Gamer Of Life

How Gamification Can Supercharge Your Life

Playing Life Like A Game

You lose motivation and slack off on your couch by night or binge-watch a series on Netflix instead of focusing on your goals. You need something to pull your ass out of that couch to get you moving.

You feel tired to do your work, but you have time to go through Amazon’s catalog and buy things you don’t need.

You ignore essential things in life by clogging your mind with things that aren’t important.

You need coffee before starting your day. You want to watch a video or scroll a useless feed of your social media before your commute. You always need stimulation. Your brain always tricks you into watching a show, read that book, or listen to a playlist or just sit the entire day, watching movies, or playing games. You go through life in autopilot.

We live in a technological era. We have built a system to stimulate us. Coffee, videos, music, books stimulate our brains. 21st-century technology taught us to live in the simulation all day.

Games are a common concept in this era.

Games have levels, storylines, and characters. We attach ourselves to our games’ roles. We kill, loot, and build properties in our virtual world, but don’t do anything in real life.

Have you ever come across a day where you don’t do anything valuable in your life and play games after games? Do you think why you’re addicted to games? How do games pique our interest?

Gamification isn’t a gimmick — it works because it triggers powerful emotions. By using game mechanics in a non-game context, gamification makes tasks more fun and engaging. Think of how it feels when you’re transported to another world via an online video game. You find yourself immersed in a storyline where you’re conquering amazing challenges.

How can you apply this information to your real life? Gamification in life gives us goals, and levels to achieve them. Life becomes exciting and challenging.

Gamification has also been shown to be beneficial to learning by creating experiences that more fully engage learners, hold their attention, and motivate them to keep striving to reach a goal.

If your life is a game built on levels, where you achieve one a goal after another, it becomes a joy ride instead of a life of boredom.

How you use gamification in your life? How can you get to new challenges in your life, learn more, be excited about your life, and increase motivation?

Create a System

Games have a system. There is a character in the game; who wants to beat the boss or mafia to control the city.

A system is a series of actions in a game that leads the story towards the end. With a system, you can establish a business and gain momentum.

You have to build the system. A system is the actions you take every day. Your systems must meet your goals.

You wake up, brush your teeth, and even take a bath before drinking coffee. That is the system. Who taught you that system? Your mom or dad or your sibling taught you, and it is ingrained in your head.

You form new connections by creating a system and tracking every day. When you build new relationships, your brain changes, and you are a new being.

Use Technology

You can’t live your life in a simulation from phones and laptops, can’t run around the city using cheat codes to buy properties.

There is no cheat code in life.

You can use technology to track your goals. By following your goals, you look at how well or how worst you perform. When you look at your performance, it gives you a way to improve.

My best streak of reading is five days. The last best was ten days, but I never got to 30 days streak. Every five days, I remind myself to beat my previous streak.

Time-Based Challenges

You only have 24 hours in a day. If you’re doing a 9–5 job, and live in a metropolitan city, you only have 12 hours of free time, subtracting the traffic and commute time to office and from office to home. In those 12 hours, if you can keep time-based challenges on your daily goals, it is better to achieve them.

If you don’t want to go for a run, you can go for a fifteen-minute jog. Fifteen minutes won’t tire you. If you feel rejuvenated after that jog, you might even finish your workout.

You are too tired to write. You only have to write 500, or 1000 words, for half an hour. That’s the beauty with timely goals. If you don’t feel like doing something, just start, set a time limit. You get something done for your day.

Reward System

My reward system is simple. On my weekends, I ride my bike for hours, listening to music. I forget about everything going in my mind and focus on the road and the song. That is my reward.

You have to think about your reward. It could be ice-cream or a rest day to rejuvenate or a retreat. Rewards are crucial because they motivate you.

As you get points and other rewards, achieve new levels with new challenges, see your name on a scoreboard, and explore new quests, your brain becomes excited and releases dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway (the reward pathway — highlighted in dark blue), which creates higher motivation and makes us chase after a reward.

When you achieve your level, beat the boss, or your character accomplishes a specific goal in a game, you have a reward, the character has more money, a better house, cars, and a beautiful wife, virtually.

We attach ourselves in the game because we see a reflection of ourselves in those characters. But, you can set some rewards in your life and live your life like a game.

Uncertainty

Life is funny. You don’t know when failure awaits you in the corner. You might get ignored by your contributions to your job or get rejected by a prospect. That is fun of the game. Uncertainty builds interest.

If you lose in a game while playing a level, you replay that level. You try to beat the boss this time. You become aggressive or play better this time. When you lose, you better yourself, make yourself robust and become aggressive.

By just following gamification in your life, won’t lead you to success.

However, the uncertainty of it, the difficulty of life, will lead you to focus on your goals more, get them done, and become stronger every day. In every game, every level is harder than the previous one. Like in life, every day, or every year can be harder than the previous one.

How you play the game of life builds your character. It makes you stronger, wiser, and aggressive. In that failure, you learn your strengths and weaknesses.

The Takeaway

Set goals or create systems to achieve them every day.

Have a reward when you achieve your goals

Set timely goals, set daily goals, or hourly, to be efficient.

Use technology to track your goals.

Life is uncertain, but the fun is playing the game.