9 ms·

I created my own MMO and lost 100 pounds

315 points by dshankar 12y ago

fivedogit 12y ago
I want to upvote this a dozen more times. I've always thought MMOs could "hack" the brain into doing all sorts of cool, productive things. Somebody needs to create an MMO for language learning. Instead of "go kill 12 dragons" the questgiver would say "matar a 12 dragones" or "matar a 12 dragones verdes" or "matar al dragón en la cima de la montaña". The immersion and addiction would have hardcore players speaking 10 languages, I guarantee it. And I think this could be extended to quantifiable human-necessary tasks, too. Like a mechanical turk, but fun.
- nawitus 12y ago
  >Somebody needs to create an MMO for language learning. Duolingo is a language-learning website where you can gain experience points.
  - hayksaakian 12y ago
    I don't think he means gamify language learning I think he means adding useful language learning subtly as a component of a real game
    - kbenson 12y ago
      Not quite the same thing, but I'm sure a lot of people here could and maybe even still can read the Ultima rune font...
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    So is memrise.
- rschuetzler 12y ago
  Wouldn't your language learning MMO just be an MMO with the language switched?
  - SoftwareMaven 12y ago
    No. An ideal implementation would train you into the new language, such that, for example, part of the quest is figuring out what the quest actually says. Instead of needing a language dictionary next to you, you have NPCs teaching it to you within the context of the game.
    - VLM 12y ago
      "part of the quest is figuring out what the quest actually says" I'm getting flashbacks to learning Latin from "Lingua Latina - Familia Romana". Here's a book in Latin with a couple pictures. A pity you can't read Latin, not yet. There's a couple footnotes in English. Also there's enough Latin borrowed into English that you can figure some of it out. If you can puzzle out what the heck is going on, you'll learn Latin. Or you'll get very frustrated. Likely both. Every couple years I put in an effort until I get annoyed and quit. All I really remember is the first chapter was a discourse on the geography of the classical era Mediterranean world, so if you know anything about history and/or geography it was pretty easy to puzzle out, and the second (or so) chapter introduced you to your large host family. Later chapters discussed the concepts of time and money, if I recall correctly. It doesn't really ebook well because of a lot of annotation to "help". A modern analogy completely in the English language would be the "Diary of a wimpy kid" series. My son read those, and I occasionally wondered if the author of those books knew about or was inspired by "Familia Romana". I'm not implying Familia Romana was a comedy, the funniest part was probably some sibling rivalry in the host family. But it was a mix of pictures and words I haven't seen in a book since early grade school.
      - jkaunisv1 12y ago
        I think a videogame has several advantages over the book format as you can offer different contexts to learn the same thing in a rote way, and let the user ask questions. Also, Latin just has too many weird tenses and stuff to pick up that way, I would imagine. At least English to French or Spanish, there's shared grammar.
- colanderman 12y ago
  …I imagine a dystopian future in which tourists are fluent only in topics relevant to medieval fantasy.
  - jkaunisv1 12y ago
    A guy I knew in Japan told me about a friend of his who learned Japanese from playing Final Fantasy. Everyone who met him wondered why he spoke like a thousand year old samurai.
    - ratsimihah 12y ago
      Hahaha, this made my day. Back to the topic, I do this thing called biking to and from work. It's more pleasant than taking the subway, and when you don't have an unlimited subway card, it's easy to keep up the habit. It may not be as fun as creating an MMO, but it's pretty low threshold.
      - jkaunisv1 12y ago
        Is HN picky about going off-topic? I haven't commented much here. I also bike to and from work and I've seen it have really positive effects on my friends who want to build muscle and lose some weight. I actually try to structure my life similar to how this guy did his "MMO", with rules and systems that make it easy to live well. When you bike and walk everywhere, it's hard not to be in decent shape.
        ratsimihah 12y ago
        Absolutely. I love that it's so low threshold, you just have to do it and it doesn't take any extra time, such as going to the gym. It's also a lot of fun. This doesn't seem too off-topic, we're just discussing alternatives to the topic in question. : )
    - merrua 12y ago
      Whatever gets you started ;) I assume enough hours exposure to non old samurai speech would get them the rest of the way. I've heard a lot of stories of children learning english from playing multi-player xbox games. The quality of their english I'm not sure about though.
- Brashman 12y ago
  I did relatively little reading when I was playing WoW hardcore. Although quests had a load of flavor text, I would just key in on the how many and what I had to kill.
- FlailFast 12y ago
  When I was a kid, I tried this with imported Zelda/Final Fantasy games. As an American, I was lucky enough to study Japanese as an elementary schooler, and back then, there was a pretty significant lag between Japanese and American releases. Consequently, I had some pretty massive incentives to try out these RPGs and muddle through the language (play the game months before my friends!). Unfortuantely most of the kanji was beyond my ability to divine, and I didn't know how to use a kanji dictionary effectively back then...so I often didn't really know what I was doing, and wound up getting the English versions too. Still, if I had a bit more support (slash knew how to use a kanji dictionary), I could have imagined it really working to improve my Japanese ability. Now that the lag doesn't exist for game releases there's not as much incentive, but it would be interesting to see someone design a game with these sorts of things in mind.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    kanji is such an awful roadblock. I think just about every Japanese student has gone through what you did, myself included. I almost wonder if basic Japanese curriculum should teach kanji before a lot of grammar, to try and get you ready to consume print media ASAP.
- Glide 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure my ability to touch type was influenced by playing Quake 1 and Quake 2. You had to type quickly enough to insult someone and not die. I've met programmers that don't touch type, but I've never met a PC gamer that doesn't. And yes, your idea would be awesome. That would actually be a sick WoW add-on. I doubt you can pull different localizations through the API though.
  - endgame 12y ago
    I credit MUDding with my current typing speed.
    - geddes 12y ago
      ditto!
  - n1ghtmare_ 12y ago
    Yeah same here (it was Counter Strike for me, but still)
  - rush340 12y ago
    I couldn't touch type and really couldn't force myself not to look, so I bought a Das Keyboard and threw out my old keyboard. It was rough at first, but I doubt I could have learned faster any other way and as a bonus I ended up realizing the joy of typing on a mechanical keyboard.
- caw 12y ago
  I haven't played an MMO in a long time, but when I played Final Fantasy XI, a large majority of the players were Japanese. The developers included an auto-translate function so you could have something like "Let's go kill [boss name]" and [boss name] would be translated to either English or Japanese depending on the player settings. Once you got familiar with the game and what you did in it, seeing just [stuff] in the brackets got you the gist of what they were saying. Unless you were trying to learn Japanese though, that's as far as you got -- you couldn't have the seamless "mata a 12 [green dragons]" unless you knew your hiragana/katakana.
- melling 12y ago
  Not sure if I'll ever get to an MMO but I'd like to create small games where you play a character and take actions in the language that you want to learn. I was thinking more of a scavenger hunt. I've got about 1000 images for my next release. I'll try to do some animations in the following release to clarify some of the verbs. Then hopefully make a SpriteKit game from there... Make Oscar 'pick up', 'carry' , 'pour'... I put up 3 pictures on my FB page: https://www.facebook.com/h4labs https://www.facebook.com/h4labs
- fivedogit 12y ago
  The only reason I haven't done this myself is MMOs are very expensive to produce, at least the WoW-clone type I envision. WildStar took 7 years to build. I don't have the cachet to ask for 10s of millions for a crazy project and get it. But, please, somebody that does, make this. :)
- jkaunisv1 12y ago
  One of the project ideas I keep daydreaming about is along these lines. An RPG set in a world with two factions, one speaks English and the other French (or whatever language people want to learn). There are characters who are unilingual, and some who are bilingual. Instead of gating progress the usual artificial way (eg. Snorlax blocking the path), all you have to do is understand what an NPC is asking or telling you to do then do it. Characters would greet each other and converse in their native language, and the bilingual characters would help smooth this out. For example you could ask a bilingual shopkeeper "What does <word> mean?". If you say "Hi" to somebody and they say "Bonjour" back, it's not hard to figure out what they mean, and conversations would escalate in complexity as you progress through the game.
  - honestcoyote 12y ago
    When I worked as a developer at an EFL / ESL educational software company, I proposed something similar for the Japanese market. Make an RPG (JPRG in style, of course) where the base language was Japanese. Have the usual storyline where characters discover ruins, a lost civilization, hidden secrets and conspiracies, etc. The ancient civilization's language was English. So, to progress through the story, the characters have to learn enough English to decipher the old records, to figure out how to defeat the (English-speaking) bad guy resurrected from the tombs, and even for the use of magic, since all the discovered spells would be in English. I got this project as far as the very early design stage. I've always been sorry I couldn't convince the execs to let us finish it.
    - mrfusion 12y ago
      That's a great idea. It would be perfect for kickstarter, no?
      - honestcoyote 12y ago
        Thanks for the encouragement. Might be worth trying again to make this.
        12y ago
- marianminds 12y ago
  I've been dreaming of doing this for years and I've been considering doing something quite similar to what you're talking about for my next project. The only problem, as another poster said, was investment. I was planning on doing a web-based text-based game, which would obviously turn a lot of people off ("that's not a real game!") but open it up to greater variation and modularity.
  - jkaunisv1 12y ago
    I think it's a great idea (well, see my above comment :)! Keep the scope small - this doesn't need an MMO to be successful, make it single player. Start with text and find an artist along the way. On my walk home between posting my initial comment above and this one, I started thinking about how to make it happen as a side project and the conclusion I came to was writing the entire script/story out first as that would be the hardest part.
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  I wonder what the world would be like today if Blizzard had partnered with Lifetime fitness, and you could only play World of Warcraft while you were on a treadmill, or other fitness device.
  - sejje 12y ago
    I'm guessing it'd look really similar, except with far, far less hours logged in WoW.
- acaza 12y ago
  I think this is a really awesome idea, the only thing I could see going very wrong is sustaining an active user base large enough to afford the server and development costs. The reason I say this is because you'd be looking for a relatively niche audience, a gamer who wants to learn a second language, which I don't think is necessarily a big portion of gamers out there. A lot of gamers like to just enjoy a game and grind. I think it would maybe work better as a single player RPG, or something a long those lines. I would definitely play an RPG to learn another language if it was done in the ways described. But, maybe that's just because I'm a fairly solo gamer.
- n72 12y ago
  Once upon a time I was an English teacher in Berlin. The student I had who had the best intuitive feel for English and the best pronunciation was a massive boy band fan and had learned the bulk of her English though translating and signing along to N'Sync and the like.
- rich2892 12y ago
  ycombinator: Pitch Hi, I see you guys are interested in making an MMORPG language learning game. It's a great idea. In fact, it's an idea that my brother, myself and a few other guys have been working on the past four years, ever since I graduated from Ohio State with my Master's in Foreign Language Education. We have already seen it work in our very alpha, alpha testing of some rough prototypes with high school Spanish students in our area. To test the concept, we focused on just a few language concepts (teaching personal, descriptive adjective pairs, e.g. "tall/short; old/young", etc.) and set up an ambush scenario of the player by some orcs fitting the description. Then, we paired the player with a helper avatar. The avatar and the player each shot a different orc in every attacking pair. The avatar told the player which to target. Second, we set up a castle maze, through which the player has to navigate as a spy, picking up needed ingredients for a weaponized spell along the way. The avatar helper already knows the lay of the castle. He instructs the player where he has to go to avoid detection. We tested these two and a third game in a few area high schools last spring just before school let out. The response was overwhelmingly positive. The kids dubbed our one game the "Spanish flappy bird", because of how addictive it was. While we'd like to develop more apps, eventually putting together an entire year's worth of curriculum for teachers, we need to redirect our focus to building an extensible framework and community to step up the development from what only a handful of people could otherwise produce. I'm a teacher. I know state standards, which do work. I also know that a lot of the textbooks, etc. we use in schools to teach are not effective and, quite frankly, boring. Standards are good for accountability. Games are good for engagement. So we're linking the two. We are building a framework which tracks a language learner's (not just high school; anyone's) progress through a given game and determines where he is in mastering all of the standards and, by extension, the language. The framework plots out his game experience, directing him to this or that "mission"/app targeting the concomitant standard based on his strengths and weaknesses. The framework itself is open-sourced and built by a community of developers. This is where we need your help. Once it's fully operational, we open up the game development to both for and not-for-profit groups who are willing to create their games in accordance with state standards. That way our framework acts as a kind of clearinghouse. Teachers and the general public know that what is published in our community actually educates in addition to entertaining. Developers can work on a project as small-scale as just a particular vocabulary set or grammar concept. Or they can go whole hog and make a full-scale, MMORPG for an entire, say, year's worth of language instruction. Or anywhere in between. What unifies them is a common set of standards and a common performance database so that users, regardless of where they start or what they do, know a.) where they are in acquiring the language and b.) what games/missions, etc. will take them to the next level. Another way of thinking about this framework from the user's experience is like Marvel's comics universe of characters and worlds. We would like to kick this off with a forum and see where to go from there, who wants to develop what. You can find us at http://www.parthalan.com/forums/forum/parthalan-development-forum/ http://www.parthalan.com/forums/forum/parthalan-development-...
brohoolio 12y ago
Good inspiring article. I recently added 3 rules to my life. 1.) No pop 2.) Track calorie intake via loseit 3.) Exercise everyday (even if it's just a 10 minute walk or some pushups) Two weeks in and I feel way better. I find that I'm trying to control my calorie intake and get it where it needs to be without exerting as much effort as I would be if I was simply counting calories to lose weight. I find that I'm doing more than the minimum in terms of exercise too just because I'm already doing some exercise. At least I found having rules helped me not push off weight loss until next week forever.
- eru 12y ago
  What's pop?
  - stan_rogers 12y ago
    Most Americans would probably call it "soda" (there are a couple of weir areas where everything is "Coke", no matter what it really is, and some of the more civilized areas use the word "pop" as the gods intended); Brits would probably say "fizzy drinks".
    - aestra 12y ago
      >Most Americans would probably call it "soda" It is HIGHLY regional. The Northeast and parts of the West mostly say "soda." The South is "coke." http://www.popvssoda.com/ http://www.popvssoda.com/
  - phillc73 12y ago
    I'm not sure, but I think it's eaten itself.
SoftwareMaven 12y ago
I went the exact opposite route. After losing 180 pounds via bariatric surgery and then regaining 70 of it, I dove into the science. I read books, but only books that pointed directly to scientific literature I could read. More importantly, I learned how to differentiate good nutrition studies from bad nutrition studies (hint: at least 90% of nutrition studies are bad) so I could tell when an conclusion is warranted by the data versus when it isn't. I also started completely ignoring anything said in the media, since, invariably, they get it wrong or they hype the afore-mentioned bad studies. Everything became about the science and the n=1 experiments. What I found was that I could lose weight without effort, improve every health marker, and enjoy the foods my body really seemed to desire (as opposed to foods engineered to cause cravings). The 70 pounds disappeared without any tracking of anything[1]. More importantly, that 70 pounds was gone a year ago, and maintaining the loss has been just as straightforward. I applaud anybody who finds the method that works for them. It's pretty clear our bodies are striving to be healthy and get what they need; once you find that, the rest comes relatively easy.[2] 1. There was some early tracking as I learned about different foods and how they interacted with me and my goals. 2. Unfortunately, some people lost the genetic lottery (less than you might think) or are so metabolically disturbed (becoming more and more) that it isn't always easy. I have a huge amount of respect for those who persevere through that and work towards a healthier life.
- beaumartinez 12y ago
  Interesting. What studies did you stick with?
  - SoftwareMaven 12y ago
    Hmm, tough question. Here are some of the studies that struck me most. The danger of something like this is it can look like confirmation bias; that is not the case. It just happens that a close, impartial reading of the evidence tends to lean one direction. * Comparison of the Atkins, Zone, Ornish, and LEARN Diets for Change in Weight and Related Risk Factors Among Overweight Premenopausal Women[1] * Effects of Dietary Composition on Energy Expenditure During Weight-Loss Maintenance[2] * The ketogenic diet as a treatment paradigm for diverse neurological disorders[3] * The ketogenic diet reverses gene expression patterns and reduces reactive oxygen species levels when used as an adjuvant therapy for glioma[4] * A Systematic Review of the Evidence Supporting a Causal Link Between Dietary Factors and Coronary Heart Disease[5] At the time, I wrote a wikia article[6] that tried to distil all of my thoughts and what I had learned. It is mostly correct, but I'm sure I got some things wrong. I haven't gone back over it in some time. More recently, I think this article (Dietary Carbohydrate restriction as the first approach in diabetes management. Critical review and evidence base)[7] gives a good overview of the metabolic benefits. All of this does not imply that I think a ketogenic diet is the One and True Path(tm); it is far more nuanced than that, but that's not a bad place to start for a lot of people. 1. http://www.mwc.com.br/files/Gardner_-_Standford_A_to_Z.pdf http://www.mwc.com.br/files/Gardner_-_Standford_A_to_Z.pdf 2. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1199154 http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1199154 3. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3321471/pdf/fphar-03-00059.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3321471/pdf/fpha... 4. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2949862/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2949862/ 5. http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1108492 http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=11084... 6. http://fat-head.wikia.com/wiki/Health_Benefits_of_a_Low_Carb,_High_Fat_Diet http://fat-head.wikia.com/wiki/Health_Benefits_of_a_Low_Carb... 7. http://www.nutritionjrnl.com/article/S0899-9007(14)00332-3/fulltext http://www.nutritionjrnl.com/article/S0899-9007(14)00332-3/f...
Mz 12y ago
Good for him. Though I was hoping he had actually created an MMO. This is kind of a metaphorical MMO, not a real one.
- jkaunisv1 12y ago
  It's not even really an MMO, I would say RPG. It's not massively multiplayer but I guess it's online. Still awesome.
  - Mz 12y ago
    Well, he was massive. And he got a couple of other people involved, making this a multiplayer effort. Perhaps that is close enough, in metaphorical terms, for what he was trying to communicate here.
    - jkaunisv1 12y ago
      Haha I like your interpretation :)
      - frankcaron 12y ago
        That was technically the literal interpretation. :)
  - VikingCoder 12y ago
    FRPG. Not "fantasy," but "fitness."
- lotharbot 12y ago
  Specifically, I was hoping there was a download or a webpage that I could go to and join into the same MMO. Like... I could go to www.HealthQuest.TLD, create a character name, and start some training quests.
  - Mz 12y ago
    I hear ya. I was really hoping to see some code for how a genuine health-impacting game would work. I originally joined HN with a desire to learn to code in order to write such a "game" (simulation) and a lot has changed in the years I have been here. One thing that hasn't changed: I still can't really code (I know a little html and css) and I still don't know how I will ever write my simulation. Perhaps it doesn't matter. The world seems mostly not interested in (or openly hostile to) what I know about such things.
jebus989 12y ago
British guy problems but I thought someone was blogging about a very small financial loss on a game they made. lbs would help.
- opminion 12y ago
  45 kg
  - dyadic 12y ago
    The problem isn't weight translation, it's reading "pounds" as currency instead of weight. Imagine the title was "I created my own MMO and lost 100 dollars", that's how we Brits parse it
    - Gigablah 12y ago
      "Lose 10 pounds! Only £10!"
  - angersock 12y ago
    5 stone?
- leoc 12y ago
  How did you even have a hundred starlings to begin with? Keep the door closed next time I suppose.
arrrg 12y ago
Ha, I’ve done similar things, but I’m still in the middle of it, 62 pounds in to be exact, that’s about the half-way point. The key component turned out to be the scale for me. Automatic tracking works much better for me than manually keeping track of it. (I also got a Withings scale, but I don’t think the brand matters. As long as the scale automatically logs everything without you having to do anything or even look how much you weigh in the morning it’s great.) Seeing your whole progress in one graph really helps me keep on track. A week without progress even though you did all the exercise you always do and ate like you always do? With the trend-line and the chart going all the way back you can easily see that it’s just a statistical anomaly, most likely random noise (probably mostly dependent on when you drank your water and when you went to the toilet). It doesn’t mean progress has stopped. That 2lb setback, probably because I wasn’t careful about what I eat? Now I look back all the way I have come and those 2lbs seem harmless. That’s a ridiculously tiny amount of weight to lose. It’s so easy. Just some extra care to what I eat and how active I am and I’m all set. With manual tracking (mostly memorising what I weighed and remembering it the next day) I would at these points just get afraid of the scale and eventually stop weighing myself. The whole process was less transparent with manual tracking and the automatically logging scale demystified it for me. During my previous attempts weeks without any progress just doomed me and got me to this really dark place. No I’m not even bothered by them. The trend-line is going down. Always. Now, step counters may not be accurate or even a good way to track how active you are (and walking or cardio may not the best ways to aid weight loss) but the built-in step counter in my iPhone that I have always with me (plus my podcast addiction and the beautiful weather this summer) actually lead me to automatically want to beat those 10,000 steps per day. And at some point I just started doing it. I think there isn’t one day during the last two months where I didn’t walk at least 9,000 steps per day, without even consciously deciding to do that. I just wanted to beat those 10,000 steps. I want to see the bar turn green and the 10,000 to light up. That has helped me tremendously to stay active (and not just move less when I started eating less). I also started driving the ergometer for 30 minutes every day and while I don’t really track that I’m seeing my progress (I can drive with more and more resistance and without any breaks in-between) – also with my scale. The heart rate measurement doesn’t work so well (it fails two times out of three) but it also shows steady downward progress. From a resting heart rate in the high 80s I’m now down to a healthy one in the low 60s. I also feel much better and sleep much better. (This would certainly be beneficial for me, even without any weight loss.) All this progress also motivates me to constantly optimise. Next step: Buy good shoes and convert some of that walking distance into running distance. (70 minutes of walking per day are a bit long, but doable. However, with some running I can bring that time down.) (The eating story is similar. I don’t particularly care about what I eat, but when you restrict how much you eat you will automatically tend to prefer food that makes you feel fuller. That’s at least how it was for me so far. I don’t want to eat pasta every day because then I wouldn’t ever feel full. And when I do eat pasta I would rather make the portion a bit smaller and add a salad for the saved calories to feel fuller.) Will it work? Ask me in three years. I hope so. I think keeping up my weighing routine forever will be the key. If I can do that I see no reason why I can’t keep at it and at least hold my weight (but most likely lose some more and hold the weight I want to have). I’m cautiously optimistic. This is the most weight I have ever lost in my life and the longest I have been at it and I don’t even feel constantly starving or demotivated or crushed (something that was common during previous attempts). I actually feel great most of the time. Get tracking! It helped me.
funkyy 12y ago
I am actually testing the 1 day fasting diet, exercising every day (either speed walking 5K, jogging for 5K or tennis) and limiting liquid calories. The things people forget: -your body is unable to calculate liquid calories (pop, juices etc) - so even after drinking 2K calories in Cola you can be still hungry -fasting for 1 day a week (200-300 intake in sugars calories like sugar tea) or 2 days a week (500 calories in fruit sugars a day) is extremely healthy as for first 24 hours since eating your body will use gathered sugars in your body to maintain itself burning all the nasty stuff logging your veins and stomach. This also helps you to say no to food - next day after fasting you wont feel like extremaly hungry and even very small meals through the day will be enough to you -track calories - but be honest, always round it up DOWN to full 50s and 100s. -calculate calories weekly, not daily. Make sure on the end of the week you are good. Start Monday with fasting - you will have 1,500-2,000 calories deficit already so basically you can eat most of stuff through the week. I have lost already 10 pounds in 4 weeks, I can run easily and I feel much better. 2 more months and I am done!
- deanclatworthy 12y ago
  I've read about the (supposed) benefits of fasting but never that it cleans up clogged veins. Got a reference for that?
- aggronn 12y ago
  >2 more months and I am done! This attitude is typically a very bad one to have when dieting. Ingesting fewer calories should be sustainable after you've reached your target weight. Anyways, good luck to you in your efforts. If this is a way for you to start, then there's nothing wrong with it at all.
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    You are never really done, but when you stop dropping weight you do get so many more calories.
  - funkyy 12y ago
    Why is bad. I didnt say I will stuff myself after 2 months, I will just remove calorie deficit from my diet - I wont stop exercising, I actually want to regain some body mass as muscles - so I need to stop deficit and make surplus of protein etc...
MichaelDickens 12y ago
In case the site isn't loading for anyone else: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.polygon.com/2014/4/22/5625906/weight-loss-mmo-video-game http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.pol...
nathan_f77 12y ago
This is exactly what I'm doing, down to the MFP app and the Withings scale. The results have been amazing so far, and I look forward to writing a similar blog post by the end of the year.
frankcaron 12y ago
Figures that I submit this for karma myself eons ago but it only now, via another HNer, pops to the top. :) - The fat MMO guy
- chrissnell 12y ago
  This is totally off-topic but I'm originally from San Antonio and noticed the last picture in the article and picked it out immediately as you having a drink at La Gloria. This (and the heat!) is exactly why it's so hard for people back home to lose weight. Kudos to you for figuring it out!
  - frankcaron 12y ago
    Good eyes! We were there after a con at Rackspace! It was as deadly as you've foretold.
- dshankar 12y ago
  Haha sorry about that Frank! Thanks for writing this though, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I guess title and timing made a difference :)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
frankcaron 12y ago
For the record, and for those asking for this to be a real game, FitRPG for iOS is planning to deliver on some of that very notion. It's a super cool app; and I say that with absolutely no affiliation (srs). Google it.
- snicker 12y ago
  HabitRPG is a web and mobile platform for gamifying habits and life goals that launched via Kickstarter a couple years back that is very successful in helping people do what you've done http://www.habitrpg.com http://www.habitrpg.com
- jonmb 12y ago
  Nerd Fitness Academy has created their own game as well, with quests and leveling up. It just released a few days ago. Here's the video tour of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLF2RkZnSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLF2RkZnSY
caster_cp 12y ago
This is genius. Really. In my mind you've just "jiu jitsued" the candy bars, by applying the same mechanisms they use to keep you hooked, but against them. By creating habits that are prone to compulsive behavior (the phenomenon at play when you want to check your diet data is the same as when a teen checks his/her Facebook/WhatsApp/Whatever for messages). The surprising thing here is that you could keep this going long enough until it actually became a habit (or so I suppose). This is the trick, and I couldn't figure out what made you keep it so (willpower may be the answer here, but s there any other thing going on?) Anyways, kudos, you data aficionado diet jiu jitsu guy :D
- jkaunisv1 12y ago
  In my experience (which I've written a bit about at habitformed.com if you're curious), habits like these do become engrained if you keep at them long enough and if they specifically don't require any willpower. The key I've found is to take willpower out of the equation because you'll always be lacking that. One way I judo'd my own eating habits was to force myself to eat two servings of decently healthy tasty things before being allowed a serving of junk. eg. some fruit, some nuts, then cookies. It didn't need willpower to enforce because I could always eat my way to a delicious cookie if I really wanted it.
thret 12y ago
I'm surprised nobody has linked the obligatory xkcd yet: http://xkcd.com/189/ http://xkcd.com/189/ I think about this every time I run.
norswap 12y ago
Ah, I'd actually hoped he had coded a real MMO. Well, congratulations to him in any case.
MichaelTieso 12y ago
I imagine a future where we will be able to track everything we eat automatically without having to enter any data in onto an app. Imagine seeing data about your body right on your arm. I eat a sandwich and it tells me exactly how many calories it was. I'll be the first to signup for something like this if/when this comes out.
smegel 12y ago
> The idea is to track everything you take in and track what you spend through exercise. Wouldn't it just be easier to weigh yourself once a week, and if your weight goes up, eat less calories the following week and/or do more exercise? Unless your memory is that bad, or your eating patterns that random, it should not be hard to cut out things you know are high calorie and you can do without.
- beisner 12y ago
  The problem with weight loss and other sorts of large, daunting projects is that morale and focus tend to evaporate pretty quickly when you don't hold yourself accountable and don't see immediate results. Whether it's weighing yourself every day or keeping a food journal, these sort of small, incremental data points help you keep focused in the short term. Tracking them over larger time frames keeps you focused in the long term. When you want to learn a new language, you can't just say, "I'll look over some words this week, and if I'm not happy with my progress I'll do more next week," - you have to have a day-to-day plan to go over X number of flash cards, or talk for X number of minutes with a native speaker. Small, manageable, tangible goals are the key to weight loss, and tracking ones weight and intake meticulously allows you to set such goals.
- Throwaway823 12y ago
  I'm trying to gain 10 or 20 lbs, because I'm on the slim side. The problem, weighing yourself once a week is open to random fluctuations. For example, let's say I'm trying to gain 15 lbs this year. That's 0.28 lbs per week, or 1.25 lbs per month. My weight might go up and down a couple of pounds throughout the day, depending on the amount of water in my system, when I use the washroom, etc. So, I weigh myself today, and let's say I had a little extra water in my system. Now, I weigh myself in a month, and I'm slightly dehydrated that day without realizing it. I might have reached my goal and gained 1.25 lbs that month, but the scale is showing I weigh 1 lbs less than when I started. That's a problem, because I stuck to my goals, my routine, and I get slapped in the face with results that say I'm going in the opposite direction. I might incorrectly make changes to my calorie count, that don't need to be made. This is why tracking is useful. You step on the scale on a regular basis, and you can see the overall trend over time. In the above scenario, I can see although the scale shows 1 lbs less, it's an off day, and looking at the forecast, I'm on target and did average a gain 1.25 lbs that month. Now, I don't even have a scale, but that's why I'd like to get one, so I can step on it throughout the day, and see a graph to better summarize what's happening.
eru 12y ago
Switching from World of Warcraft to Ingress can also help with fitness and weightloss.
restlessmedia 12y ago
It's the guiding principal behind weight watchers. If you get into the habit of at least noticing what you are eating, you'll give yourself the opportunity to accept/deny it. The points system for weight watchers is genius and removes the complexity around nutrition as long as you how many points that thing your eating contains.
- coroxout 12y ago
  I just started doing Slimming World, which I guess is much the same as WW but with a different points allocation scheme. (Rice/pasta/potatoes are basically "free" as long as they are not cooked in oil; a third of each meal should be fresh fruit/veg, to discourage you from overloading on the free carbs; bread is very bad on the points system; you get one free calcium-containing product and one free fibre-containing product from an approved list every day, which has bizarrely led to me eating more cheese than ever before. I mainly picked SW over WW because of when the sessions were, rather than because I liked their way of doing it; in fact, to be honest I wasn't sure it would work at all, but so far it is.) Anyway, I agree there are definitely "gamification" aspects which are true for these weight loss group sessions too. The point scoring; every week people get applauded for their weight loss and shiny stickers are handed out for the best that week or for reaching various milestones; and just turning up to group every week (which you have to to keep your membership current) means you can't chicken out of weighing yourself on a bad week, and sitting in a group provides your "encouragers" and "challengers" too, although possibly not as effectively as selecting one of each from your everyday friends.
4ndr3vv 12y ago
This title was very confusing for an Englishman.
zedwill 12y ago
The story reminds me of REAMDE, by Neal Stephenson. In fiction, the protagonist Richard also creates his own MMO and uses immersion as a way to loose weight.

315 points by dshankar 12y ago

I want to upvote this a dozen more times. I've always thought MMOs could "hack" the brain into doing all sorts of cool, productive things. Somebody needs to create an MMO for language learning. Instead of "go kill 12 dragons" the questgiver would say "matar a 12 dragones" or "matar a 12 dragones verdes" or "matar al dragón en la cima de la montaña". The immersion and addiction would have hardcore players speaking 10 languages, I guarantee it. And I think this could be extended to quantifiable human-necessary tasks, too. Like a mechanical turk, but fun.

nawitus 12y ago
>Somebody needs to create an MMO for language learning. Duolingo is a language-learning website where you can gain experience points.
- hayksaakian 12y ago
  I don't think he means gamify language learning I think he means adding useful language learning subtly as a component of a real game
  - kbenson 12y ago
    Not quite the same thing, but I'm sure a lot of people here could and maybe even still can read the Ultima rune font...
- jacquesm 12y ago
  So is memrise.
rschuetzler 12y ago
Wouldn't your language learning MMO just be an MMO with the language switched?
- SoftwareMaven 12y ago
  No. An ideal implementation would train you into the new language, such that, for example, part of the quest is figuring out what the quest actually says. Instead of needing a language dictionary next to you, you have NPCs teaching it to you within the context of the game.
  - VLM 12y ago
    "part of the quest is figuring out what the quest actually says" I'm getting flashbacks to learning Latin from "Lingua Latina - Familia Romana". Here's a book in Latin with a couple pictures. A pity you can't read Latin, not yet. There's a couple footnotes in English. Also there's enough Latin borrowed into English that you can figure some of it out. If you can puzzle out what the heck is going on, you'll learn Latin. Or you'll get very frustrated. Likely both. Every couple years I put in an effort until I get annoyed and quit. All I really remember is the first chapter was a discourse on the geography of the classical era Mediterranean world, so if you know anything about history and/or geography it was pretty easy to puzzle out, and the second (or so) chapter introduced you to your large host family. Later chapters discussed the concepts of time and money, if I recall correctly. It doesn't really ebook well because of a lot of annotation to "help". A modern analogy completely in the English language would be the "Diary of a wimpy kid" series. My son read those, and I occasionally wondered if the author of those books knew about or was inspired by "Familia Romana". I'm not implying Familia Romana was a comedy, the funniest part was probably some sibling rivalry in the host family. But it was a mix of pictures and words I haven't seen in a book since early grade school.
    - jkaunisv1 12y ago
      I think a videogame has several advantages over the book format as you can offer different contexts to learn the same thing in a rote way, and let the user ask questions. Also, Latin just has too many weird tenses and stuff to pick up that way, I would imagine. At least English to French or Spanish, there's shared grammar.
colanderman 12y ago
…I imagine a dystopian future in which tourists are fluent only in topics relevant to medieval fantasy.
- jkaunisv1 12y ago
  A guy I knew in Japan told me about a friend of his who learned Japanese from playing Final Fantasy. Everyone who met him wondered why he spoke like a thousand year old samurai.
  - ratsimihah 12y ago
    Hahaha, this made my day. Back to the topic, I do this thing called biking to and from work. It's more pleasant than taking the subway, and when you don't have an unlimited subway card, it's easy to keep up the habit. It may not be as fun as creating an MMO, but it's pretty low threshold.
    - jkaunisv1 12y ago
      Is HN picky about going off-topic? I haven't commented much here. I also bike to and from work and I've seen it have really positive effects on my friends who want to build muscle and lose some weight. I actually try to structure my life similar to how this guy did his "MMO", with rules and systems that make it easy to live well. When you bike and walk everywhere, it's hard not to be in decent shape.
      - ratsimihah 12y ago
        Absolutely. I love that it's so low threshold, you just have to do it and it doesn't take any extra time, such as going to the gym. It's also a lot of fun. This doesn't seem too off-topic, we're just discussing alternatives to the topic in question. : )
  - merrua 12y ago
    Whatever gets you started ;) I assume enough hours exposure to non old samurai speech would get them the rest of the way. I've heard a lot of stories of children learning english from playing multi-player xbox games. The quality of their english I'm not sure about though.
Brashman 12y ago
I did relatively little reading when I was playing WoW hardcore. Although quests had a load of flavor text, I would just key in on the how many and what I had to kill.
FlailFast 12y ago
When I was a kid, I tried this with imported Zelda/Final Fantasy games. As an American, I was lucky enough to study Japanese as an elementary schooler, and back then, there was a pretty significant lag between Japanese and American releases. Consequently, I had some pretty massive incentives to try out these RPGs and muddle through the language (play the game months before my friends!). Unfortuantely most of the kanji was beyond my ability to divine, and I didn't know how to use a kanji dictionary effectively back then...so I often didn't really know what I was doing, and wound up getting the English versions too. Still, if I had a bit more support (slash knew how to use a kanji dictionary), I could have imagined it really working to improve my Japanese ability. Now that the lag doesn't exist for game releases there's not as much incentive, but it would be interesting to see someone design a game with these sorts of things in mind.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  kanji is such an awful roadblock. I think just about every Japanese student has gone through what you did, myself included. I almost wonder if basic Japanese curriculum should teach kanji before a lot of grammar, to try and get you ready to consume print media ASAP.
Glide 12y ago
I'm pretty sure my ability to touch type was influenced by playing Quake 1 and Quake 2. You had to type quickly enough to insult someone and not die. I've met programmers that don't touch type, but I've never met a PC gamer that doesn't. And yes, your idea would be awesome. That would actually be a sick WoW add-on. I doubt you can pull different localizations through the API though.
- endgame 12y ago
  I credit MUDding with my current typing speed.
  - geddes 12y ago
    ditto!
- n1ghtmare_ 12y ago
  Yeah same here (it was Counter Strike for me, but still)
- rush340 12y ago
  I couldn't touch type and really couldn't force myself not to look, so I bought a Das Keyboard and threw out my old keyboard. It was rough at first, but I doubt I could have learned faster any other way and as a bonus I ended up realizing the joy of typing on a mechanical keyboard.
caw 12y ago
I haven't played an MMO in a long time, but when I played Final Fantasy XI, a large majority of the players were Japanese. The developers included an auto-translate function so you could have something like "Let's go kill [boss name]" and [boss name] would be translated to either English or Japanese depending on the player settings. Once you got familiar with the game and what you did in it, seeing just [stuff] in the brackets got you the gist of what they were saying. Unless you were trying to learn Japanese though, that's as far as you got -- you couldn't have the seamless "mata a 12 [green dragons]" unless you knew your hiragana/katakana.
melling 12y ago
Not sure if I'll ever get to an MMO but I'd like to create small games where you play a character and take actions in the language that you want to learn. I was thinking more of a scavenger hunt. I've got about 1000 images for my next release. I'll try to do some animations in the following release to clarify some of the verbs. Then hopefully make a SpriteKit game from there... Make Oscar 'pick up', 'carry' , 'pour'... I put up 3 pictures on my FB page: https://www.facebook.com/h4labs https://www.facebook.com/h4labs
fivedogit 12y ago
The only reason I haven't done this myself is MMOs are very expensive to produce, at least the WoW-clone type I envision. WildStar took 7 years to build. I don't have the cachet to ask for 10s of millions for a crazy project and get it. But, please, somebody that does, make this. :)
jkaunisv1 12y ago
One of the project ideas I keep daydreaming about is along these lines. An RPG set in a world with two factions, one speaks English and the other French (or whatever language people want to learn). There are characters who are unilingual, and some who are bilingual. Instead of gating progress the usual artificial way (eg. Snorlax blocking the path), all you have to do is understand what an NPC is asking or telling you to do then do it. Characters would greet each other and converse in their native language, and the bilingual characters would help smooth this out. For example you could ask a bilingual shopkeeper "What does <word> mean?". If you say "Hi" to somebody and they say "Bonjour" back, it's not hard to figure out what they mean, and conversations would escalate in complexity as you progress through the game.
- honestcoyote 12y ago
  When I worked as a developer at an EFL / ESL educational software company, I proposed something similar for the Japanese market. Make an RPG (JPRG in style, of course) where the base language was Japanese. Have the usual storyline where characters discover ruins, a lost civilization, hidden secrets and conspiracies, etc. The ancient civilization's language was English. So, to progress through the story, the characters have to learn enough English to decipher the old records, to figure out how to defeat the (English-speaking) bad guy resurrected from the tombs, and even for the use of magic, since all the discovered spells would be in English. I got this project as far as the very early design stage. I've always been sorry I couldn't convince the execs to let us finish it.
  - mrfusion 12y ago
    That's a great idea. It would be perfect for kickstarter, no?
    - honestcoyote 12y ago
      Thanks for the encouragement. Might be worth trying again to make this.
      - 12y ago
marianminds 12y ago
I've been dreaming of doing this for years and I've been considering doing something quite similar to what you're talking about for my next project. The only problem, as another poster said, was investment. I was planning on doing a web-based text-based game, which would obviously turn a lot of people off ("that's not a real game!") but open it up to greater variation and modularity.
- jkaunisv1 12y ago
  I think it's a great idea (well, see my above comment :)! Keep the scope small - this doesn't need an MMO to be successful, make it single player. Start with text and find an artist along the way. On my walk home between posting my initial comment above and this one, I started thinking about how to make it happen as a side project and the conclusion I came to was writing the entire script/story out first as that would be the hardest part.
VikingCoder 12y ago
I wonder what the world would be like today if Blizzard had partnered with Lifetime fitness, and you could only play World of Warcraft while you were on a treadmill, or other fitness device.
- sejje 12y ago
  I'm guessing it'd look really similar, except with far, far less hours logged in WoW.
acaza 12y ago
I think this is a really awesome idea, the only thing I could see going very wrong is sustaining an active user base large enough to afford the server and development costs. The reason I say this is because you'd be looking for a relatively niche audience, a gamer who wants to learn a second language, which I don't think is necessarily a big portion of gamers out there. A lot of gamers like to just enjoy a game and grind. I think it would maybe work better as a single player RPG, or something a long those lines. I would definitely play an RPG to learn another language if it was done in the ways described. But, maybe that's just because I'm a fairly solo gamer.
n72 12y ago
Once upon a time I was an English teacher in Berlin. The student I had who had the best intuitive feel for English and the best pronunciation was a massive boy band fan and had learned the bulk of her English though translating and signing along to N'Sync and the like.
rich2892 12y ago
ycombinator: Pitch Hi, I see you guys are interested in making an MMORPG language learning game. It's a great idea. In fact, it's an idea that my brother, myself and a few other guys have been working on the past four years, ever since I graduated from Ohio State with my Master's in Foreign Language Education. We have already seen it work in our very alpha, alpha testing of some rough prototypes with high school Spanish students in our area. To test the concept, we focused on just a few language concepts (teaching personal, descriptive adjective pairs, e.g. "tall/short; old/young", etc.) and set up an ambush scenario of the player by some orcs fitting the description. Then, we paired the player with a helper avatar. The avatar and the player each shot a different orc in every attacking pair. The avatar told the player which to target. Second, we set up a castle maze, through which the player has to navigate as a spy, picking up needed ingredients for a weaponized spell along the way. The avatar helper already knows the lay of the castle. He instructs the player where he has to go to avoid detection. We tested these two and a third game in a few area high schools last spring just before school let out. The response was overwhelmingly positive. The kids dubbed our one game the "Spanish flappy bird", because of how addictive it was. While we'd like to develop more apps, eventually putting together an entire year's worth of curriculum for teachers, we need to redirect our focus to building an extensible framework and community to step up the development from what only a handful of people could otherwise produce. I'm a teacher. I know state standards, which do work. I also know that a lot of the textbooks, etc. we use in schools to teach are not effective and, quite frankly, boring. Standards are good for accountability. Games are good for engagement. So we're linking the two. We are building a framework which tracks a language learner's (not just high school; anyone's) progress through a given game and determines where he is in mastering all of the standards and, by extension, the language. The framework plots out his game experience, directing him to this or that "mission"/app targeting the concomitant standard based on his strengths and weaknesses. The framework itself is open-sourced and built by a community of developers. This is where we need your help. Once it's fully operational, we open up the game development to both for and not-for-profit groups who are willing to create their games in accordance with state standards. That way our framework acts as a kind of clearinghouse. Teachers and the general public know that what is published in our community actually educates in addition to entertaining. Developers can work on a project as small-scale as just a particular vocabulary set or grammar concept. Or they can go whole hog and make a full-scale, MMORPG for an entire, say, year's worth of language instruction. Or anywhere in between. What unifies them is a common set of standards and a common performance database so that users, regardless of where they start or what they do, know a.) where they are in acquiring the language and b.) what games/missions, etc. will take them to the next level. Another way of thinking about this framework from the user's experience is like Marvel's comics universe of characters and worlds. We would like to kick this off with a forum and see where to go from there, who wants to develop what. You can find us at http://www.parthalan.com/forums/forum/parthalan-development-forum/ http://www.parthalan.com/forums/forum/parthalan-development-...

brohoolio 12y ago

Good inspiring article. I recently added 3 rules to my life. 1.) No pop 2.) Track calorie intake via loseit 3.) Exercise everyday (even if it's just a 10 minute walk or some pushups) Two weeks in and I feel way better. I find that I'm trying to control my calorie intake and get it where it needs to be without exerting as much effort as I would be if I was simply counting calories to lose weight. I find that I'm doing more than the minimum in terms of exercise too just because I'm already doing some exercise. At least I found having rules helped me not push off weight loss until next week forever.

eru 12y ago
What's pop?
- stan_rogers 12y ago
  Most Americans would probably call it "soda" (there are a couple of weir areas where everything is "Coke", no matter what it really is, and some of the more civilized areas use the word "pop" as the gods intended); Brits would probably say "fizzy drinks".
  - aestra 12y ago
    >Most Americans would probably call it "soda" It is HIGHLY regional. The Northeast and parts of the West mostly say "soda." The South is "coke." http://www.popvssoda.com/ http://www.popvssoda.com/
- phillc73 12y ago
  I'm not sure, but I think it's eaten itself.

SoftwareMaven 12y ago

I went the exact opposite route. After losing 180 pounds via bariatric surgery and then regaining 70 of it, I dove into the science. I read books, but only books that pointed directly to scientific literature I could read. More importantly, I learned how to differentiate good nutrition studies from bad nutrition studies (hint: at least 90% of nutrition studies are bad) so I could tell when an conclusion is warranted by the data versus when it isn't. I also started completely ignoring anything said in the media, since, invariably, they get it wrong or they hype the afore-mentioned bad studies. Everything became about the science and the n=1 experiments. What I found was that I could lose weight without effort, improve every health marker, and enjoy the foods my body really seemed to desire (as opposed to foods engineered to cause cravings). The 70 pounds disappeared without any tracking of anything[1]. More importantly, that 70 pounds was gone a year ago, and maintaining the loss has been just as straightforward. I applaud anybody who finds the method that works for them. It's pretty clear our bodies are striving to be healthy and get what they need; once you find that, the rest comes relatively easy.[2] 1. There was some early tracking as I learned about different foods and how they interacted with me and my goals. 2. Unfortunately, some people lost the genetic lottery (less than you might think) or are so metabolically disturbed (becoming more and more) that it isn't always easy. I have a huge amount of respect for those who persevere through that and work towards a healthier life.

beaumartinez 12y ago
Interesting. What studies did you stick with?
- SoftwareMaven 12y ago
  Hmm, tough question. Here are some of the studies that struck me most. The danger of something like this is it can look like confirmation bias; that is not the case. It just happens that a close, impartial reading of the evidence tends to lean one direction. * Comparison of the Atkins, Zone, Ornish, and LEARN Diets for Change in Weight and Related Risk Factors Among Overweight Premenopausal Women[1] * Effects of Dietary Composition on Energy Expenditure During Weight-Loss Maintenance[2] * The ketogenic diet as a treatment paradigm for diverse neurological disorders[3] * The ketogenic diet reverses gene expression patterns and reduces reactive oxygen species levels when used as an adjuvant therapy for glioma[4] * A Systematic Review of the Evidence Supporting a Causal Link Between Dietary Factors and Coronary Heart Disease[5] At the time, I wrote a wikia article[6] that tried to distil all of my thoughts and what I had learned. It is mostly correct, but I'm sure I got some things wrong. I haven't gone back over it in some time. More recently, I think this article (Dietary Carbohydrate restriction as the first approach in diabetes management. Critical review and evidence base)[7] gives a good overview of the metabolic benefits. All of this does not imply that I think a ketogenic diet is the One and True Path(tm); it is far more nuanced than that, but that's not a bad place to start for a lot of people. 1. http://www.mwc.com.br/files/Gardner_-_Standford_A_to_Z.pdf http://www.mwc.com.br/files/Gardner_-_Standford_A_to_Z.pdf 2. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1199154 http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1199154 3. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3321471/pdf/fphar-03-00059.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3321471/pdf/fpha... 4. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2949862/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2949862/ 5. http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1108492 http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=11084... 6. http://fat-head.wikia.com/wiki/Health_Benefits_of_a_Low_Carb,_High_Fat_Diet http://fat-head.wikia.com/wiki/Health_Benefits_of_a_Low_Carb... 7. http://www.nutritionjrnl.com/article/S0899-9007(14)00332-3/fulltext http://www.nutritionjrnl.com/article/S0899-9007(14)00332-3/f...

Mz 12y ago

Good for him. Though I was hoping he had actually created an MMO. This is kind of a metaphorical MMO, not a real one.

jkaunisv1 12y ago
It's not even really an MMO, I would say RPG. It's not massively multiplayer but I guess it's online. Still awesome.
- Mz 12y ago
  Well, he was massive. And he got a couple of other people involved, making this a multiplayer effort. Perhaps that is close enough, in metaphorical terms, for what he was trying to communicate here.
  - jkaunisv1 12y ago
    Haha I like your interpretation :)
    - frankcaron 12y ago
      That was technically the literal interpretation. :)
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  FRPG. Not "fantasy," but "fitness."
lotharbot 12y ago
Specifically, I was hoping there was a download or a webpage that I could go to and join into the same MMO. Like... I could go to www.HealthQuest.TLD, create a character name, and start some training quests.
- Mz 12y ago
  I hear ya. I was really hoping to see some code for how a genuine health-impacting game would work. I originally joined HN with a desire to learn to code in order to write such a "game" (simulation) and a lot has changed in the years I have been here. One thing that hasn't changed: I still can't really code (I know a little html and css) and I still don't know how I will ever write my simulation. Perhaps it doesn't matter. The world seems mostly not interested in (or openly hostile to) what I know about such things.

jebus989 12y ago

British guy problems but I thought someone was blogging about a very small financial loss on a game they made. lbs would help.

opminion 12y ago
45 kg
- dyadic 12y ago
  The problem isn't weight translation, it's reading "pounds" as currency instead of weight. Imagine the title was "I created my own MMO and lost 100 dollars", that's how we Brits parse it
  - Gigablah 12y ago
    "Lose 10 pounds! Only £10!"
- angersock 12y ago
  5 stone?
leoc 12y ago
How did you even have a hundred starlings to begin with? Keep the door closed next time I suppose.

arrrg 12y ago

Ha, I’ve done similar things, but I’m still in the middle of it, 62 pounds in to be exact, that’s about the half-way point. The key component turned out to be the scale for me. Automatic tracking works much better for me than manually keeping track of it. (I also got a Withings scale, but I don’t think the brand matters. As long as the scale automatically logs everything without you having to do anything or even look how much you weigh in the morning it’s great.) Seeing your whole progress in one graph really helps me keep on track. A week without progress even though you did all the exercise you always do and ate like you always do? With the trend-line and the chart going all the way back you can easily see that it’s just a statistical anomaly, most likely random noise (probably mostly dependent on when you drank your water and when you went to the toilet). It doesn’t mean progress has stopped. That 2lb setback, probably because I wasn’t careful about what I eat? Now I look back all the way I have come and those 2lbs seem harmless. That’s a ridiculously tiny amount of weight to lose. It’s so easy. Just some extra care to what I eat and how active I am and I’m all set. With manual tracking (mostly memorising what I weighed and remembering it the next day) I would at these points just get afraid of the scale and eventually stop weighing myself. The whole process was less transparent with manual tracking and the automatically logging scale demystified it for me. During my previous attempts weeks without any progress just doomed me and got me to this really dark place. No I’m not even bothered by them. The trend-line is going down. Always. Now, step counters may not be accurate or even a good way to track how active you are (and walking or cardio may not the best ways to aid weight loss) but the built-in step counter in my iPhone that I have always with me (plus my podcast addiction and the beautiful weather this summer) actually lead me to automatically want to beat those 10,000 steps per day. And at some point I just started doing it. I think there isn’t one day during the last two months where I didn’t walk at least 9,000 steps per day, without even consciously deciding to do that. I just wanted to beat those 10,000 steps. I want to see the bar turn green and the 10,000 to light up. That has helped me tremendously to stay active (and not just move less when I started eating less). I also started driving the ergometer for 30 minutes every day and while I don’t really track that I’m seeing my progress (I can drive with more and more resistance and without any breaks in-between) – also with my scale. The heart rate measurement doesn’t work so well (it fails two times out of three) but it also shows steady downward progress. From a resting heart rate in the high 80s I’m now down to a healthy one in the low 60s. I also feel much better and sleep much better. (This would certainly be beneficial for me, even without any weight loss.) All this progress also motivates me to constantly optimise. Next step: Buy good shoes and convert some of that walking distance into running distance. (70 minutes of walking per day are a bit long, but doable. However, with some running I can bring that time down.) (The eating story is similar. I don’t particularly care about what I eat, but when you restrict how much you eat you will automatically tend to prefer food that makes you feel fuller. That’s at least how it was for me so far. I don’t want to eat pasta every day because then I wouldn’t ever feel full. And when I do eat pasta I would rather make the portion a bit smaller and add a salad for the saved calories to feel fuller.) Will it work? Ask me in three years. I hope so. I think keeping up my weighing routine forever will be the key. If I can do that I see no reason why I can’t keep at it and at least hold my weight (but most likely lose some more and hold the weight I want to have). I’m cautiously optimistic. This is the most weight I have ever lost in my life and the longest I have been at it and I don’t even feel constantly starving or demotivated or crushed (something that was common during previous attempts). I actually feel great most of the time. Get tracking! It helped me.

funkyy 12y ago

I am actually testing the 1 day fasting diet, exercising every day (either speed walking 5K, jogging for 5K or tennis) and limiting liquid calories. The things people forget: -your body is unable to calculate liquid calories (pop, juices etc) - so even after drinking 2K calories in Cola you can be still hungry -fasting for 1 day a week (200-300 intake in sugars calories like sugar tea) or 2 days a week (500 calories in fruit sugars a day) is extremely healthy as for first 24 hours since eating your body will use gathered sugars in your body to maintain itself burning all the nasty stuff logging your veins and stomach. This also helps you to say no to food - next day after fasting you wont feel like extremaly hungry and even very small meals through the day will be enough to you -track calories - but be honest, always round it up DOWN to full 50s and 100s. -calculate calories weekly, not daily. Make sure on the end of the week you are good. Start Monday with fasting - you will have 1,500-2,000 calories deficit already so basically you can eat most of stuff through the week. I have lost already 10 pounds in 4 weeks, I can run easily and I feel much better. 2 more months and I am done!

deanclatworthy 12y ago
I've read about the (supposed) benefits of fasting but never that it cleans up clogged veins. Got a reference for that?
aggronn 12y ago
>2 more months and I am done! This attitude is typically a very bad one to have when dieting. Ingesting fewer calories should be sustainable after you've reached your target weight. Anyways, good luck to you in your efforts. If this is a way for you to start, then there's nothing wrong with it at all.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  You are never really done, but when you stop dropping weight you do get so many more calories.
- funkyy 12y ago
  Why is bad. I didnt say I will stuff myself after 2 months, I will just remove calorie deficit from my diet - I wont stop exercising, I actually want to regain some body mass as muscles - so I need to stop deficit and make surplus of protein etc...

MichaelDickens 12y ago

In case the site isn't loading for anyone else: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.polygon.com/2014/4/22/5625906/weight-loss-mmo-video-game http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.pol...

nathan_f77 12y ago

This is exactly what I'm doing, down to the MFP app and the Withings scale. The results have been amazing so far, and I look forward to writing a similar blog post by the end of the year.

frankcaron 12y ago

Figures that I submit this for karma myself eons ago but it only now, via another HNer, pops to the top. :) - The fat MMO guy

chrissnell 12y ago
This is totally off-topic but I'm originally from San Antonio and noticed the last picture in the article and picked it out immediately as you having a drink at La Gloria. This (and the heat!) is exactly why it's so hard for people back home to lose weight. Kudos to you for figuring it out!
- frankcaron 12y ago
  Good eyes! We were there after a con at Rackspace! It was as deadly as you've foretold.
dshankar 12y ago
Haha sorry about that Frank! Thanks for writing this though, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I guess title and timing made a difference :)
deleted 12y ago
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frankcaron 12y ago

For the record, and for those asking for this to be a real game, FitRPG for iOS is planning to deliver on some of that very notion. It's a super cool app; and I say that with absolutely no affiliation (srs). Google it.

snicker 12y ago
HabitRPG is a web and mobile platform for gamifying habits and life goals that launched via Kickstarter a couple years back that is very successful in helping people do what you've done http://www.habitrpg.com http://www.habitrpg.com
jonmb 12y ago
Nerd Fitness Academy has created their own game as well, with quests and leveling up. It just released a few days ago. Here's the video tour of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLF2RkZnSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLF2RkZnSY

caster_cp 12y ago

This is genius. Really. In my mind you've just "jiu jitsued" the candy bars, by applying the same mechanisms they use to keep you hooked, but against them. By creating habits that are prone to compulsive behavior (the phenomenon at play when you want to check your diet data is the same as when a teen checks his/her Facebook/WhatsApp/Whatever for messages). The surprising thing here is that you could keep this going long enough until it actually became a habit (or so I suppose). This is the trick, and I couldn't figure out what made you keep it so (willpower may be the answer here, but s there any other thing going on?) Anyways, kudos, you data aficionado diet jiu jitsu guy :D

jkaunisv1 12y ago
In my experience (which I've written a bit about at habitformed.com if you're curious), habits like these do become engrained if you keep at them long enough and if they specifically don't require any willpower. The key I've found is to take willpower out of the equation because you'll always be lacking that. One way I judo'd my own eating habits was to force myself to eat two servings of decently healthy tasty things before being allowed a serving of junk. eg. some fruit, some nuts, then cookies. It didn't need willpower to enforce because I could always eat my way to a delicious cookie if I really wanted it.

thret 12y ago

I'm surprised nobody has linked the obligatory xkcd yet: http://xkcd.com/189/ http://xkcd.com/189/ I think about this every time I run.

norswap 12y ago

Ah, I'd actually hoped he had coded a real MMO. Well, congratulations to him in any case.

MichaelTieso 12y ago

I imagine a future where we will be able to track everything we eat automatically without having to enter any data in onto an app. Imagine seeing data about your body right on your arm. I eat a sandwich and it tells me exactly how many calories it was. I'll be the first to signup for something like this if/when this comes out.

smegel 12y ago

> The idea is to track everything you take in and track what you spend through exercise. Wouldn't it just be easier to weigh yourself once a week, and if your weight goes up, eat less calories the following week and/or do more exercise? Unless your memory is that bad, or your eating patterns that random, it should not be hard to cut out things you know are high calorie and you can do without.

beisner 12y ago
The problem with weight loss and other sorts of large, daunting projects is that morale and focus tend to evaporate pretty quickly when you don't hold yourself accountable and don't see immediate results. Whether it's weighing yourself every day or keeping a food journal, these sort of small, incremental data points help you keep focused in the short term. Tracking them over larger time frames keeps you focused in the long term. When you want to learn a new language, you can't just say, "I'll look over some words this week, and if I'm not happy with my progress I'll do more next week," - you have to have a day-to-day plan to go over X number of flash cards, or talk for X number of minutes with a native speaker. Small, manageable, tangible goals are the key to weight loss, and tracking ones weight and intake meticulously allows you to set such goals.
Throwaway823 12y ago
I'm trying to gain 10 or 20 lbs, because I'm on the slim side. The problem, weighing yourself once a week is open to random fluctuations. For example, let's say I'm trying to gain 15 lbs this year. That's 0.28 lbs per week, or 1.25 lbs per month. My weight might go up and down a couple of pounds throughout the day, depending on the amount of water in my system, when I use the washroom, etc. So, I weigh myself today, and let's say I had a little extra water in my system. Now, I weigh myself in a month, and I'm slightly dehydrated that day without realizing it. I might have reached my goal and gained 1.25 lbs that month, but the scale is showing I weigh 1 lbs less than when I started. That's a problem, because I stuck to my goals, my routine, and I get slapped in the face with results that say I'm going in the opposite direction. I might incorrectly make changes to my calorie count, that don't need to be made. This is why tracking is useful. You step on the scale on a regular basis, and you can see the overall trend over time. In the above scenario, I can see although the scale shows 1 lbs less, it's an off day, and looking at the forecast, I'm on target and did average a gain 1.25 lbs that month. Now, I don't even have a scale, but that's why I'd like to get one, so I can step on it throughout the day, and see a graph to better summarize what's happening.

eru 12y ago

Switching from World of Warcraft to Ingress can also help with fitness and weightloss.

restlessmedia 12y ago

It's the guiding principal behind weight watchers. If you get into the habit of at least noticing what you are eating, you'll give yourself the opportunity to accept/deny it. The points system for weight watchers is genius and removes the complexity around nutrition as long as you how many points that thing your eating contains.

coroxout 12y ago
I just started doing Slimming World, which I guess is much the same as WW but with a different points allocation scheme. (Rice/pasta/potatoes are basically "free" as long as they are not cooked in oil; a third of each meal should be fresh fruit/veg, to discourage you from overloading on the free carbs; bread is very bad on the points system; you get one free calcium-containing product and one free fibre-containing product from an approved list every day, which has bizarrely led to me eating more cheese than ever before. I mainly picked SW over WW because of when the sessions were, rather than because I liked their way of doing it; in fact, to be honest I wasn't sure it would work at all, but so far it is.) Anyway, I agree there are definitely "gamification" aspects which are true for these weight loss group sessions too. The point scoring; every week people get applauded for their weight loss and shiny stickers are handed out for the best that week or for reaching various milestones; and just turning up to group every week (which you have to to keep your membership current) means you can't chicken out of weighing yourself on a bad week, and sitting in a group provides your "encouragers" and "challengers" too, although possibly not as effectively as selecting one of each from your everyday friends.

4ndr3vv 12y ago

This title was very confusing for an Englishman.

zedwill 12y ago

The story reminds me of REAMDE, by Neal Stephenson. In fiction, the protagonist Richard also creates his own MMO and uses immersion as a way to loose weight.