How to Conquer the Information Overload Gamefully

The challenge

In the internet interconnected world, the information becomes a much too easily accessible good.

There is even a well-known term for that — the information overload.

“Information overload (also known as infobesity, infoxication, information anxiety, and information explosion) is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about that issue. Generally, the term is associated with the excessive quantity of daily information.” — Wikipedia

Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of the world is online for big chunks of the day (especially during the working hours), there is even more information every day. Those of us, who don’t work on the “front line” during the pandemic, can express our generosity mostly online nowadays. So there are valuable short and long bits of information in all possible digital formats. These come from official sources, press, entertainment industry, our families, friends, bosses, employees, colleagues, communities we joined, and social media we frequent. But there are also libraries giving free access to books, films, and more, museums, zoos, culture centers, and theaters offering online tours and performances, and so many more.

The workdays for all of us have become a fusion of our work and personal lives.

The oncoming information, especially the one about the COVID-19 situation, lockdowns, and reopening, affects both our work and personal lives, and it has never been more challenging to draw a line between them.

The main effect of that multidimensional information overload is a profound confusion and a feeling of being lost.

How can we handle all this overflow of the information, especially when we start a workday?

The gameful solution

A perspective change is often the best solution in confusing situations.

How can we view the information flow differently?

I discovered that the gameful approach to life provides effortless and joyful resourcefulness in all areas of our lives and most circumstances, including times of crisis.

While writing the Book 1 of the “Gameful Life” series, Gameful Project Management, I have discovered that what I was creating with my non-fiction books and articles on Self-Gamification, were not the ideas to replace the well-establisher others. Instead, I was creating “awareness boosters.”

Even the subtitle of the Gameful Project Management book has the phrase in it: Self-Gamification Based Awareness Booster for Your Project Management Success.

To find out what an awareness booster is and how information coming upon us can become such a booster, we need first to identify what awareness boosters are. Let’s start with awareness.

What is awareness?

Awareness occurs when we observe ourselves, the world around us, and our thought processes about and reactions toward it, non-judgmentally. Ariel and Shya Kane, whose inspiring work I often quote, define awareness as follows:

“A nonjudgmental, non-preferential seeing. It’s an objective, noncritical witnessing of the nature or what we call the ‘isness’ of any particular circumstance or situation. It can be described as an ongoing process in which you are bringing yourself back to the moment, rather than complaining silently about how you would prefer this moment to be.” — Ariel and Shya Kane, Practical Enlightenment

What is a booster?

There are various definitions of boosters in real life.

But there is only one purpose for boosters in games.

One of the pioneers and most known experts in gamification, Yu-kai Chou, defines the boosters in games in the following way.

He says a booster is

“a reward that allows people to play the game better, to power up their gameplay.” — “Game Design Technique #31” in frames of the Octalysis Prime videos available on YouTube

In his acclaimed book Actionable Gamification, Yu-kai Chou writes,

“Have you ever played the game Super Mario and felt blissfully excited when you picked up a mushroom or flower that made you stronger? These are considered Boosters in a game, where a player obtains something to help them achieve the win-state effectively. Different from simply leveling up or acquiring new skills, Boosters are usually limited to certain conditions.” — Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification

In the video quoted above and in his book, Yu-kai Chou describes these conditions to be the ability to use the benefits the boosters bring only inside the games, in which you got them, and also the fact that you can lose those boosters.

“Once you get hit by an enemy, you return back to your ‘natural state’ prior to the boosters.” — Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification

So, according to Yu-kai Chou, by itself, a booster means nothing. You can only use it in a game. For example, you might get a sword after killing a certain amount of monsters. You can’t use this sword anywhere else than in the game, where you earned it.

The “information game”

Since we can turn anything into again, or, in other words, approach anything as if it was a fun game, of which we are both designers and players, then the information generation and consumption is a game, or rather a collection of games, too.

So how can we play this “information game”?

First of all, we need to be willing to allow the incoming information to inspire us, in other words, to boost the gameplay in our real-life games.

Here is what I wrote in my book Gameful Project Management on awareness boosters:

“That is what all non-fiction — especially those on personal and business development — and also some fiction books, video courses, documentaries, films, inspiring workshops, seminars, and conferences, as well as meet-ups with peers and friends, are. If we allow it, they can all boost our awareness of what else is possible, in addition to what we already know.” — Victoria Ichizli-Bartels, Gameful Project Management

That will allow the incoming information to inspire us comes from the voluntary participation component of the Self-Gamification game.

“Voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken

The goal, the rules, and the feedback system reveal themselves in the mission, the flow of the gameplay, and the way you are rewarded in the game you play, each step of the way.

Your mission

Your mission in the “information game” is to identify the awareness boosters for your other real-life games. It also includes “securing” those boosters, which means either immediate use, or putting them “into a safe place” where you can retrieve them when you play the corresponding challenge, project, or activity game.

The gameplay loop

The gameplay loop determines both the rules and the flow of your “information game.”

“At the heart of your game’s design, there are core mechanics and the core gameplay loop. In short, it’s the main activities that structure the entire design, and the players engage in repeatedly, in a looping sequence. It’s part of the essence of the game, something you cannot remove without fundamentally altering the experience.” — Game Analytics

Here is a suggestion for the gameplay loop of the “information game”:

1. Take one piece of information (either chosen by you or given/recommended to you by others).
2. Pay your full attention to this piece. Imagine that you have no other task to do at this moment.
3. As you read, watch, or listen to that piece, identify any awareness boosters, in other words, anything that resonates with you.
4. Simultaneously, recognize which of the games from your real-life game collection can be powered up by which of these awareness boosters.
5. Activate the awareness booster; in other words, go and play the challenge, project, or activity game, which the booster can power up, and apply it there. Or,
6. Save/secure it for later, which is write down somewhere, best in the notes for your project or activity game, the information this awareness booster provides, and how you can apply it to power up your real-life (work or personal) games. An idea: generate a distilled piece of information containing only awareness boosters and send them to yourself in a row of e-mails with the challenge, project, or activity game name in the subject line and call for action along with the specified awareness booster in the body.
7. Reward yourself — with a point, a badge, a star, a glittery sticker, a fist pump, a little dance — if you identified at least one awareness booster and mapped it to one of your real-life games. Reward yourself even more if you acted upon it and activated your awareness booster.

Feel free to modify or add to this loop. You are the designer and the player of your “information game.” In the end, it is your responsibility to make this game enticing for you. No one else spends so much time with the player of your life’s games, yourself, as you do and can experience your true self in each moment.

All there is left for me to do is to wish you to enjoy the “information game” and all your challenges, projects, and activities quests and games.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article, and it brought you some light into the dark tunnel of the information overload. I don’t mean the end of the tunnel, which doesn’t exist. Instead, I hope the information in it this article could serve you as an awareness booster and do that right now, right this moment like a torch with endless battery life and as much light as you need to illuminate what empowers you.

If you would like to get more information (;-)) on Self-Gamification, then I invite you to visit victoriaichizlibartels.com/gameful-life, and please let me know if you wish me to address a specific topic in terms of turning it into fun and engaging games.