Abstract

Recently, growing energy consumption and negative environmental impacts of fossil fuel use are becoming a burning issue. Among energy consumed everyday, standby power draw represents as much as 10% of household electricity consumption in the United States. This is costly on both the individual and national levels. Some efforts to reduce energy consumption can be found around us such as increasing price of fuel or resorting to citizens’ altruistic behaviors, but these public efforts have proved relatively ineffective. In the mean time, successful social networking sites such as Facebook continue to grow at a rapid pace. We intend to reframe this vast and growing audience’s conceptions and motivations for reducing energy use by introducing the intrinsic motivators of fun and competition.

We propose a social game, Friendenstein, using a very popular social networking platform, Facebook, and using an easily measurable metric of energy waste, computer idle time through extensive research on serious gaming and games with a purpose. There are two main parts to our application. First, a dashcode widget runs on the players’ computer and tracks idle time. This is reported once per day as a percentage idle, and directly effects the in-game resources available, namely the battery count. On the server side, our application runs on php, mysql, facebook (fbml) and facebook’s own special version of javascript.

The system will recommend competitors based on its own computation in order to encourage players to do better and drive energy usage down.The project now exists as a now playable demo. Our next step will be to perform more formal evaluation to gather user feedback on how to improve and change the game metrics, to refine the interactions, as well as to follow up with on-going updates to make the system sustainable.

Introduction

Much of energy production in countries where Internet use is highest can be characterized by a dependence on fossil fuels for the large majority of energy production [9, 10]. In many of these countries, strategies for balancing enery supply and demand rely on the introduction of new energy sources — using both conventional and alternative fuels — to meet a growing demand or to offset potential negative environmental impacts of fossil fuel use. Another way to balance supply and demand without resorting to price increases is to reduce usage, and therefore demand.

Standby power draw, the amount of energy consumed when products are ostensibly off or not in use, represents as much as 10% of household electricity consumption in the United States [1]. This is costly on both the individual and national levels: the average US household spends $100 per year to power devices that are either switched off or in standby mode [2]. At the national level, standby energy usage represents more than 100 billion kilowatt hours of annual US electricity consumption and exceeds more than $10 billion in annual energy costs [2]. Based on the US Department of Energy’s estimate of 1.341 pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour [3], this represents a sizable portion of the CO2 released unnecessarily in the atmosphere every year.

Large-scale publicity efforts to encourage energy conservation have proved relatively ineffective; people do not seem willing to reduce their energy consumption for purely altruistic or extrinsically motivated reasons. Coupled with this, recent polls suggest that the American public is growing less concerned about climate change. In October 2009, 35% of Americans considered global warming a serious problem compared to 44% in April 2008 [4]. Similarly, fewer people today than a year ago believe that there is concrete evidence that global temperatures are rising. While these trends are alarming, we propose harnessing another trend: successful social networking sites such as Facebook continue to grow at a rapid pace. Facebook now has roughly 70 million users in the United States, up from just 28 million in 2008 [5]. We intend to reframe this vast and growing audience’s conceptions and motivations for reducing energy use by introducing the intrinsic motivators of fun and competition.

Through extensive research on serious gaming and games with a purpose, among other aspects of social influence, we designed a social game, Friendenstein, using a very popular social networking platform using an easily measurable metric of energy waste, computer idle time. Friendenstein helps users know better about their behavior concerning energy consumption with their computers. This is done by tracking the idle time, the time when the computer is left alone while it is not being actively used, and by displaying how well users are saving energy with their computers as the game character’s states. We envision that this motivation system can be expended to other electronic devices other than computers in the future.

Related Work

Research has shown that it is possible motivate social goods and environmental causes through social and internet gaming [11]. The ESP Game and other “Games with a Purpose”, while not focused on conservation, demonstrate that game mechanics may be used to motivate and encourage player behaviors that result in real world goods [11]. The Facebook application (Lil) Green Patch, in which users can raise money to save actual rain forests by tending their virtual garden, has generated $210,000 for the Nature Conservancy, resulting in many acres of saved rainforest, simply through advertising [6]. While these games demonstrate that players can affect real world change through game play, they may not necessarily change the behavior of the individual or promote energy conservation at home. Our project innovates on these by encouraging demonstrable out of game behavior for in-game success.

Details (System)

System Implementation

There are two main parts to our application.  First, a dashcode widget runs on the players computer and tracks idle time.  This is reported once per day as a percentage idle, and directly effects the in-game resources available, namely the battery count.  These batteries act as food for the user’s pet Frankie.

On the server side, our application runs on php, mysql, facebook (fbml) and facebook’s own special version of javascript. We had hoped to use a javascript framework, but facebook doesn’t allow such niceties.  The project now exists as a now playable demo (though is not complete).  Our next step will be to evaluate it and get user feedback on how to improve and change the game metrics, as well as build out the social computation pieces and refine the interactions.

Game Mechanics Design

Characters

Characters are one of the main parts of the game that users are going to interact with. Based on different users’ activities and their behaviors using their laptop (and other electronic devices in the future), the states of these characters will also change.

All the characters are created based on the well organized grid system, so that each part (e.g. Face, Head, Shirt, Pants, Hat, etc..) can be placed on the exactly same position. Also, the joint areas where two elements meet (e.g. head and shirt, shirt and pants etc.) are always same. This makes every part interchangeable. It will also easy for us to create and add more items based on this grid system.

Two Rooms based on Frankies’ States

Friendenstein provides two different rooms based on the character’s states. The blue room is “Charing Room”. If the character is “healthy and happy” or “sad but not very ill”, the character will hang out in this room and users have to come to this room to take care of them and feed them. Users also can play around with other additional features, such as buying items, changing accessaries on the character, etc. However, if the character is in a dangerous states in health and eventually dies, the character will be moved to the red room, “Resuscitate Room”.

Interface

Coins(Top Left): show how much money a user has made based on the activities in game. A user can buy more items using these coins.

Level(Top Right): shows how much time a user has to survive to move to the next level. As a user moves on the next level, more items will be unlocked at the market.

Friends List(Bottom Left): shows a user’s top 5 friends based on their experience and energy saving behavior.

Bulb(Bottom Right): an indicator of the character’s health, connected to the tail of the character.

Battery(Bottom Right): shows the number of batteries that a user has. The batteries are delivered from the battery factory (a widget).

Feed Button(Bottom Right): increase the character’s health level consuming one battery at a time when the button is pushed.

Market & Changing Parts

A user can buy more items or change the parts of the character with the items that the user already purchased. Some items will be revealed only after the user reaches a certain level.

Recommendation System

Our system’s recommendation system will be somewhat more in the background than many of the other systems, but for that no less important.  While still not fully implemented, the system will recommend competitors.  The social theorist Festinger hypothesized that much of the social comparisons we make are made against people who we consider part of our group, or who are similar to us.  Friends represent the people who we likely consider in our group.  However, there are many instances where people who are similar to us on relevant cues are not necessarily friends.  Here, the relevant comparison metric will be energy use.  As a first shot, our application takes players with similar energy usage data and places them in contest with one another by locating them on the same leaderboard.  This leaderboard will conist of players who are similar, but slightly better than the player, though remain relatively constant over the course of several weeks.  We think that this will encourage the player to do better, and drive energy usage down.

Sustainability

If our site reaches, and is found engaging by, enough users (a sizable if), there are a number of revenue sources we can employ to make the site sustainable. We envision using banner advertising and giving our users the opportunity to do “offers” that result in in-game resources for the users and ad revenue for us.  Finally, we envision offering our users the ability to purchase physical manifestations of their Franky — t-shirts, stuffed animals, and other such kitch.

Corporations Advertisements

$5,000 per item

Customized T-shirt, $200

Evaluation (Experiments)

During the first stage of the development of Friendenstein, we mainly focused on researching on existing work and building the basic structure of the game system. Even though extensive formal evaluation of the usability of the game wasn’t a part of the scope on this stage, we gathered valuable feedback by creating early lo-fi prototypes from our friends and classmates. A series of sketches of the game interface was helpful not only to get opinions through informal evaluations, but also for us to find the best way to deliver our game concept. While hi-fi prototypes were developed and the game was implemented on Facebook, a lot of details were changed so that users can easily understand how to play the game and how to manipulate each component.

Discussion (Future Work)

Evaluation

We’ve done several informal tests on our system and we adopted a lot of feedback that we’ve got from our classmates. But to provide better user experience with our system, to maximize the “fun” factors of our game, and to prevent any critical usability problems of the interface, we plan to run a semi-formal game play test/user test.

Implementation

We still have some parts of the game which are not implemented yet. These parts need to be integrated in our system for the game to function fully and properly. The areas that require the immediate work are like the following:

• Better recommendation system based on the system computation
• Market purchase system and Changing parts interface

Design

The interaction with our User Interface components, such as buttons and lists, might feel a little awkward at this point. We can make these interactions more sophisticated by defining mouse hover, click, and out states and by adding necessary graphics.

On-going Update

Our database system will be updated as the system grows. We will need more characters and items to keep our users interested in our games, and make our system more visually pleasing. This might include adding seasonal or promotional items.

Conclusion – Lessons Learned

By providing a fun and competitive gaming platform, we intended to motivate Facebook users to reduce their energy consumption by reducing the amount of time their computers are on but idle. We created a widget for Mac that tracks users’ idle time and we designed a Facebook social game, Friendesntein, that is connected to the widget. We envision these systems will change users’ behaviors through social competition. Also, this motivation system can be expended to other electronic devices other than computers in the future.

Bibliography

[1] Standby Power (Lawrence Berkley Laboratory) – http://standby.lbl.gov/

[2] Standby Power and Energy Vampires (Energy Star) – http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=about.vampires

[3] Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency/Carbon Dioxide Emissions from the Generation of Electric Power in the United States – http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/co2_report/co2report.html

[4] Fewer Americans See Solid Evidence of Global Warming (Pew Research Center for the People & the Press) – http://people-press.org/report/556/global-warming

[5] A Look At Facebook’s Reach Worldwide (TechCrunch) – http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/27/a-look-at-facebooks-reach-worldwide/ on Ahn, L. and Dabbish, L. 2004. Labeling images with a computer game. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vienna, Austria, April 24 – 29, 2004)

[6] Nature Conservancy’s Facebook Causes Page – http://apps.facebook.com/causes/2979 (last retrieved – Jan. 15, 2010)

[7 ]Asch 1956

[8] Deutch Gerard

[9] The World of the Interent (CNN Money) – http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/storysupplement/worldinternet/index.htm

[10] Fossil fuel (most recent) by country (NationMaster) – http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ele_pro_by_sou_fos_fue-electricityproduction-source-fossil-fuel

Here’s the part where we have to think outside the box that is the ivory tower. How can this possibly make money?

1. Describe how you think your site can sustain itself as a business.
   If our site reaches, and is found engaging by, enough users (a sizable if), there are a number of revenue sources we can employ to make the site sustainable. We envision using banner advertising and giving our users the opportunity to do “offers” that result in in-game resources for the users and ad revenue for us.  Finally, we envision offering our users the ability to purchase physical manifestations of their Franky — t-shirts, stuffed animals, and other such kitch.
   
2. How would you need to change your interface/design to accommodate your business model (place for ads? credit card handling system, freemium sign-up pages)?
   Our interface as shown in our lo-fi prototype currently has space for ads. If we decide to include offers, we would need to add a page to list them, in a manner similar to — but less copyright infringing than — the image below.
   
3. How are you going to sustain use?
   To keep people coming back and purchasing more in-game or real items items (either with in-game money or real money), we will need to regularly create and add more items.  We should also implement game elements that encourage our users to develop an emotional bond with their avatars.  These users should be more willing to support their Frankie (us) financially.

It’s that time again!  Team Enervate has been busy designing the components that will make our frankenstein game work.

Just to review, the game works like this:  Players install a widget that tracks how much wasted energy (computer idle time) they generate.  The working metaphor is that the widget is a kind of factory that makes batteries, but can only do so when the computer is not idle (meaning either on and in use, or off).  These batteries/information is then shipped back to the server on a daily basis, at which point you can feed them to your pet frankenstein.  Why does frankenstein eat batteries?  No one is really sure.   At any rate, if you don’t keep feeding him on a regular basis, he’ll die.  Then you have to resuscitate him.  If you keep him fed and alive for increasing amounts of time, you’ll level up, earn coins which you can spend on stuff.  Just like real life.

Let’s take a look under the hood.

First, let’s start with a high level look at the architecture.  There are essentially 5 major pieces of infrastructure:  The widget to gather usage data from the computers, the php server that will have the php code to handle the widget data and game functionality, the interface that will be our users gateway to said functionality, facebook’s developer api  to provide access to the social network of our users, and of course a database to store all that juicy game data.

The php server will do the bulk of the work here.  This function description here is for the handling the widget update, when it reports back with the idle percentage and a time stamp.  From this, we’ll calculate how many batteries you generated.

Let’s take a look at the logic to drive the interface. Here we didn’t dive as deeply into the inputs and outputs of the functions, as often they are little more than read and write operations to the database.  The functionality is broken out by game element (which also corresponds to page); the main page (labeled on_game_load) takes care of most of the functions that run the scores, energy levels, battery supply, etc.  The Resuscitate page takes care of bring the users frankenstein back to life should he starve to death, and the dressing room takes care of outfitting the monster with the finest garb the reanimated could hope for.

Now, onto the interplay with facebook.  We’ll use fbml here to grab user data and present it in friends list, as well as relevant competitors, and sending gifts and invitations and such.  We will store the users Facebook id and use that to get their friends.

Deeper still?  Okay, here’s our first shot at the database schema.  We may have to revise the tables slightly as we build, but this shows the data we think will be necessary to support the first round functionality.  We have tables for User, Avatar, and Franky, Daily energy, Weekly energy, Franky Items and Store Items.  These will allow us to keep track of most of the necessary data to start out.

franky_schema[pdf]

1. Research

Experience has shown us that it is nearly impossible to ascertain “fun” from user research, which limits the usefulness of user research. We did do some competitive analysis and learned a lot about some effective game mechanics.

2. Game Design

2-1. Game Concept

The main goal of our Facebook game application is 1) to let users be aware of energy consumption, 2) to encourage people to save the energy,  and  3) to eventually change the behavior in their everyday life. The team is exploring various game concepts that convey this somewhat serious concept to users in interesting and playful ways.

Possible genres of the game that we’re considering are like the following:

• Tower Defense Games
• Simulation: Managing your own farm/cafe/town/aquarium etc..
• Puzzles

Interactive Website that shows the concept of GE Smart Grid

2-2. Motivation Factors

A lot of games are using a collection of special objects as a means of encouraging users to keep playing the game. For example, a player can get a badge that goes into his collection book or an item that decorates his game environment as a reward whenever he completes a task in the game.

In social games, these items have a bigger impact than solo-play games since it enables the comparisons with players’ friends. Realizing your friends have a more interesting and powerful game environment with more items that enable more enjoyable gameplay motivates you to play more to compete with them.

Our game can provide two types of items as motivation factors based on users’ activities:

1) Energy Saving Reward: The more energy a user saves, the more of in-game items or resources they earn. These items will be the essential and basic part of the game.

2) Task Achievement Reward: Users can get another type of items as they make progress in the game.

making comparisons with friends can be a big motivation factor

A task of collecting items can encourage people to come back to the game more often

2-3. Social Interaction

One of the advantages of using Facebook as a game platform is that the game can use a list of existing friends to interact with. Possible features of social interaction that we are currently considering are like the following:

• bragging and showing off
• help and cooperation
• attack
• sharing tips
• exchanging items

A list of friends who are playing the same game with you

You can visit your friends and see their game play as well as their achievement

You can also help your friend, nom.. nom.. nom..

2-4. Visual Concept

We’re exploring various visual concepts. It’s our job. Stop bothering us. BTW, We’re Zombie fans. “Ghosts vs. Zombies” is one of the best candidates for our concept. We might consider somewhat gloomy and somewhat cheerful visual concepts.

3. Technical

Looking into widget design and facebook integration.  We think we have leads on how to do both.

4. Widget

Team Enervate is:

We will build:

Simple Scenario:

Market:

The top facebook games have over 73 million monthly active users.  While we do not expect to garner this much success (at least a first ), even significantly less popular games on Facebook can still get considerable usage.

Critical Features for version 1:

Social Computation Features

Version 2 Features

Technical Infrastructure

Competition

Draft High-Level timeline – Phase (time frame)

Revise design (March 29–April

Our presentation is included below:

…what is this awesome group going to do? We want to make a Facebook game that will help save the planet. Yes, really. Our proposed social networking game will provide players with in-game resources that reflect conservation-oriented activities in the real world.  An initial prototype for this will use a Dashboard widget to measure the amount of time a computer is on but idle, and therefore wasting energy.  Next, we will send this data to the server based game, giving the players more points for reducing this amount of time where the computer is sitting powered up and unused.