Is there a collaborative, gamified jogging app?

February 17, 2015 9:20 AM

A friend and I would like to start running again and have some fun way of encouraging and holding each other accountable. We live many states apart and I thought a collaborative, gamified jogging app might do the trick, similar to what I've read about Zombies, Run! but with a collaborative aspect where our progress is linked together. Does this exist?

I've looked at Fitocracy, RunKeeper and Pact. They all allow social sharing of your workouts and perhaps ways to complement and encourage other users but no real collaboration towards a shared gamified goal. I've never played Farmville or those things but something with that level of "oh no the beans are going to die and our farm will fail unless Friend goes for a run! Friend, go for a run!" linkage would be great.

posted by ChrisHartley to Health & Fitness (2 answers total)

Best answer: Zombies, Run! dev here: As far as I'm aware, no. A co-op exercise game is a good idea, and Health Month does this to some degree, as does HabitRPG. However, by design neither appear to have a very developed base builder or story.

From a game design perspective there are some challenges to making a co-op exercise game work. One is that you don't really want the game to fall apart if one person stops participating or reduces their participation; at that point you can get negative peer pressure. Another is handicapping the different players. And from a financial perspective, a game or app (or even a feature within it) that requires multiple, highly co-ordinated users to work (rather than just, say, a competitive leaderboard) can face problems spreading or making money.

Still, these challenges are not insoluble and it's something we spend a lot of time thinking about - as I'm sure many other developers do. So hopefully you won't have to wait too long until your dream app arrives!
posted by adrianhon at 1:35 PM on February 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

Response by poster: Wow, thanks for the definitive answer adrianhon. So it seems like the field is wide open if anyone wants to build a co-op exercise game. Perhaps a simple incrementer game where each player is collecting/building different resources that can then be combined to create other resources/build buildings, etc. Might need a built in handcap system so people of different abilities can play together, and a way to replace your partner if they drop out. Hmmm sounds like something for Metafilter Projects.
posted by ChrisHartley at 6:08 PM on February 17, 2015 [1 favorite]