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Quantifying Human Engagement into Playful Activities.

ABSTRACT: Engaging in playful activities, such as playing a musical instrument, learning a language, or performing sports, is a fundamental aspect of human life. We present a quantitative empirical analysis of the engagement dynamics into playful activities. We do so by analyzing the behavior of millions of players of casual video games and discover a scaling law governing the engagement dynamics. This power-law behavior is indicative of a multiplicative (i.e., "happy- get-happier") mechanism of engagement characterized by a set of critical exponents. We also find, depending on the critical exponents, that there is a phase transition between the standard case where all individuals eventually quit the activity and another phase where a finite fraction of individuals never abandon the activity. The behavior that we have uncovered in this work might not be restricted only to human interaction with videogames. Instead, we believe it reflects a more general and profound behavior of how humans become engaged in challenging activities with intrinsic rewards.

SUBMITTER: Reguera D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7058085 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Quantifying Human Engagement into Playful Activities.

Reguera David D Colomer-de-Simón Pol P Encinas Iván I Sort Manel M Wedekind Jan J Boguñá Marián M

Scientific reports 20200305 1

Engaging in playful activities, such as playing a musical instrument, learning a language, or performing sports, is a fundamental aspect of human life. We present a quantitative empirical analysis of the engagement dynamics into playful activities. We do so by analyzing the behavior of millions of players of casual video games and discover a scaling law governing the engagement dynamics. This power-law behavior is indicative of a multiplicative (i.e., "happy- get-happier") mechanism of engagemen ...[more]

PMID: 32139729

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Project description:IntroductionSocial determinants of health impact health, and migrants are exposed to an inequitable distribution of resources that may impact their health negatively, leading to health inequality and social injustice. Migrant women are difficult to engage in health-promotional activities because of language barriers, socioeconomic circumstances, and other social determinants. Based on the framework of Paulo Freire, a community health promotion program was established in a community-academic partnership with a community-based participatory research approach.AimThe aim of this study was to describe how a collaborative women's health initiative contributed to migrant women's engagement in health promotion activities.Materials and methodsThis study was part of a larger program, carried out in a disadvantaged city area in Sweden. It had a qualitative design with a participatory approach, following up on actions taken to promote health. Health-promotional activities were developed in collaboration with a women's health group, facilitated by a lay health promoter. The study population was formed by 17 mainly Middle Eastern migrant women. Data was collected using the story-dialog method and the material was analyzed using thematic analysis.ResultThree important contributors to engagement in health promotion were identified at an early stage of the analysis process, namely, the group forming a social network, the local facilitator from the community, and the use of social places close to home. Later in the analysis process, a connection was made between these contributors and the rationale behind their importance, that is, how they motivated and supported the women and how the dialog was conducted. This therefore became the designated themes and were connected to all contributors, forming three main themes and nine sub-themes.ConclusionThe key implication was that the women made use of their health knowledge and put it into practice. Thus, a progression from functional health literacy to a level of critical health literacy may be said to have occurred.

Dataset Information

Quantifying Human Engagement into Playful Activities.

Publications

Quantifying Human Engagement into Playful Activities.

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