Hacking Life: Gamify with Habitica

About half a year ago I reflected for a moment on a video game I was playing, Hitman, and noticed something about myself which was pretty illogical: Hitman seemed to have this irrelevant point system which graded the player on how well they player passed a level. Super-stealthy and tricky kills with no collateral gave a high point score and the worse you scraped through the level, the less points you got. There was nothing useful about the points you got, you still got to the next level if you managed to get through, and I do not even remember whether the points were tallied overall when I got to the end of the game. I knew full well that the biggest thing was to complete the game, but I was compelled to repeat the levels over and over again to get as many points as possible. From a game design point of view this was a genius move: there was no need to create as many levels if you entice the player to do the same level many times. The total game play time would be the same. From my perspective, I was sucked into a system where my satisfaction depended on a contrived point system with no value whatsoever outside the satisfaction of earning the points themselves

Example of a possible Hitman game result.

Whether I like it or not, I like doing the best possible at games. Highest score. All achievements unlocked. All skills fully trained. Game completed. Do I realise that the little twang I get from unlocking some achievement on the Playstation is valueless? Yeah, absolutely. Does that mean I do not care about it? Absolutely not. A well made game will easily fool me into valuing whatever it wants me to value, and more importantly, it will get me to do things I would normally not do. One example is the silly number of hours I spent playing Runescape when I was much younger. I would spend ages clicking on pixelated rocks to get ores to get my mining level up so I could make money and mine different colour pixelated rocks, and make more money. Is mining experience in Runescape actually valuable? Of course not. Is Runescape money valuable? Not really. Is mining fun? No, it's pretty dull. But Runescape managed to make me value something that I knew was valueless.

Gamification is the process of transforming something into a game to unlock that kind of gamer mentality. It is the basis of the educational games I enjoyed as a kid, for instance. I was pretty familiar with the concept of applying game mentality to learning from my teacher-mother. But I have more recently discovered a brilliant platform for gamifying my life, or at least a big chunk of it, by using Habitica.

Habitica gives you a way of transforming your life into a role playing game. You add the habits you want to develop, daily activities you want to do and any items on your to-do list. When you complete these, you get experience points and gold. When you do not, you lose health. Experience allows you to level up so your character is stronger, and it allows you to unlock extra features of the game like quests and the like. You can collect pets and unlock them all, you can upgrade your weapons and armour, you can team up with other Habitica users to go on challenging quests together - it's an RPG! But unlike other RPGs, to get better you need to be good at doing what you set out to do.

I would heartily recommend giving Habitica a go. One of its most convenient features is that it does not take long to get up and going and, whilst rewarding, you do not have to spend much time interacting with Habitica itself - instead, you do your dailies, carry out your habits, and tick off the items on your to do list. To win at Habitica is to win at life. Isn't a double win worth it?

You're welcome to join me with the following codes, which will make more sense once you start up:

Group ID: ef3f50dc-f481-4630-a443-af8c442621e8
User ID: 1be6fedc-399a-42ff-bea2-595be6e9b6e7