Becoming the back burner!

 

Habitica Crossover #4 | Becoming the back burner!

Note: 

• This post also functions as a teaser to the upcoming post detailing the progress of Life Challenge #4: Gamification.
• This will be the last post on this series for a long while, and it will decouple itself from the "Life Challenges" series

After a few months of using Habitica, I have found it increasingly difficult to maintain it as my mindset and my tasks have more or less migrated to the two new productivity tools that I have created to organise my life and inject some fun into my clearing of to-dos. These tools are namely, “Commitment Tracker” and “Motivation System”.

I can only share some basic information about these two productivity tools because I will be divulging the details of how they work in the upcoming post about my progress in the Gamification Challenge. To put it simply, the Commitment Tracker is to help me organise my tasks my regular cycles and quantify the value for each task (assigned to a commitment) to me, while the Motivation System takes these numbers and either process them into trends that give me a bigger picture of my productivity over a certain duration, or exchange them for rewards that I can enjoy, so as to give me the last push I need to complete a certain task and to give up a certain distraction or reward.

With these systems, they have effectively rendered Habitica obsolete for me. My usage of Habitica was mostly concentrated on its task management system. In comparison to that, I spend much less time engaging with different people on guilds or on the shop and stable for the virtual rewards. The pixel art loses its charm over some time, because I find that its visual appeal means nothing to me, and I have no actual use for these pixels on the screen.

For instance, these equipment does not make sense to me, because there are no monsters that actively appear at the “Tasks” tab trying to gobble my character up if I am lax in my checking off to-dos and habits. They only serve to enhance my attribute points, for which there is little use other than changing how fast one clears the quests (which is just a progress bar) and the rate at which one's health drops for a missed daily or a negative habit.

Another example of why I do not find the rewards provided by Habitica appealing is the system on its Stable. Although I admit that the pets look cute and value-added to the visual appeal of my character avatar, after a long time trying to get along with them, I cannot quite figure out what the use of them are other than being decorative items that can only eat food and grow (which I pity the pets and mounts for not being able to present themselves as lively creatures that actively bring joy to their masters and assisting their masters with various tasks).

How about supportive communities like guilds which are one of the biggest draws to this gamified task management site? In general, I feel that many Habiticians are either talking to themselves or responding to each other’s questions quickly. Unless one is lucky enough to join into a very supportive and family-like party, it is hard to develop any kind of relationships with other users or engage in deep conversations over productivity with other like-minded people. Maybe nothing will happen if I do not get the ball rolling, but this is not where my life interests lie, and I have other hobbies and commitments to attend to. As such, there is no reason for me to continue contributing to these guilds, unless there were some extremely kind guilds that would give me gems for completing something and I would be able to unlock something cool on the shop for them (still, it will only be for a very short time).

The fear of incurring penalties such as reduced health and mana, as well as getting hit by the monster of the party quest I am on, also contributed to my lack of willingness to check in to Habitica. I know that skipping on dailies and habits will be detrimental to my personal growth in the long run, but there were days where I felt so tired and burnt out that I wanted to escape the reality of holding myself accountable or responsible for all the tasks and habits that I am struggling hard to maintain.

All these negative experiences I had on Habitica had led me to the conclusion that I am able to make something that is better than this site and I will not need to pay a single cent for anything when I am designing the reward systems and progress trackers myself. Perhaps I am asking for too much, but it is worth a try to see what I can make on my own. As such, I have decided to put Habitica on the backburner and use it mainly as a source of inspiration for future ideas about self-improvement.

Semper prorsum!  V 

Official release of Life Challenges #4: The Gamification Challenge

 

I N      C O N J U N C T I O N     W I T H

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 

Inspirations from Habiticians! (and official release of new blog!)

Habitica Crossover: Issue #2

What makes Habitica so great is its diverse community of players who want to get things done. In the time since I restarted using Habitica this year, I have found myself in a guild where I stayed active for some time. In addition, I have tried out some challenges and used the guilds and taverns to find out more about the awesome people they have there.

I was involved in a guild named as “Inspiration Station”. What it mainly does is to allow members to uplift each other by sharing quotes, poems and stories. The guild master motivates everyone to do so by giving out gems. I received some too, but the amount of gems I have is so little that it is not quite enough to get anything. In addition to the gems, the appreciation given by others through their likes and replies really boosted my morale and drove me to commit more time in searching or coming up with good quotes.

However, as the length of my posts became longer and I can’t quite seem to make up my mind on how many quotes I should share, I have since shifted my attention to maintaining a quote blog, on which I lovingly create collections of quotes. Link to blog here: https://embersinspiration.blogspot.com/ 

Hence, this guild master soon became my inspiration.

That level was simply crazy! It is quite rare to meet someone who has exceeded level 100! Each level requires easily hundreds to thousands of experience points. I cannot imagine how many tasks this person has to check off to get to this stage.

I also looked around in the tavern to get to know some strangers. Many of their profiles have their life stories and some of their achievements was mind-blowing. But before that, allow me to introduce the one behind the well-known “Use Case Spotlights” guild and the column that goes by the same name on the official Habitica blog.  Their posts could easily reach many Habitica users.

I was amazed by the number of blogs and book reads shanaqui maintains. And I saw some lingo that I have not encountered before. Time to search up on these! Part of the fun about playing games, even on gamified productivity platforms like Habitica, is that you feel like you feel good about learning new “made-up” things even though these have no bearing in the real world (unless the community of famers become large enough or the game interesting itself for people to attach value to it; then the game becomes more of a commodity than a pastime).

I did not know that profiles can become so colourful that they put a smile on your face. It seemed like many Habiticians have many things going on for them. For me, I have the same situation too. I definitely have enough things to do and habits to maintain to get myself to level 100!

Back to the amazing users I discovered while scrolling through the Tavern.

It seems like the profiles I stumbled upon (I chose tiered users and high level ones to find out more about) usually present themselves as solo players or guild leaders. Maybe being in a party may not be as common as I thought.

This Habitician is a legend because of what comes next in the profile.

Through this serving wench's being overwhelmingly above my current level, and reaching heights that I have not even imagined before, I now learn that when one’s level is sufficiently high (maybe at 100?), one can rebirth and choose another class (be it a mage, warrior, rogue or healer). And it is kind of daring to start from all over again just for a class switch in order to get limited edition equipment. Just HOW NICE are these pixels?

On a side note, that pink coloured tree must be the beautiful cherry blossoms that stand to be admired during spring. Unfortunately, there are not quite enough pixels to faithfully recreate the shape of the sakura flower.

To sum up, I could not have sustained myself on Habitica for long without these amazing people. Unfortunately, the stats and characters that aim to simulate a role-playing game are too superficial to imbue much meaning to checking off your task, and not many challenges have stories that are interesting enough to get people hooked to fulfilling their tasks and acquire their next purpose in life.

Habitica Crossover #1: Introducing how I manage my life using it

(Note: the image above is a combination of screenshots from the original Habitica desktop website. This is not an official promotion for the game, as it is simply an original blog post written by a Habitica user to share how he plays and enjoys the game.) 

What is Habitica?

Habitica is a productivity role-playing game that allows users to create to-dos, dailies and habits to help them get things done and improve their lives. 

There are features such as quests, rewards, equipment, pets and potions in order to provide extrinsic rewards. According to its website, these provide instant gratification that helps users to feel good about getting things done and have more motivation to work. 

There are also features designed with accountability in mind, so that players can stay on track in fulfilling their goals. Players can team up in parties, or join dedicated communities about particular topics, life goals or hobbies that are called guilds. This makes it feel more like a role-playing video game.

My way of playing Habitica

Like most players, I create those normal tasks and habits using Habitica and categorise the important ones using labels. However, I have some ways of using Habitica that are different from many players. 

Habits - they can become part of your motivation system instead of using it for specific tasks

To reward myself for doing well, I can set specific rewards like bonus experience points using positive habits. Likewise, I can penalise myself for undesirable behaviour by setting it as a negative habit. This is because I find myself to be more driven by actual consequences rather than the things I can buy with the gold in the game. In this case, what I use to motivate myself is the actual progress I get in the game - basically the level, health, experience and gold my avatar has - because they represent the amount of time I spent being committed to whatever I want to do in my life. 

Examples of how habits can serve as rewards and punishments 

I have reused this approach in the form of rewards. Asides from using gold to get real-life rewards, I can also use the rewards section to design fines to penalise myself financially for bad behaviour. In this way, there will be a stronger deterrent against skipping my dailies, habits and to-dos. 

Rewards - they should be reserved for something special and not be confused with breaks

This is the most difficult section of Habitica to use well for me, since the only thing it does is to make me poorer in terms of gold. Is it not strange that you still have to purchase rewards with gold which you painstakingly accumulate by checking off your tasks and habits? I mean, I don't see very much of this in real life.

Thankfully, Habitica allows me to set free rewards. Using this, your very productivity can be turned into vouchers that you can redeem for something rewarding!

Also, I have used the rewards section to add additional rules for in-game rewards. For instance, I have set the amount of gold to pay for the taxes and fees before I get equipment or use the drops, which includes pet feed and hatching potions. These will deter me from using in-game rewards so readily since there is a chance that I will be so immersed in it that I will lose my productivity. 

Free rewards and in-game rewards to make the game feel more realistic

Do-it-yourself - achievements and challenges

Since Habitica needs money to run itself, a lot of the good stuff can be pricey. Some even requires gems, which are to be purchased (unless someone else gives you gems) or a subscription.

I was depressed about how basic-looking the things without needing much gold or money are, so I decided to make my own achievements and challenges.

For the challenges, after designing them, I have used Habitica to keep track of what I need to do and give me rewards. Once I am ready to share about my challenge, I will post it under the "Life Challenges" series of this blog. This blog can be an effective medium for me to record my usage of Habitica and what I can do to make it more fun for myself. 

To keep myself more motivated, I tried designing achievement titles and badges for myself. It does help me to stay in the game longer and have the world being mesmerised by the things I came up with myself. However, for now, the badges don't look very nice, so I am considering learning pixel art to make the style of the badges more consistent and to increase the visual appeal of the badges. 

Self-made achievements

Interaction with other players

The most fun thing about Habitica is that you can find communities you like and grow together with other players! 

There was this 'Inspiration Station' guild that I joined because I liked the idea of sharing inspiration for others to feel better about themselves and working hard. But the primary reason why I joined was because of the challenge rewards - I can finally unlock those parts of the games that require gems and make my avatar look better. Until then, I will be working really hard to get the guild leader's attention.

For some of the guilds I joined, such as the 'Life Hackers' guild, it was to get some inspiration on how to be more productive and how to make Habitica more fun. At times, I check out the wikis other than the guilds for inspiration too!

I have also sought help and contributed feedback in guilds and the tavern. I was bursting with pride and joy when I saw my tip on the 'Use Case Spotlights' guild getting featured on the Habitica blog! 

My tip getting featured. And yes, "synitheia" is my username. It is Greek for "habit". Why Greek? Because it sounds deep and it also sounds like a legitimate name.
Link to the post: https://habitica.wordpress.com/2020/06/25/use-case-spotlight-adapting-to-life-changes/

My progress

For now, thanks to the tasks and challenges I am coming up with, as well as the blog I am writing, I can churn out enough work to ensure that I level up every week. I am also having fun trying out as many features of Habitica as possible and be creative in playing the game.

For my future plans, I intend to make this feel more like a role-playing game by creating a world made of pixel-art and have nice storylines to keep me engaged in the game. This was partly why I dabbled in world creation using the Free Frontiers story series in the Story Creation Challenge I set up for myself.

Do keep looking out for the "Habitica" label, and stay tuned for more posts detailing my exciting journeys in Habitica!

Habitica Revival

Here is what my Habitica looks like!

From this post onward, I am going to start posting more about what I am doing in real-life, instead of just exploring and creating new stories! Anyway, back to the subject of this post, I am returning to Habitica for the first time in 2020.

For now, I have included some habits, dailies and to-dos, plus an entire incentive system (with my own customised achievements I designed myself included in my profile details) to make the most out of this gamified productivity application.

This is still a developing story, but I am sharing about this first so that anyone who views my blog will have an idea of what I am up to recently. I will cover more details about how I use Habitica in a new series dedicated to this game.