We should all gamify our lives.
As gamers, a lot of us understand this in more abstract terms: Concrete progress feels good. It feels good to get the sound effect and flashing lights of a level up. We love watching numbers fill bars, and we love achievements for even the most useless things. Like magpies, we’ll go far out of our way for a bit of shiny scrap metal.
I was unfortunately raised by a psychologist, which means that I know enough psych to understand it but not enough to explain it thoroughly, but the basic gist of what keeps us playing games that are often objectively pointless and mind-numbingly repetitive is operant conditioning. Or, to put it simply, positive and negative reinforcement. Or, even more simply, the carrot and the stick.
Operant conditioning can explain nearly everything in gaming. World of Warcraft is a particularly great example because it show up in everything. If you stop playing for a while, you’ll miss out on new raids and equipment. If you play every day, you can level up at a satisfying rate or complete dailies that get you important rewards. In turn, we become so accustomed to the rapid level-up pace at lower levels, with its easy satisfactions, that we start to work harder for the same fix and we don’t mind (mostly). But beyond the stuff in the grand scope, it’s also in the tiny details: Recommended builds and skill rotations, for instance. Sure, it would objectively be more fun to vary attacks and try new things every round of gameplay, but you aren’t rewarded for that. In fact, you’re punished, whether that be in the form of a raid wipe or just getting chewed out by other players.
(Speaking of which, ever noticed that leveling up in WoW, Diablo, Overwatch, or nearly any other Blizzard game involves gold/yellow, flashes of light, and triumphant sounds? Alongside the more concrete rewards, of course. They’re a master of the craft of addiction.)
The blatant manipulation of your brain mush isn’t something to be afraid of, though. Actually, it can be harnessed.
Take a look at Habitica (formerly Habit RPG). Marketed as “Your Life: The Roleplaying Game,” it’s very simple, really only a glorified to-do list app. You’ve got dailies, one-time goals, and habits to check off, over and over.
What makes it more successful, though, is how it translates checking off items into tangible, RPG-grade rewards, like gold and EXP, pets and mounts, and so forth. It turns difficult habits into dramatically-framed quests and gives players “abilities” to defeat bosses. And if you fail a task, you lose health.
It’s a really simple concept by design, but the issue is that you can put a game down. I tried Habit RPG, and I inevitably always forgot about it because something in my life distracted me from it. The app, at least when I used it, somehow isn’t aggressive enough. Far be it for me to complain about an app being less bothersome, but when you have to manually open it every day to check off an item on a list that you feel increasingly divorced from, with rewards that feel abstract and unhelpful, less gets done.
The “multiplayer” aspect might help, where others also depend on you and motivate you to do your chores, but the UI regarding that is a little clumsy. The external community mostly concerns itself with “LFG” requests and how-to questions. It lacks depth.
It also doesn’t help overmuch that the graphics, while I’m sure are meant to be childishly, charmingly pixelated, are completely bland.
On the other hand, I recently tried an app called Fabulous, which is similar but not the same. One thing it gets right is its insistence: it will poke and prod at you to do the tasks you’ve assigned for yourself. Alerts take over your screen and shifting to other apps (at least on the Android version I use) leaves a small widget in the corner to constantly remind you of what you’re supposed to be doing.
It’s fun and interactive, but lacks something in customizability options, and that hampers progress a little bit. Unlike Habitica, you have one consolidated daily checklist. There isn’t a way to change it for different days: no way to, for example, shift your morning ritual at 8 am on weekdays to 10 am on weekends.
That’s understandable. The app is meant to help build rituals by reinforcing daily habits, over and over again, at the same time each day. Still, I feel that it’s for a different level person than Habitica. Habitica is for someone who needs motivation to keep all the different strands of your life together; Fabulous is for someone who already has their ducks in a row and wants to focus on further self-improvement. The only motivation in Fabulous is an ongoing streak.
Of course, that’s great, but won’t work for a lot of people. Self-improvement takes work, and everyone is at a different stage in the process. Where Habitica might ask you to take out the trash, Fabulous asks you to meditate for thirty minutes, and that’s time and energy a lot of us just don’t have.
The other issue with Fabulous is how quickly tasks build up. The first week all you’re doing is writing a to-do list, but a couple weeks later you’re eating a full breakfast, stretching, taking your medicine, drinking water… It doesn’t sound like much, and it’s perfectly attainable for some people, but for someone living the arguably-unhealthy student life like I am, a breakfast is fifteen minutes, stretching is ten, medicine and water is five, getting dressed and ready for the day is at least twenty, the to-do list is ten… That’s at minimum an hour in the morning that I don’t have, let alone meditating for half an hour.
It can keep taking over your life as well. There’s an afternoon ritual option and an evening one, if you’re so inclined. Personally, my issue with these is that my afternoon and evening aren’t decided by a set time (which cues the beginning of the ritual in the app, taking over your phone), but by events. If I get home from work and that’s all I have to do, my afternoon might start as early as 4 pm. If I have to work late into the night, I might not get an afternoon, jumping straight to evening and working through 10 pm. There’s no flexibility here.
All this said, if you need just a tiny extra boost of self-affirmation in the morning, or some daily reminders, or you just really need to get in the habit of, specifically, a morning ritual, Fabulous might be for you.
All this has me thinking, though: How else can we do this? If Habitica is clumsy and unpleasant to look at, and Fabulous is inflexible and limited in scope, what other options are there?
My ideal life-gamification tool is something I’ve always got on me, like a phone, so certainly an app, but it also needs to be flexible, allowing me to input my own tasks and goals; vocal, giving aggressive but not irritating reminders; interesting enough to captivate and keep my attention for a long period of time; feel tangible, with real and attainable rewards; and be pleasant to look at, because, as we all know, any excuse can demotivate us.
Since it’s relevant at the moment, Pokemon Go is also a gamification app. Yeah, it seems like its primary purpose is to catch and train pokemon, and that’s great, but let’s be real: it’s about rewarding you for going outside, walking and exercising, and exploring the local area. If there was any doubt about that, it went away when they decided to make “steps taken” for egg hatching only possible at less than 3 km/hr, meaning you can’t just leave the app open while you go get your groceries.
(PoGo has big flaws as well. Let me add another stipulation to a good gamification app: It has to function.)
There are more here, for more specific purposes, if you’re interested. You can also read a bit more about the mechanics of gamification here. But in the meantime, I’m going to be sitting here struggling to figure out what the perfect gamification technique for every chore in your life is and how it could possibly be implemented.
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