Gamifying My Entire Life
DATA
I've documented my thoughts on this in a series of blog entries. I'll link them here for convenience.
Introduction
Duolingo - Week 1, language learning
Incorporating Ideas from The Power of Habit - Namely, spacing out starting games
Mid-Week Status Check - Notes on Duolingo
Research on Other Games
Notes on Meditation/Mental Wellness Games - Jane Mcgonigal's SuperBetter and Level Me Up
750 Words - Week 2, writing gamification
Habits of Omission
Habit RPG - Customizable gamification
Notes on For the Win
Habits of Omission Part 2 - Curtailing alcohol and coffee with Habit RPG
Notes on Applied Gamification
Meditation Gamification - Week 3
Plateaus and Gamification
Travel and Gamification
Travel and Gamification 2
Getting Back from Travel
Too Many Games
BACKGROUND
One of my old friends was a master gamer. Watching him was like watching a well oiled machine tromp through levels and gain skills. But he wasn't necessarily particularly productive with real life. I think he'd describe himself as pretty lazy. My co-working space gave a seminar on gamification based on the ideas of Kevin Werbach, the guy who wrote the book on the concept. Apps based on the concept were popping up everywhere, and the seminar made a good point, that most people react quite differently to games than they do to real life, even if the two are remarkably similar. So I read Werbach's book, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business, and took his Coursera class, which was luckily available at around the same time.
My goal was to see how far games could take me. I had a laundry list of basic habits and skills I wanted to learn. So I ended up gaming my entire life. Exercise, learning Spanish, eating healthy, chores, drinking less alcohol and caffeine, meditating, writing, and exercise.
METHOD
Initially I was planning on just adding as many games as possible. I started by testing Duolingo, which seemed to give me a boost of excitement after the first week. It appeared that the format alone was enough to master everything I ever wanted. I decided to do a ramp up for each new game just to fiddle around with the settings and generally get to know the games before starting for real. Every next week I'd add another game.
They were:
Duolingo
750words
Level Me Up
Habit RPG (now Habitica)
I also messed around with SuperBetter, Fitocracy, Memrise, Chorewars, Khan Academy, Code Academy, and Gympact.
Many of the programs had mobile versions, and since I just got a smartphone, I downloaded them to see if they would work while on the go.
CONCLUSIONS
Despite my initial high level of of enthusiasm this did not work. My games collapsed about 6 weeks in, after coming back from two extensive work trips.
As Werbach mentioned in his book, a lot of the programs didn't quite get gamification. Level Me Up, for example, didn't really have any novelty - it just divided up 10,000 hours into a series of time badges. There was no novelty or exploration or leaderboards. There was no nuance when it came to pushing skills. For 750words, you just had to write that minimum. Which was great, but it had no way to improve on those 750 words. Many games were also very obsessed with the "streak" method of improvement. This was around the time I first read about Phillippa Lally's experiments, where streaks really didn't matter so long as you kept going with it. In fact, far more important was starting again after a break from the game.
TAKEAWAYS
While it was ultimately a failure, I was shocked that I had lasted so long - looking at some old planners from middle school and high school, I realized that I normally only made it about 3 weeks. While 6 weeks wasn't long for any real long-term change, it was double. Gamification does work. But I think it has to be combined with other concepts.