Official release of Life Challenges #4: The Gamification Challenge

 

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Life Challenges #4 & Habitica Crossover #3 | Gamification Challenge

Part 1: Release of challenge

Background of this challenge

Have you ever done or experienced anything boring before, so much so that you really wanted to doze off or do something else? That was the kind of feeling I had when I went about doing most tasks in a day. I started to dread most of the work I did and wanted to dive into something that felt good, like going on social media and finding out the high life my friends were having, or bingeing on shows and manga, which mostly ended up to be a waste of time.

But before we think, “Life’s like that. It sucks. Suck it up,” let us give ourselves the chance to entertain the thought of making the most monotonous tasks more interesting. I did a bit of Googling, and it hit me back with this term, “gamification”. 

The gaming industry is massive, with games being increasingly popular and engaging. Games have allowed us to see traditionally boring tasks like walking, reading and doing housework in a new light, by employing some of the features in actual video games that affect us psychologically.

Seeing something that could be boring turned into something that everyone wants to be let in might sound far-fetched, but take a look at how this presentation (on presentations) was turned into fun games: 

As such, I have started exploring this concept with Habitica (you can learn more about my exploits in the “Habitica Crossover” series). However, I became disenchanted with it after some time because it did not offer much engagement for this. It is hard for me to be invested in pretty pixels without a compelling story to back them up, and only be focused on logging in my tasks and watching my points gauges get filled up. For gamification, this RPG for being productive was doing its job, but it was not good enough for me. I wanted more customisability and unpredictability in the mechanics of the game.

Description of the challenge

Overarching purpose

To help myself in staying accountable and productive in completing this goal, I have set up a motto for this challenge. It is semper prorsum,  a Latin saying for "always forward". Through gamification, I hope to create something that I can look forward to, be it to see what kind of rewards and achievements I will be unlocking, to look out for what crazy challenge awaits me to be conquered, or to find out how much progress I have made in my work. In this way, instead of being held back by past mistakes and fears, I can take the one step forward in the direction of my goals that is set to generate countless steps more.

Having a cool motto is nice because it can serve as a catchphrase to remind myself about how deeply related the challenge is to my life, which makes it too significant for it to be ignored and be left on the back burner.

The specifics

I will be giving myself until the end of this year to complete this challenge, since trying to gamify my life from scratch is a really challenging undertaking.

For my first phase, I will complete a system where it will quantify what I do and develop some rewards and penalties (so that the reinforcement of any behaviour that makes me more productive can be done in both positive and negative ways).

For my second phase, I will make use of analytics tools such as point gauges and graphs to make my progress behaviour and motivate myself to improve on my previous performance in my tasks.

For my third phase, I will be integrating these personal systems into Habitica. With the points or rewards I accumulated in these systems, I can use them in exchange to make myself move faster in the game. Also, I can measure up to how another Habitica user has been progressing to add in the element of competition, so that I can catch up to others. Finally, by mixing my own games and the mechanics of Habitica, it will make the element of play stand out more in every task that I do.

As I could not wait to get on this challenge, I have already started this in August. However, it is going to take quite a lot of time before I can conclude what I am doing in this challenge, because I have to test these systems out and determine whether they are fun enough for me to progress smoothly in my work, but not so addictive that I push off the important work to get on with the game.

In my next post under “Life Challenges”, I will share some sneak peeks of what my gamified task management systems are like, and what kind of features I have built in to hack my own psychology that drives me to work harder.

Semper prorsum.  V