You sit down to play one game, and suddenly it has been six hours. It is fun in the moment, but the lack of movement adds up, and exercise still feels like a chore.
The Problem
Gamers often spend hours in long sessions without a break, and prolonged inactivity can lead to weight gain, low energy, back pain, and eye strain, with wider long term health risks. Fitness is easy to deprioritise because it feels intimidating, unclear, and less rewarding than games, so consistency breaks.
The Solution
Quest Up is a gamified fitness app for gamers. It turns movement into quests, progression, and rewards, so fitness feels familiar, less intimidating, and easier to stick with.
THE PROBLEM
Breaking Down the Problem
Research with gamers across Discord, conventions, and gaming cafés showed three consistent themes: long sedentary sessions, low motivation, and a desire for visible progression that feels more like a game.
TARGET USER
Who I designed for
Primary Users: Gamers who want to be more active, but struggle to stay consistent.
Secondary Users: People who find fitness intimidating and need a guided, rewarding structure.
Meet Adam, a 21 year old computer science student who loves gaming, but is starting to feel the health impact of long sessions. He wants healthier habits, but struggles to stay consistent without giving up what he enjoys.
The focus became lowering the barrier to fitness by making movement feel familiar, rewarding, and easy to start within a gaming routine.
How Might We
motivate gamers to engage in physical activities to improve their long-term health?
SOLUTION
Turning fitness into a repeatable quest loop
Quest Up reframes movement as missions you can complete, track, and level up, so exercise feels like progress instead of punishment.
This is the repeatable behaviour Quest Up is designed to build: choose a quest, move, get instant feedback and rewards, then choose again. Repeating the same loop in a consistent context helps turn effort into a habit over time.
The retention layer reinforces the loop through progress visibility (stats and streaks), social motivation (leaderboards), and self expression (shop and customisation). It keeps users coming back without adding complexity to the core action.
USER TESTING
Reward chasing can create an over exercising risk
I ran guerrilla usability tests, followed by a short post test interview to understand decisions and motivation. Many issues surfaced, but one stood out: when XP, currency, and rankings drive progression, some users may push beyond safe limits to optimise rewards.
This is a safety and trust risk. If the product rewards volume without pacing, it can encourage unhealthy behaviour, especially for highly motivated users chasing ranks.
Energy Balance keeps Quest Up motivating while adding a clear pacing rule. Users can still chase progress, but the system protects them from overdoing it, which supports safer play and longer term consistency.
OUTCOME
A Winning Idea
Quest Up won the City Ventures Grand Spark start up competition, earning £3,000 and a place in a 10 week accelerator program to develop it further as a real start up.
What I learned
Motivation systems need guardrails: rewards can drive unhealthy behaviour if pacing is not designed in.
The core loop must stay simple: retention works best as a layer that reinforces the loop, not a replacement for it.
Testing is not just usability: behavioural edge cases and safety risks should shape the product direction early.