Game, Gamification & Life
Who doesn’t love playing games?
Almost everyone in your neighborhood knows about popular video games like CoC or Candi Crush Saga or PUBG etc.
There is a common misconception that only kids love to play games.
Statistics say that more than 1.2 billion people play video games Worldwide Out of 8 billion people. These 1.2 billion people who play games can’t be all children.
This is a fact that 90% of school-aged children play video games. But do you know the mean age of a gamer? That’s 33. About 68% of gamers are over 18 years old. 47% of gamers are women.
Why people play Video Games?
Life is boring and hard. People always want to find an escape route from there life. Video Games create such escape routes just for a few hours of the day.
Video games are like Alternate Worlds, alternate timelines. People actually find happiness playing games.
Why do they find happiness?
Is it because they can level up? Is it because they can kill the boss in the boss battle? Is it because they have multiple lives in these worlds? Is it because they can kill bad guys in PUBG or Call of Duty? Or Is it because they can finally unfold the mysteries of sun goddess in tomb rider?
No. Not leveling up, not getting more mana or points or magical item gives them enough tenacity to push through, go more and more.
It’s a sense of achievement
A sense of accomplishment that allows themselves to go beyond. The wiring of brains actually gets affected by Video games. There is a hormone named Dopamine secretes during video games. Dopamine is also named as the feel-good hormone. That is why people actually find happiness playing games.
Not only does it create happiness but also dopamine helps deep learning and thinking. So playing video games is not actually half-bad.
Caution
It’s a fact that if you play too much you’ll get addicted. Stress, poor eyesight, and a lot of other problems grow if you play too much. But it is also true overdoing anything causes harm to people.
science discovered video games in a limited dose actually improve memory, eyesight, and reasoning skill.
But this is not our topic of this blog: How Video games affect people?
Our topic is the Gamification of Life.
So what is Gamification?
Gamification if a process of changing the mindset of people.
Think, what if all the elements of the game come down to real life, work, studies, projects.
Shall it be not fun? The adventure, the thrill, the mysteries, the craziness condensed into real life. Isn’t that exciting?
That is what is called gamification, converting boring, lazy, procrastination of life into fun and adventurous.
Imaging points or mana or magic items on things may not gamify your life.
The real game elements are challenges, rewards, failures, and achievements.
Does this Gamification thing really work?
Let me tell you a story. The story of a lady, Jane McGonigal. She hit her head so hard that she got a concussion, nausea, and other problems like vertigo and constant headaches. She couldn’t read or write for more than a few minutes at a time. She had trouble remembering things. She was super sick and depressed. People take months and years to heal postconcussion syndrome. Doctors didn’t allow her to read, to write, to play video games, to do work, to send an email, to take alcohol or caffeine. Horrible! isn’t it? But she was the first person in the world to earn a Ph.D. studying the psychological strengths of gamers and how those strengths can be converted to real-world problem-solving. So she couldn’t give up on life after all this.
She created a simple recovery game called “Jane the Concussion Slayer” which is now known as SuperBetter. And strangely she accelerated her healing. Gamification actually rewires your brains to go in an accelerated positive direction.
This is the power of gamification. Now it is proven that not only brain injuries but also various kinds of health problems can be healed using Gamification. So this is legit.
How to Gamify your life?
Gamification of life is actually a change of mindset, observing your life from a different viewpoint.
Life is a game. You are a character in the RPG.
RPG means Role Playing Game. FPS means First Person Shooter. These two are game terminology. None of them actually matters. What matters is that how to play your life’s game.
A game means you’re the hero and there are bad guys, you need to kill those bad guys and win the level.
Who are the bad guys?
Bad guys are your problems which you don't want to face. But do you know who is the Boss of most of the problems?
It's your laziness, your procrastination, your internal fear of not getting things done, and fear of failure.
Suppose you didn't come up with a new marketing strategy which is needed to submitted today Or You didn't understand any theorem of algebraic topology at first glance Or you didn't understand what is the internal meaning of the novel Ulysses.
I will tell you what people tend to do.
When you stumbled upon something you thought you couldn't do, you start to slack off. It feels like you're getting sleepy, you become lazy, you start to procrastinate and ultimately you will not even do the easier jobs after this one. That is what happens inside your brains.
Your subconscious mind always tries to protect you and give you the comfort zone you like. It put a barrier inside your mind and feeds your brain that the things outside your comfort zone are very tough, you couldn't do it in 100 years.
But think, if it is a game. Will you stop until clearing the level? THINK!
Consider your problems as bad guys or zombies and kill every single one of them until anything left.
In games, there are various kinds of zombies. Not all of them could be killed by the same method. You need separate skill sets to slay various kinds of zombies.
Life is just like that.
Rewards
What do you love? Dark chocolate? PS4 games? Comics? A new book by Dan Brown? A movie?
Whatever it is at your payscale, you can buy a lot. I know. But to make things a little bit harder, consider them as Rewards. Limit yourself to buy those after completing your tasks. Tasks are your zombies. Slay the zombie and you're eligible to earn rewards.
If you do that you'll find the energy inside you. Trust me. The harder the job is the harder to get Rewards. And Sweetness will be sky-kissing too.
You can set reward levels like...
Tasks………………………………………………… Rewards
Complete all due tasks …………………………….A new PS4 game CD
Complete jobs worth of week …………………… Netflix subscription
Get a Promotion ……………………………………A new movie in the theatre
Reaching the sales target of the year…………….. A vacation
By practicing this system you actually change your brain maps, and you'll work hard and hard and hard. You'll achieve things that you couldn't think so a week before.
Punishments
Punishments come after rewards. We are playing a game. Right?
So there will be punishments. That's fair enough.
It's not like you need to slap yourself in the face or you don't get food all day. No, it's not like that. You don't need to harm yourself.
As I said earlier. Life's hard and crazy. It doesn't work the way we planned. There will be failures. But don't let your failure gets you.
Success comes after so many failures
You need to push yourself to get through your failures. You need to get the necessary skill sets. You need to play the game, over and over again until you succeed.
You fight. You get devastated. You get numb. You get depressed. But you know what, it's the way of life. It means that you're on the way of processing. You're on the right path. You need to do what you need to do. You need to get strive for success. Never look away from your goal post. Push! Push! Push! Push until night! Push the day tomorrow again! Push the next day! Push the week! Push the month! You'll get what you deserve eventually. Never lose faith for a single bit.
If you think you're not doing your best. Keep pushing. Until you get that. Run and Run again, if you can't run, walk. If you can't walk, crawl. But never ever stop trying. Cause then only you loose when you stop trying. It's okay to be late. Better late than never.
In this way, punishment will look like a way of improvement.
You can set punishment levels like...
Tasks………………………………………………… Punishments
messed up with Client ………………………… Forget the football match
didn't cross your day's target …………………. Do extra 100 pushups
didn't complete your Syllabus………………… You are not getting the turkey in the thanksgiving
didn't plan for the month………………………. you'll be eating veggies and broccoli only
Without harming yourself you actually can punish yourself. And by practicing this system you don't want to slack off.
Extra-Boost
What is this extra boost? Extra boost is like having a new power for a limited period of time. It is like getting a Magnet in Subway Surfers.
If you get that power you can earn twice as much of your points or rewards. But here will be some ground rules. For what conditions you'll get extra boosts.
You can set extra-boost like...
If you can solve Algebra Exercise in 50% of the allocated time, Next Exercise would take 2x rewards. Similarly, If your new email campaign can reach 500 People this week You can spend 3x hours this weekend.
This is the game model I come up with in everyday life.
You can use this method in every aspect of life, health, finance, work, studies... everywhere. Trust me it works.
You need to start good and end well. If this model is getting your nerves, create cheat day, and create cheat codes. I mean who doesn't like cheat codes. It's all up to you, you need to get the job done in any way.
Well, this is the minimalistic approach of the game design for everyday life. You can make this game harder by using some extra variables.
You can create levels of the game.
You can create health and mana variable.
You can create secret identities like 'Jane the Concussion Slayer'
You can create inventory and magic items
In this way, you can make the game harder. But always remember, it's for your improvement. Don't make it so complex that it'll be harder to track. If that's the case you'll lose motivation in a week, there will be no point in creating such games.
But One thing you can do to take your games greater heights.
If you play with friends and family and colleagues. Playing together is fun.
In this way, you can create Parties for your clan and challenges for your friends. In a competitive environment, everyone will flourish.
It'll be crazily powerful. This kind of challenge actually boosts your mind to Go Beyond, to be a better player.
Methods
For some people, it is good enough to create a to-do-list for gamification.
You can use Pen and Paper Method, Or To-do-list apps available on various platforms. Some worthy to-do-list apps are Todoist, TickTick, Any Do, Google tasks, Asana, Trello, and so on.
Well, I love todoist, the way they provide task management is awesome. I'll discuss the workflow of the todoist on another day.
If you want two months of premium todoist service for free, click here.
If the to-do-list is not your forte, you can choose the game design. You can create your own game design in Pen and Paper or Excel or Datasheet or table wherever you want. To help with your gamification, some people built apps for you.
If you want kanban flow like Trello + Gamification = Habitica, That is what you're looking for.
In Habitica you can find an RPG like environment. There you can find Health and Experience bar. You can gain gold coins in completing your work. You can buy from the shop with the same in-game gold coins and put it to inventory. You get some eggs and from that, you can get animals as a pet. You can even battle monsters with friends. It's a pretty good deal. Check it out.
If you want a superhero-like environment, SuperBetter is for you, What I mentioned earlier.
If you want to define things as you like, Level up Life, LifeRPG, and Do it now are for you.
Only For health, you can use Fitocracy and Zombies, Run! 5k Training.
There are other apps too like Mind Snacks, EpicWin, and others.
If you find other interesting apps please let me know.
COVID-19
You must be thinking about what is COVID-19's (#corona) deal with this topic.
Rest assured. I'll explain as much as I can.
COVID-19 a dangerous life form suddenly wiped out 270k people from Beautiful Earth. 3.85M people are diagnosed with positive. This curse actually destroyed life and keep doing it. We don't know what will happen in the near future. There is no certain cure for this Virus still now. The vaccine is yet to be discovered, but we don't know when.
There is a lot of uncertainty. Because there are a few variables we are not familiar with.
What we need to do right now, is to make ourselves impregnable and to make our immunity skyrocketing.
Model of Health Game for COVID-19
Since you only grasp the idea of Gamification just now. For you, I'm taking charge of creating the Health game to a beat Our Alien Bad Boss COVID-19.
1. Wash you Hands Often and at the end of the day you Get to watch an episode of your favorite show
2. KEEP safe distance for a week and You may cancel a punishment once at a time.
3. STAY home until everything is okay and You’ll get to buy your dream gadget.
4. Take Bath, Take Sunlight, Do Exercise every single day and You can have your dream vacation after all this.
Always remembers that if you do this for yourself, you actually do it for your family and precious world.
Stay Home and Save Lives
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