a construction, you know, quite male dominated and quite macho and so on, but they were very forward thinking, and this is a large workforce, all based in the UK and some of the workforce in the Republic of Ireland as well. But they asked me, I’d been working with our senior team for about a year and it was starting to filter down into management and talent and so on. But they said, look, we would love to introduce something for all our staff, an opportunity that everybody that could get involved, all 3000 people would be interested in or capable of doing something. Now, we had tried a steps challenge before, it just did not work for them. It was costly. It only sort of excited the people who were already active. It just was quite one dimensional.

Jonny
There was cyclists in the business that didn’t take part and they felt they didn’t get a good return on investment for that. And still to this day, a number of businesses are still stuck on that steps challenge, option for physical well being, and I’m not seeing too many innovations beyond that. So they gave me the challenge of coming up with an alternative and I love problem solving and innovating. So I took myself off and had a good think about how I would do this differently, how I could scale up something that wouldn’t be cost prohibitive for the business, something that it would be engaging and encouraging that all people of all different levels, from the extremely fit people, the young people, all the way through to the sedentary workers and those who are maybe towards the exit of their working career.

Jonny
So it was a major challenge. How do you engage such a diverse range of people? And my answer to that was, well, the World Health Organization and all the cmos around the globe all agree that there is a minimum requirement or a minimum recommended dose of physical activity that all adults should be doing. And I thought, well, hang on, if everyone able disabled are encouraged to reach this target, this 150 minutes of moderate, vigorous two strengthening, and I throw into the mix, lengthening as well into that so important mobility and balance and range of movements, could that be gamified in some way that would be exciting, would be encouraging, engaging that everybody across the wide landscape could engage with.

Jonny
And ultimately what we want to try and see is the sedentary workforce get towards reaching that minimum requirement on a weekly basis and hopefully then beyond it. It’s really building up a confidence in that population that they feel it’s not a huge mountain to climb, to be active to a healthy level. And it’s really trying to get those people who are doing nothing to doing something on a regular basis, all in the while not excluding the people who are already active and doing an awful lot. But for example, whenever people do these steps challenges, and this business was no different, you see the already active just go even more active. They get very crazy numbers in terms of their steps for this period.

Jonny
And it lends itself to people who already have got the energy to do it and have got the time to do it. And I noticed that feedback, their steps challenge that they ran unsuccessfully was it felt another pressure because it was based in teams and it was competitive then you were getting pressured into making up your steps that day, and I just doesn’t sit well with me. That pressure shouldn’t be a primary motive for people to be active. It should be more about fun, enjoyment and capability and doing anything more than what you currently do and should be encouraged. It’s making things competitive, and having winners and losers is another difficult thing to try and do, because certainly if you introduce any sort of initiative that’s a challenge or has a competitive element, you are going to create that.

Jonny
So you want to try to make sure that people aren’t courageous to do something, but aren’t made to feel bad for not doing as well as others, which can be challenging, for sure.

Pete
So that’s really interesting. I mean, to be honest, only yesterday I had a client who mentioned the success of their step challenge. They’d run previously, but that it didn’t work for everyone and that some people got carried away. So everything you’re saying resonates, and I’ve come across that before. How actually are you making it fair then, within the game of Oopla.

Jonny
Okay, so first and foremost, the activities you choose to do, let’s say you get rewarded for any activity that is contributing towards the 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity. I say to users, what you count as exercise counts. So a very fit person or a young person, maybe an activity that they choose to do, they would only classify that as exercise if there’s sweat pouring out of them. Whereas another person who is sedentary or hasn’t engaged in activity for a long time, maybe something that might not be counted as exercise for one person might be exactly what they would classify as exercise. So it’s trying to level out the playing field in terms of that. First and foremost, we’re not doing it by physiology.

Jonny
So it’s not about heart rate above a certain threshold, minutes spent above certain threshold on your heart rate, or anything like that. It is simply just perception and what you count as exercise counts. The other thing about it is, I know the World Health Organization used to have this rule of it only counts if it’s ten minutes or more, and they’ve reduced that to every minute counts. But I brought that rule. I experimented with keeping that rule as ten minutes or more. The reason why is because I want people to dedicate time towards being physically active. I totally agree with the every minute counts rule, but I think if you want to create habits and something that requires thought and scheduling, that’s a really healthy way for people to make commitments.

Jonny
So when you play UbLA, you wake up and you get out of when am I going to do ten minutes? Or how am I going to fit ten minutes in here? If you can do ten minutes three times a day, then you have physical activity guidelines across the week. So three tens, five days a week is going to get you that minimum 150. The other thing, I designed a point scoring system based on trying to encourage people to always dedicate ten minutes of time and do an activity that they count as exercise. And that’s pretty much the essence of Oopla. So you will receive points for time engagement up to a threshold. So we want to encourage people to get 30 points a week for spending 300 minutes a week of activity.

Jonny
So we know that the 150 is the recommended dose, and if you could double that’s really seen as ideal. Then we have active days. So active days is any day with 30 minutes or more logged, and it could be three tens or minutes straight. You would get a tick for today’s an active day. And if you get to six active days, you receive your bonus points. The bread and the butter of ooplet is what I call the milestones. So we have a category of 15 different activities. And as you engage with that activity, if you accumulate either a time or a distance, then you hit the milestone and the milestone gives you points. For example, a walking milestone is 12. However long it takes you to do that by ten minutes at a time.

Jonny
So if you walked 1 km in ten minutes, which is a fairly good pace, it would take you 120 minutes, 2 hours to complete a walking milestone over however long that may take you, however many days. Similarly, we have timed based milestones. So things like strength, yoga, dancing, gardening, Tai Chi, they’re all based on a fixed accumulate 2 hours of time in this ten minutes minimum and you hit your milestone. So we have the bread and the butter is really all about hitting those milestones. Then I give you extra points for milestone variety. So every three different milestones you do, we give you bonus points. So if you walk, you do your yoga milestone, and you say, do your swim milestone, then there’s three different ones. We’ll give you a point. So there’s 15 there.

Jonny
Now, the most we’ve ever had on our community is someone managed to hit twelve milestones. We play Oopla in rinds, four week rounds. So we divided the 52 weeks of the year into 13 four week rounds. So we kind of start on the first Monday of January, and every fourth Monday, you build up a score and then the score resets. We all start again every four weeks, you build up your Oopla score.

Pete
Excuse me, is that a deliberate thing? So basically, even people who come independently are part of a cohort?

Jonny
Yeah. So we’ve got Oopla Global, which is all users together. But we target Oopla as a workplace challenge, a workplace initiative, let’s say. So anybody can join up blind any day of the year. So, for example, we’re in round ten, day 18 at the minute. So there’s six more days to go until we get to round eleven. So you could join it. Now you can build up a tiny little score. But another way that we earn points is we try to keep the competitive element, but the main competition is with yourself. So you play uplift for your, let’s say you get around ten score, you get 500 points. So when you play round eleven, you’ve got to get to 501, and then if you do that, we’ll add more bonus points on top of that. So it makes round twelve that little bit harder.

Jonny
So you’re accumulating. Their challenge gets a little bit tougher each round that you play. And like any good game, it’s all based on strategy. So the strategy is, when you wake up in the morning, where am I going to do ten minutes? How am I going to do that three times today? What activity am I going to choose to do that? How do I get my milestone varieties so that do I not just do the same thing? All of it? I got to be cleverer. With the limited time that I’ve got and try and get more milestones and more different milestones. And on day 28, the game shuts down. So I don’t want to leave any milestones uncompleted.

Jonny
I want to make sure that I close them all up before the end of the 28 days to maximize my score going into the next round, obviously. And then the last one is we have a weekly bonus. So each week it’s kind of a global community, and it’s something that everybody can achieve. So it’s do this task this week or do that task and get your bonus points. For example, it might be this week do four active days. So that’d be four days with 30 minutes or more, or earn two milestones this week. So it would be whatever milestones you have to close up, then achieve those, and we’ll give your weekly bonus as well. There’s a lot of scoring ways there, but I think the best players we have are the ones that get really strategic.

Jonny
And then all this thought that goes into physical activity, it now starts to get ingrained as a habit in your lifestyle, and you start to really look forward to doing your physical activity. You find it fun because the challenge is really how do I schedule and structure my time and how do I maximize my points? And all the while, you’re hitting your minimum physical activity requirements each week as you go.

Ben
You can see from the Oopla website you’re working with some really big organizations. Is it just glory? Is it just points? What is it that teams or people are getting? You’re being strategic. You’re having to work to figure out the way to get the best point. You’re not just being active. One of the things you just mentioned is that people are thinking more about physical activity. And one of the things you mentioned early on this conversation was that one of the challenges of things like walking challenges and pedometers is that suddenly it became another thing to think about. Are you actually engaging those who are inactive to become more active? And how are they feeling in that case, if they’re having to spend more time thinking strategically about physical activity?

Ben
And are you seeing any changes in the types of users that are actually being really strategic? And were they already active or were they inactive?

Jonny
There’s a lot there, Ben, thanks. Yes, I was in a business just a few weeks back, and I came in, I had an ubla t shirt on, and obviously we deliver this virtually. And the first thing someone said to me at reception, hey, you’re the Oopla guy. And straight away I got a sense that this has made a difference. Sometimes you don’t see that from my side because it’s all digital. You just see numbers. But actually, when you go into a workplace and you see people’s reaction to the brand, or you suddenly get a sense of actually this has made a difference to people and the feedback. We sat down with the HR team and there was a couple of users that came in to talk to us as well because were desperate for hearing the stories behind what’s happened.

Jonny
And we absolutely heard things like new levels of confidence, kind of cascading effect. Just the fact that I was able to do this, I was able to build on this, I felt better, I had more energy. So I don’t need to tell you guys about the benefits of physical activity, for sure, but it was the achievement that they had gained from being able to take part. Now, I know I’ve gone into a lot of depth in terms of strategy and all these different point scorings, but at the end of the day, we start people off with, can you do ten minutes of activity today? That’s the start of your snowball. And can you start to do that two, three times a day? Can you make that into a regular thing?

Jonny
And then Oopla, unlike a steps challenge where there is only one thing to do, there’s a day one, and you just do as many as you can and that’s all there is to it. There’s advantage to that because everyone, it’s very clear and obvious what everyone has to do right from the beginning is be active and do as much as you possibly can, and hopefully you will sustain that beyond this steps challenge. But Opla, I designed it to be play long term, and I think that’s one of the challenges that I faced at the minute with businesses. They are still in a short term mindset. It’s flavor of the month, walking month of May or walktober.

Jonny
I’ve just seen some business advertiser, so it’s like, we’ll do this for a month, we’ll place emphasis on it, and then we’ll move on to the next topic afterwards. Opla, for me, I designed it that people would want to play it all throughout their lives, because again, coming back to the WHO guidelines, that’s from age 18 to 65, the guidelines are clear what we should all be doing every single week as a minimum standard. And that continues. In fact, it increases after the age of 65. They introduce another strength training day as well into the. Into the mix. So I would hope to see people playing hoopla throughout their lifetime. As opposed to a 30 day challenge.

Jonny
But there’s a mindset shift I think needs to change, particularly in the business world where they’re looking short term hits and frequent changes to their well being interventions.

Ben
What’s the reward? Is it just points and profile and you get to have the egotistical. I was the most active Ooplar this week. What’s the motivator within it?

Jonny
So it’s really hard and I say something that we’re working deep on at the minute. So as we’re talking gamification, business partner has a background in video gaming and we’re looking deeply into the Bartlett’s taxonomy of players. So we know we’ve got the four different types of players, the killers, the achievers, the socializers and the explorers. So we’re looking at how do we fix, I think games where there’s a leaderboard, you will get the killers, the steps, challenge guys, even the Oopla guys. It’s the ones hungry to beat everyone else. I want to be top of the leaderboard and I want to blow everyone away. So that’s a worry because you’re kind of feeding into the people who have that mindset of I’m already active and I want to prove I want to beat everyone else.

Jonny
So the more you feed into that style of character, the more disengaging it will become for lots of other people. I like the model of achievers and socializers. The achievers would be, can you regularly hit a target and then can we somehow provide you with a reward of that? Many of the wearables would give you virtual badges. I know some of our clients have done charity donations or when they’ve done it in teams, there’s been a reward for the team. The reward can be incredibly small to still motivate people to do enormous things. Like you guys will shout, the winning team will all get a free coffee and people will go to great unbelievable lengths to win a very small nominal prize.

Pete
Do you think it needs a reward at all?

Jonny
It’s a good question. This is a discussion were having on our meetings this morning, and with rewards, there’s also a cost, which then brings the whole price of the program and the intervention up significantly. So it is tricky. Obviously, we’ve got the park run model, whereby the reward is not by how fast you run park run, but how many times you turn up. And I think there’s a nice to get that recognition through their t shirt rewards. It’s quite nice, but again, it’s costly to scale and to implement especially Oopla is worldwide, so there’s a carbon footprint to sending t shirts all around the world. But the other option is the kind of the vitality model whereby you earn your points and there’s a third party that gets involved and rewards you through their mechanics. Yeah, we’re still at that exploratory stage.

Jonny
We have done some research in terms of what would encourage long term engagement, and fortunately true people are still motivated by merchandise, by stuff. They still want something tangible in their hands. So you have charitable options, but people seem to still be stuck in the mindset of I want stuff for my efforts. So it’s getting the right. Trying to think what that needs to be is important.

Pete
I think it’s really interesting because your aim is long term engagement, but these rewards quite often are short term and certainly like maybe a free coffee is not going to be motivating every year. So what sort of game mechanics or elements are you thinking of building in to encourage that long term engagement?

Jonny
Planning? The model is built around four week rounds and recurring four week grounds. I think the idea there is we want to progress to having seasons, so each year is a season. So your rounds add up to your seasonal score, so we start to think longer term and can you do better next season than you did this season? And that might keep long term engagement. I know I’m probably a bad example because I am quite an active person. I’m one of those people I described earlier that does enjoy a bit of sweat. What engaged me with one piece of equipment was to reach 2 million meter or sorry, not to 2 million 1 million meter. It took me four years to accumulate.

Jonny
This is on rowing machine and yeah, it took a long time to earn that t shirt, but it kept me going for four years. But I haven’t quite got myself into the mindset of earning the 2 million t shirt yet. That seems another big mountain to climb, but I certainly learned something through that process for myself. But again, am I different to the target demographic that I want to see change in OpLA? So I still think there’s learning out there that needs to really understand what will maintain their engagement long term.

Ben
Jonny, when you go into an like, I’m guessing these organizations are from tens of peoples to hundreds of people. You have all these different player types. You have all these different individuals. Do you see certain trends in the people who are engaging with Oopla or generally you see it across the board? And if there are trends, what are those types of people who aren’t engaging and are you engaging those people who never would have taken on a pedometer.

Jonny
And step counter answer, that is a real diverse range of people. We have the endurance guys, the ones who don’t do long distance and many hours. We have the people who the gym bunnies who will be there accumulating a lot of time in the gym. But I’m most proud to say that absolutely we have tapped into the non exercising group. This is the entry group. I feel removed quite a few barriers for entry for them, making it feel safe to join. We added a feature. Right. One of our earliest features was stealth mode. So very conscious of, let’s say maybe a senior leader who wants to take part but doesn’t want the pressure of getting a high score.

Jonny
But also more meaningful than that is the player who really feels nervous, embarrassed, shy, anxious, and maybe just would like to take part, but at a distance. So we generate stealth modes that they can just hide their name from the leaderboard if they wish. The leaderboard is also highly interactive. Most leaderboards you look at will just show you the top straight away and you’ll have to scroll and find where you are. So create a few easy clicks to hide people who aren’t like you. So you can say, please show me only the people in my age group or people who have achieved a similar amount of time that I have. So you can start to tailor your own leaderboard. And then we have every leaderboard is dynamic so that people can see, can make it more relevant to themselves.

Jonny
But coming back to what you’re saying, bet. Yeah. Like I went into the business just a short while ago, and it is the people who you wouldn’t imagine doing going to a gym because it would be too intimidating, or taking up yoga because you have to look a certain way and wear a certain style of clothing. I feel that Oopla has taken away a lot of barriers and given people a lot of opportunity to feel safe taking part in activities that they maybe wouldn’t normally in society. Because the fitness industry has a certain way for the businesses to grow and be successful. But unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that they include everybody. They can be quite exclusive. So I think that giving people opportunities to do things in their homes or in the local parks, outdoors, and feel like they’re part of a community.

Jonny
And I know from this business so many people are saying it was so encouraging to see people who aren’t normally active being a lot more active and choosing to do different activities. After all, the only way that people will maintain activity is if they enjoy it. And it’s accessible and coming back to steps challenges. If you feel pressured to do as much as you possibly can in a short space of time at the end of that period, the sustainability or the maintenance of that is unfortunately not highly successful.

Jonny
But if you can ease people into doing activities that they enjoy doing and dedicating short bits of time towards it and feeling like they’re progressing, they’re actually benefiting themselves, you’ve got a better chance of them continuing with that longer term and hopefully growing and developing in that because they enjoy it and they’ll connect with other people and they’ll feel more confident and so on as a result.

Ben
Jonny, you can see that you’re bringing the game mechanics into Opla particularly. What I like about you’ve described is the time elements. Having four weeks to make it feel the scarcity, you only limit amount of time rather than you can just keep collecting points forever. I think it’s a really valuable game mechanic you’ve added in there, and a level of the unique element of you can be strategic around gaining points. It’s not like you need to do as much activity as possible. You can do less activity than someone else, but gain more points as a result. Where do you see game mechanics and gamification going in terms of motivation? Not just within physical activity, but other lifestyle requirements to maintain health and well being?

Jonny
I think it’s only going to be successful if you make it fun. And that’s, I think one of our core values at Oopla, what we’re building has to be fun. People have to like it, otherwise it’s not going to have the longevity that they want to achieve from it and it’s not going to have the success. So oopla, maybe I should say where it came from. If anyone listening has ever had the challenge of naming a product these days, it is the hardest thing I think I’ve ever had to do. It took me a long time, but Oopla really, my daughter was three at the time and she was having her tv time, but it was nice outside and it was coming towards the end, so it was time to turn the tv off and take her out to play.

Jonny
I hit the standby button and I literally picked her up off the sofa and one of those kind of noises that happened in middle age just came out and it was like she was getting heavier. So I then paused, went, oh, there’s one to write down. And then obviously I did my homework. Now we’re well supported with invest and I in Northern Ireland with our startups, and I had time with the consultancy team about how to name your brand. And I had a big long list and I was starting to tick the boxes. Profanity check worldwide, and you got to do your trademarks here and there and your domain names and so on. And it was all checking out. And I then figured out, where does it come from? What does it mean?

Jonny
And I had a friend of mine in France, because I had an inkling that it was origins was in France. And he oh, yeah. We would use that for, like, hey presto. And I thought, well, that’s perfect, isn’t it’s like, that’s the fun, that’s the I’ve achieved and look at me and what I’ve done. So hey presto was kind of the meaning of Oopla. And I think how we want Uopla to make people feel. And coming back to your question there, I think the only way games and gamification I think will survive is if we can make it fun. Now fun can have a different. Fun can mean different things to different people. So I think we have to think very carefully about the target audience and how we make it fun for them.

Jonny
As long as we achieve that, then we’ve got a chance to use gamification to change the landscape. In terms of health.

Ben
It’S been great to have you on the show today to talk about taking international level rugby sports science to the front line of health service staff. The exercise motivation mechanics of not just points for being active, but adopting a strategy to be active to get more points, reflecting more traditional strategic board and video games, and working with different player types to make sure everyone feels part of a community, no matter if they’re more of the traditional active gym bunnies or those who are starting to discover being active for the first time.

Jonny
Thank you, guys. It’s been absolutely wonderful to be here.

Pete
It’s been great.

Ben
Really interesting.

Pete
I’ve got so many more questions as well. I’m wondering also for our listeners, can they reach out to you and ask any more questions if they want?

Jonny
Yeah, absolutely. So you can find us online at Oopla app and we can organize a demo if you want to.

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