Gamification means fusing game mechanisms (e.g. lives, points, boss battles, competition rules, etc.) into an activity. Recently, gamification has been garnering more interest, especially in the educational realm. Khan Academy is famous for implementing game-based principles into its adaptive student curriculum, most notably for their point and badge system. During my time at ETS, many of the research divisions were focused on assimilating game mechanisms in their assessment technology. However, here’s another possible area of incorporating gamification: our lives.
It’s a sad fact of life that good habits are remarkably difficult to form, while bad habits are remarkably difficult to break. Enter Habitica: the idea of Habitica is to provide an RPG (role-playing game) platform to build good habits and destroy bad ones.
In Habitica, players (that’s you!) enter in tasks and habits, and are rewarded with gold, experience points, and equipment upon completion of each task. Players can utilize these resources and buy items to enhance their characters. There’s even an innovative component where you can go on quests with friends, and these quests’ success are contingent on you completing tasks in real-life. I obviously can’t cover all of the multitude of different features that the game/productivity app provides (take a look at the screenshot), but it really is a well-designed game.
Dare I say it, but Habitica does provide enough enticing game-like features to even keep me — and I consider myself non-susceptible to the dangerous allure of video games — engaged and entertained. It’s been motivating to be provided with a visual representation of my progress in the form of an experience bar. One of the most powerful features of Habitica is how it caters to the intrinsic human desire for instant gratification — when I finish a task and click on the check mark, I get a notification that shows me how much gold and experience points that I’ve gained; I’m quite sure that if you could see inside my brain, you’d see the pleasure centers in my brain light up from a release of endorphins.
However, the most valuable aspect of Habitica is the gold system. Let me explain: Habitica allows you to purchase rewards with gold earned from completing tasks; for example, I’ve configured it so that if I want to “Watch YouTube for 25 minutes,” I must forfeit ten of my hard-earned gold pieces. Now, when I want to watch YouTube videos, I first check my gold stores and then mull over whether or not I can afford this reward, More often than not, the urge disappears and I go back to work — Habitica has trained me well indeed. By forcing me to “purchase” my rewards and relaxation time, Habitica has given me a different, refreshing perspective on my time, allowing me to quantify time in terms of virtual gold currency. As Ben Franklin said, “Time is money,” and Habitica takes this adage to heart.
The desire to “keep going” that video games engender is truly powerful. I’m curious to see if there’s a way that we can better integrate gamification platforms like Habitica within our schools and daily lives. Call it gimmicky or too light-hearted, but I sincerely believe that gamification can play an important role in helping to incentivize habit-building and enhanced productivity.