How to play your life

How Gamification can change your life

Life is a game. Simple, straightforward, with a goal, obstacles, and resources to overcome them. It seems complex because there are so many games all overlapping and continuous.

What makes life so interesting and confusing in game terms is that just when we think we know what the goals are, they change! Or they never were the goals in the first place.

Often we are mistaken about the goals, and confused about the obstacles.This series aims at examining each mini-game of our lives to better understand the games that we play every day, in order to play them better. 

What is a game?

A game can be defined as a goal plus obstacles. Jesse Schell in The Art of Game Design gives the example of the game of golf: The goal is to put a ball in a hole. Easy! There’s a hole! Drop. No no, the right hole is 300 metres away. Okay, I’ll just pick it up, walk over and…No no, you need to hit it with this metal stick. And so on.

The game is not the goal, but overcoming obstacles. If the goal of Scrabble were to get the biggest score, why not grab all the letters, make up the longest word I can imagine, and write 1,000 points under my name? The obstacles, the rules, bring us back in line with the point of the game, which is to use seven letters, your vocabulary and strategy to do better than the opponents. 

But beyond that, the point of any game is to have fun, preferably with other people. Any game which lets people enjoy the time they spent playing it, and the company you played it with, is a good game. In short, was it fun? If it isn’t fun, why not? 

Just a game? 

Why is a game considered fun and life so ‘serious’? I can suffer horrendous defeats in a game, massive turns of bad luck and misfortune, and I can laugh through it and have a better time than if I had won. What is stopping me from doing the same with life? Why do many approach it differently, without as much humour? Why do some get offended at the thought at laughing at our own misfortunes? 

First, life is a game that we didn’t choose to play. We didn’t have the option of not playing, and the starting position that largely defines our role was selected for us before we even had a say in it. In short, we did not start with an even playing field, and we had no say in it.

So many of the obstacles that we encounter are to do with our own psychology and physiology that we may well cry ‘unfair!’ before the game has even begun. 

And there is no redeal. We must play our hand. To make us feel better about this, we ought not compare ourselves to others. Others may have been born with a better break, a head start, but where’s the fun in that? The fun and triumph of a game is in overcoming odds stacked against you and pulling off a surprising success by your own measure, not someone else’s. 

In many video games, you struggle against odds. You start with nothing, face opponents and obstacles, gather resources and skills, and expand your abilities, whereupon you take on even bigger obstacles. 

The video game Max Payne has you amassing weaponry and getting stronger, but many people’s favourite chapter is when he is reduced to nothing but a baseball bat against guards with automatic weapons. The struggle is refreshed. 

Farmville, like other sims, starts humbly – one plot of farmland, with which you can afford another, then a granary, more farms, a wagon, and so on. The goals expand to keep you interested in the next stage, then the next. If you were given a large plot of land already producing a fair cornucopia of food, and continually told you that you had won, it wouldn’t be very interesting as a game, and you would lose interest quickly. 

In life, people who have ‘won’ in some venture often become disheartened at the lack of goals ahead of them. Top athletes don’t know where to go from the top, and need to be counselled in how to set new goals for themselves, new struggles in which to be interested. 

It is my contention that people are disgruntled in first-world societies because it is a game already won. As such, they invent dramas and traumas, pretend enemies to fight and wrongs to right that simply aren’t there. Or they aspire to impossible goals based on something they saw on TV. It is precisely because the struggle has already been fought for them that there is no game to play, so they must make one. But back to games.

 The elements of gameplay. 

Games have a goal and obstacles. To achieve them, you have attributes and resources, including currency. Resources are things which you can use to achieve your goal, some of which can be traded, in which case they are also currency. You have a certain amount of skills, tools, knowledge and valuables with which you can gather more resources, and ultimately overcome obstacles to reach the goals. 

A young, ambitious soccer player has plenty of resources, very little of which can be traded as currency. Very little that can be traded for other resources. Money if he is lucky, but there are But he does have other resources. Skill is the key attribute, and to get more of this, be has the other resources of fitness, youth, time and contacts. The game that this soccer player engages in is to trade one resource for another until he has the required skill to make it into a better team while still young.

So, time is spent in training, and other resources utilised to enhance the quality of training for the time spent. He could, for example, use his attribute of personality to gain contacts and a coach willing to help. He could spend money to achieve this, for which he may need to expend time in work, or volunteering in trade.

 Games and psychology 

You have goals, attributes and resources. There are obstacles, though the biggest one is usually found inside your own head, and this is mainly because your brain can’t see the fun in the task enough to remain interested enough to do it. 

The more you recognise each goal and its importance, identify your attributes and resources you can use or trade to come closer to the goal, and plan how to get there, the more you can overcome the obstacles and reach those goals. 

As a teacher, I could see how well the students responded when an exercise was framed as a game, with all the goals and obstacles laid out. Even given traditionally dull subjects such as geology, they dived into the exercises with enthusiasm, all the while thinking they were escaping work. 

This happens to all of us, as we gradually realise that we aren’t as naturally motivated as we would like to be. It just isn’t that inherent.

In response, with the advent of portable technology and smart phones, life is turning into games to give us the impetus to achieve them. Wristbands help us keep score of our exercise in a day, phone apps give you points for ticking off items on your to-do list, and there is an app which lets you score points for housework. This is the field of Gamification. It asks that if games are considered fun, why not treat life as if it were a game?

Through this, through looking at every part of our lives in game terms, see everything in terms of goal, mechanics, obstacle and currency, and make everything more achievable and enjoyable. I’ll look at three key areas of life: health, social life and work, and help you see how you can break them down into games to give you the motivation to achieve them.