Gamification

It turns out I’m a sucker for gamification, and it seems this is a good thing. 

I first noticed this a few years back. I had been talking with an engineer I used to work with in my games industry days about how I wished I could learn more math but I was bad at it, and he recommended Khan Academy. This was great advice. After watching one overview video I realized that much of my trouble with math was due to never properly learning some of the basics, and I started back with the Algebra I hadn’t really learned in 8th grade, and using Khan Academy I kept at it until I hit Integral Calculus and realized I needed a teacher. As it happens I was lucky enough to find a really good teacher at the local community college and I kept at it until I’d taken the math classes available there, but that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is that Khan Academy used the sort of rewards that a game uses and it really helped me keep at it. If I was going to miss a day, Khan Academy would remind me not to break my streak. It would teach and test, but do so in a way that felt a lot like progressing through a game. 

More recently I started on Duolingo. I wouldn’t say I speak any of the languages I’ve been studying on Duolingo well, the app has its limitations, but I have learned a lot and am on 500+ day streak for working at it. Mostly I’m focussed on German and Spanish, but I’ve learned some Russian, French, some of the Scandinavian languages, all with the help of these gamelike rewards. 

In July I was kindly gifted a Fitbit, and once again the gamification seems to be working. Back when I worked in the computer games industry, I put on a lot of weight (all that sitting in an office chair and way too many nights of eating pizza will do that.) I think most people don’t look bad when they put on weight, but since I was so thin growing up, when I put on the pounds it goes straight into pregnant baboon belly mode, which in addition to looking goofy is the least healthy. Before the Fitbit, I’d lost some of it, but had hit a plateau where I couldn’t seem to lose the last twenty pounds. I’m happy to say that the gamified rewards of the Fitbit, the routine of doing it everyday, plus being motivated to eat a little less (after all, I wouldn’t want all that exercise to be for nought), have resulted in me losing that last twenty pounds. My walking streak (days with 10,000 or more steps) is over 100, and I now weigh under 200 pounds for the first time since I started working at Blizzard back in 1996. 

So for me at least, gamification works. Now if only I could build up some rewards to keep me focussed on writing. The most usual metric is word count, but I’ve always felt like word count is a weird one. It works really well for measuring progress on a rough draft, less so as one rewrites and polishes. So this requires further thought. How to reward, remind, an cajole myself into writing more with gamelike rewards…