What are games, when you boil them down to their constituent elements? Well, they’re tools for having fun and bonding with other people, for one. They can be environments in which we compete, learn more about the world, or enjoy a great story. But boil them down further, and you’ll find a set of rules and goals that help structure our purpose for playing them in the first place. A game without a purpose, conflict or puzzle is going to be a boring game, even if the substance involves “learn this cool story in this walking simulator context,” that’s still a goal.

So, games aren’t too dissimilar from how we live our lives. Listen to any game dev conference and they’ll talk about how to manipulate the psychological considerations of a player to give them the best experience, even if that means pointing them in the right direction.

If you’ve been struggling to make progress in a given area of your life, could it be that gamifying it could be a fantastic new means of starting afresh? In this post, we’ll discuss what that means and how to implement it, through a number of incremental steps:
 

Plan Your Approach To Organization

Organizing life isn’t dissimilar to organizing your approach in a video game. Let’s say you’re playing an MMO, hoping to level up and get your side skills boosted so you can be useful within your guild. You might have a route you play every day where you chop down trees, skin virtual animals for leatherworking, or tend to your farm for cooking. You’ll pick off every place to stop along the way, choose the shortest distance, and use automated tools to help you offset some of the busywork.

We can take this approach to real-life planning, also. For example, when heading to a new city you might plan luggage storage in the train station as your first stop, then visit your friend to get the lay of the land, then head for lunch, then clothes shop. Planning this out, perhaps in a digital journal you can use your smartphone to access, helps optimize your day and get the best from the entire experience.
 

Create a Reward System

No task in a video game is complete without a reward. When we turn in a quest, we gain experience points and better stats for our character. When we complete a level, we’re rewarded with a new level, offering new tools to experience more of the story.

So, it’s good to curate your own reward system when gamifying your life, too. For example, if you’re on a weight loss journey, then every kilogram you lose might be connected to a small treat, be that heading for dinner with your partner, enjoying a simple indulgent treat like a dessert you’ve been enjoying only in moderation, or heading to the movies. Reward systems motivate progress anew, but they also give us the rest stop we’re looking for.
 

Level Up Your Skills

In a game, one of the most satisfying moments is when you unlock a new skill or upgrade a current one. But of course, you can do this in real life too. It’s often where the most delight and satisfaction is to be found.

Luckily, it’s a new year. For that reason, taking some time to invest in yourself can be a rewarding way to begin. Why not learn how to cook four new dishes this month? This can inspire you to try new cuisine or learn new skills, like how to fillet a fish you pick up from the fishmonger for use in your meals, or how to make delicious ramen at home.

You can track the challenge in steps, like following a guide to fish on YouTube, or heading to the chef store and purchasing a worthwhile chef knife. When you add an incremental reward process with a final goal completed at the end, you get to feel the same satisfaction your virtual character does, too.
 

Bonus: Have Fun!

Not everything in life is enjoyable, and still, not everything in a game is, either. But when you gamify your life, you get to maximize the fun you have and seek out the interests you may have had on the back burner. The secret to fuelling all this? Fun and fun for fun’s sake. So, perhaps this week you’ll get back into a sport you once enjoyed, or start painting again. Gamifying your life isn’t just for the chores, it’s for everything else too!

With this advice, we hope you can make the most of that rejuvenating approach.