I like to walk for exercise, and since near the launch of Pokemon Go I've used it as part of my walking routine. However I was getting pretty complacent about walking and watching my diet recently so I wasn't really achieving my fitness goals. A few weeks ago I heard about an app called StepBet, I've started using it in addition to what I was already doing and I've had really positive results so far.

What's Pokémon Go?

I like walking as a form of exercise, but I have trouble motivating myself to walk just for the sake of walking. I need to feel like I'm walking to somewhere. I find that Pokemon Go helps me with that. If you're not aware of how it works, Pokemon Go is an “augmented reality” game, it uses the GPS hardware in your phone to incorporate your real world location into the gameplay. The gameplay involves pokemon (little cartoony monsters) popping into existence in locations in the world, and if you're nearby you can use the game to capture them. There are lots of different types of pokemon, and it's cool to have many different ones in your collection, so you want to go out and “catch them all”. There are also locations in the real world that the game considers “pokestops”, which are places where you can stock up on the virtual supplies you need to capture pokemon, and “gyms”, where you can have your pokemon fight against other people's. These pokestops and gyms are usually set up around interesting landmarks, like government buildings, statues, park entrances, etc. Because you get in-game benefits for going to these places it helps me with motivation: for whatever reason my brain seems to think “I want to go spin the pokestop at the park” is a more valid and worthwhile goal than “I want to go to the park”.

What's StepBet?

StepBet is a bit different, it's an app that uses the “step counting” functionality that's built into your phone (or a pedometer) to see if you've hit daily/weekly goals for how many steps you've taken, and it uses some clever psychology to try to convince you to put in the effort to hit those goals. The basic idea is that you put forward some money in a “bet” that you can hit your goals for a given time period: if you don't you forfeit your money into the pot, but if you do hit your goals you share the pot with everybody else who signed up who was able to hit theirs. Usually you put in $40 to cover a six week period (although the first week is the sign up / practice week, so I've only been using it for a little over five weeks) and many, but not all, people stick to their goals, so you make a little more back than you put in. This arrangement is leveraging the psychological phenomenon of “loss aversion” to get you to meet your goals. Normally, given the vagaries of diet, exercise, and metabolism and the long-term nature of fitness plans, it can be easy to convince yourself to procrastinate or have cheat days, but once you've locked yourself into the StepBet you have a really clear sense of what it would cost you to slack off today: $40.

What was my experience like?

To be honest, when I first installed the StepBet app I didn't have the purest intentions: I figured that I already walked much more than the average person on my normal pokewalks so I'd be able to hustle the system to make money with no extra effort. But the system was a bit smarter than that: it starts by querying your phone's historical motion logs to figure out your normal activity level and then sets goals for you that will push you a little bit. Each week you have to hit four “active” days and two “stretch” days (which gives you one day off a week, if you need it). When I saw that my “active” goal was longer than the normal route I had been taking with my pokewalks I thought about dropping out, but then my pride kicked in: I didn't want to say that I couldn't do it.

It also made me think about what I was doing on my normal routine and realize I had worked some bad habits into it. Part of my normal route involved going past, and often into, a grocery store. I had been using the idea of being able to hit the store as a way of justifying going out for a walk, but there's a huge flaw in this plan: that's where they keep the junk food. Most of the good I was doing by walking I was undoing by picking up something from the bakery or ice cream sections. Since I realized I was getting serious about taking longer walks I realized I should get serious about controlling my diet again, too. Other than cutting out the junk food I'm not doing anything really fancy, just being smarter about portion control and trying to avoid falling for the trap of confusing boredom for hunger. The combination of increasing my activity level and getting my diet under control has really started to pay off: I've lost weight, have noticeably less flab, and I'm feeling more energetic.

I'm not sure if StepBet alone would do it for me. Just seeing a number of steps that I need to hit feels very arbitrary to me so it's hard to get emotionally invested. But when I instead think of my goals in terms of routes I can walk that are long enough to hit the number of steps then it clicks for me, so thinking in terms of which pokestops and gyms I want to visit on my routes does the trick for me. I have two medium length routes that satisfy my active goal (one of them includes a trip to the same grocery store, but I only use it when I have a list of things I actually need) and two longer routes that go to some more interesting places that satisfy my stretch goal.

Pokemon Go's gameplay is simple and sometimes frustrating, but that's not necessarily bad

I play a lot of RPG and strategy games so I'm used to playing pretty complex games. By contrast Pokemon Go is designed to be accessible by casual gamers, so it's much more straightforward to play. It has some things in common with more passive casual games in that it primarily just rewards you for consistently checking in on it, but the difference is that instead of getting you to check on a web page it's getting you to go to places in the real world. Having the “habit forming” elements of a casual game is actually good when the habits you're forming are virtuous, like getting exercise. The game can also be aggravating at times, since you sometimes have to wait for animations to finish and you face a lot of random factors that can result in negative game events. For example, even if you throw your pokeball at a pokemon with perfect technique there's still a random chance it will escape from you rather than get captured. But I find that the game works like a magnet for my frustrations. If I don't have distractions when I'm out walking it can become easy to focus on minor aches and pains, or how tired I'm getting, or how there never seem to be any convenient restrooms when I need them, but because the game is a more obvious source of things to think about I don't tend to build up any negativity about the exercise or the inconveniences associated with it – I'd rather be annoyed at the pokemon that got away than thinking how much I'm sweating.

You won't get rich with StepBet, but it is nice to come out ahead on the deal

The primary benefit of StepBet is that it helps give you the psychological nudge to get the steps in, and it does that by the prospect of avoiding the loss of your initial bet. But when the six weeks finishes they do distribute the pot to the participants who made it all the way to the end without ever missing a goal (minus a 12.5% cut that they take, although there's a minimum payout of whatever you put in so you never lose money if you make it to the end). It is possible for people to drop out for legitimate reasons, such as an illness, but that only happened with a few people in the one I was involved in. It was interesting to watch the number of players who were hitting goals slowly go down over the course of weeks. Ultimately the ideal is for people to be able to hit their goals, and many do, so it's unlikely that you can make a ton of money doing this, but it's nice that I got back more than I put in. I think it's reasonable that StepBet takes some cut of the winnings, but the cut they do take seems pretty high to me. There's a “membership” option where you can pay a flat fee to get in on no-house-cut games and up to three simultaneous bets, but I haven't looked into that in any depth.

What technology giveth...

One significant wrinkle to relying on technology to help you with motivation is that it can be exasperating when it fails on you. While the Pokemon Go servers are usually reliable, they occasionally go down, which means you can't really do anything in the game. One day the servers became unresponsive right as I was preparing to go out for my walk and it really threw me off kilter. Also, one day I thought that my steps weren't registering with StepBet and I got pretty stressed out for a bit (there's money on the line!), but it turned out the steps were registering and it was just the display in the app that had somehow gotten out of sync – everything was fine once I refreshed it.

Final thoughts

It's getting toward the rainy part of the year here in Oregon so for a time I was wondering if I'd be able to keep up the consistent walking for another round in StepBet. Then I realized I was looking at it backwards: that's exactly why I should sign up for another round, because I'll need the motivation to keep going when the weather gets worse (it can be tough to play Pokemon Go in the rain, though: touchscreens and raindrops aren't the greatest combo). This has only been the first round and it can be questionable to extrapolate a trend from a single data point, but I certainly feel like I've turned a corner from where I've been over the past few years. I'm feeling more positive about my fitness situation now than I have in a long time.

While I can't promise that anyone else would get the same positive effects from using this combination of apps that I have, if you're in a situation where you want to get your steps in but might be struggling with motivation then I'd suggest considering it. Pokemon Go is free to play. For StepBet you need to put in some money up-front for the bet, but it's possible to get it back by hitting your goals.