I am a big fan of mental wellness, self confidence, meditation, and all that hippy stuff. When I was younger, I used to meditate everyday, but I didn’t really appreciate how I could use it practically until recently (after years of depression and self confidence issues and whatnot).

So I was excited to find that Super Better is a program that gamifies mental health.

Unfortunately, I find it kind’ve….Idunno….scattered. I’ve only fiddled around with the program a few times, but the game options seem very random. I like the fact that it is the only gamified program I’ve seen so far that gives users a choice.

Choice is usually something that’s used in games to get gamers even more addicted - rather than coming up with one situation, you give a player several choices, either implicit or explicit, allowing for more palatable options, and boom, then they’ve got you. So I liked that part.

I’ve found other routines for mental health on my own that I find work incredibly well. What I need is a software that incorporates a personal routine and gamifies that without the need for specifics, and I think I found one example with

Level Me Up - an iPad/iPhone app, that uses Malcolm McDowell’s (I think other people contributed to this, but he’s the one whose known for it) 10,000 hours theory - 10,000 hours is roughly the amount of time it takes to gain mastery over a skill. The program divvies up this amount of time and has a timer - you can set the program to be linear or more RPG-like - meaning level 1 will be easier to complete, level 2 slightly more difficult, etc.

So far I like this, but I can see it getting really old really fast. There are no badges, no community, just levels that take progressively more and more time. I’ll post a full review on each of these programs later.

I am very curious to see how these small differences in game mechanics affect long-term habituation. The goal is to get addicted to a skill over a longer period, so I’m assuming that having badges and the ability to socialize the game will help to make a habit stick long-term. We’ll see.