Unanswered Questions

I visited "SparkPeople Game Room" and was excited about fun people have with games.
Most games were very simple and easy to play. For example, Crotty posted game "Change a Letter" on 3/19/09 11:56PM and started with "robe," and the next person replied with "role", and then it became "pole", and after 2214 words, it became "Hulk." There are also silly games such as "Last person to post wins!" which has all together 17903 posts and it is still going on.

I also wanted to gain more SparkPoints so I took a quick poll. The question was "What kind of junk food do you usually crave?" and I selected all of the above (Salty, sweet, crunchy, creamy, and cold). After I submitted, the result showed that "sweet" came first (41%), next to "all of the above" (25%). I also received 3 extra SparkPoints.

I recognized that there are more women than men on the site. Maybe the design of the site is targeted toward women, with pretty graphics, images, and lots and lots of content. There are also lots of features on the site, and lots of effort and time to put to keep up with everything on the site. Also, I think women are more conscious of their weight/health than men, and thus would like to learn more and share stories with others.

In addition, I learned that the design of the site shapes the behavior of users. On most pages, users find activity stats everywhere. Activity stats are dynamic numbers that show various information such as calories burned, pounds lost, cups of water drunk, recent exercises, SparkPoints earned etc. This information encourages and further motivates users to work harder to achieve their goals by showing others' statistics and welcoming users to contribute to the stats. User's goal achievement status that appears on every post also reminds the user and others of the goals they are trying to accomplish. Also, SparkPoints encourages users to earn points by doing things that bring them closer to their goals.

In the end, I have few questions that are still not answered:
-Do they support each other outside the virtual community? (the extent to which they encourage each other)
-Are most people honest about their weight and progress?
-What do people do on SparkPeople most of the time?