Green Gamers

Obesity rates among adults have steadily grown in recent decades all the way up to 42.4% in 2018. This is a 12% increase from the turn of the century (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021). A major reason for this rise is increased consumption of processed, high-calorie foods. People eat these foods at a young age and develop bad eating habits that can last for the rest of their lives. It is essential to intervene early and help adolescents form balanced, healthy eating habits before bad habits are already formed. Our solution to this problem is Green Gamers. Green Gamers combines adolescent’s passion for gaming with healthy eating via in-game rewards for healthy eating. People will be able to purchase healthy food items, such as a bag of carrots, and on the packaging there will be a QR code. They will then be able to scan the code on our website, and earn points which will unlock in-game items and other rewards. Video game rewards act as effective motivators for you people to eat more healthy foods. After the solution was formulated, a preliminary survey was conducted to confirm that video game related rewards would inspire children to eat more healthy foods. Based on those results, we are currently in the process of running a secondary market research campaign to learn if gift card rewards are a stronger motivator. Our end goal for Green Gamers would be to partner with large gaming studios and food producers. This would allow us access to many gaming franchises, so that rewards are available from a wide variety of games: making the platform appealing to a diverse audience of gamers. Similarly, a relationship with large food producers would give us the ability to place QR codes on a greater assortment of healthy food items. Although no relationships with large companies have been forged yet, we plan to utilize funding to test our concept on small focus groups in schools.