The common understanding of games in the context of entertainment has been recently integrated with a new broad game concept aimed to improve people and their lives. Serious games and gamification in general significantly increase their potential if they are considered in a social context, running on well-known commercial social network platforms.

In this work, a social health Facebook game that motivates better lifestyle choices for people living with diabetes is adopted to evaluate the social effectiveness of gameplay in network games. After having defined the reference metrics, the authors show important relationships between social behaviors and successful lifestyle changes through a correlation analysis to investigate the connection between having friends and being successful in the game.

The tracked metrics clearly show how people with significant engagement in social networks (assumed to be proportional to the number of friends) perform better than users with more limited social activities on the platform.

This work is definitely interesting for the methodology, the metrics, and the application context. In my humble opinion, there are aspects of the study that could be omitted (such as the gender information) because they don’t seem to provide any useful information; other aspects, on the contrary, deserve more in-depth investigation (such as considering more than one game to support achieved results).