“Raid the fridge!”

Monster Appetite is a web-based health education game, modeled on a previously developed card game by the same name. In each round, a player is presented with a number of food items and tries to select the superlative card, measured by the calories per serving. The player must select the highest caloric food card before another player does, resulting in a race to identify the best (i.e., highest in calories) card first. The subversive approach (i.e., making one player’s monster avatar as fat as possible), fast decision-making and competitive game play keep players engaged and encourage them to rethink their daily food choices. A flexible backend implementation allows the game mechanics to be easily modified and rolled out to subsets of the user base to run control-treatment gameplay testing. Monster Appetite is designed to collect anonymized user data to build a dataset of health food awareness in relation to demographics.