How to Never Stop Playing Your Writing and Publishing on Medium Games

By remembering and following the “turn-your-life-into-games” gameplay loop

Writing and publishing on Medium is a game. Medium is also a massively multiplayer online game and platform.

Every topic you address is a part of your writing and publishing on Medium game. Or rather a game collection.

Every article you write and publish is part of this game collection. And the process of creating each of them is a game collection in itself.

So inside each of these Medium-story-games, there are many mini-games. One to come up with the topic you want to write about. Another to create a headline, followed by finding the featured image or coming up with a subtitle.

And the multiple “writing sections and subsections and paragraphs” games follow. They can be intercepted by finding more images, researching quotes, and references mini-games. These are concluded with the epic games of revising, editing with Grammarly, final read, and keyword/tag identification, concluded by the exciting submitting or publishing game.

This is your game collection, both in terms of its design and flow. So you design and play them. It is your self-motivational game design you are responsible for.

Exploring the game of this article

Writing this article for you is my self-motivational game — one of the real-life projects I turn into a fun game for me. If I am excited about it, there is a chance you will enjoy it too. If I am not enthusiastic about what I do, there is little chance you or anyone else will enjoy reading it.

Each stage of creating this article served as a design for the next one and a level in this game. During my morning routine, I came up with many versions of the headline and angle to look at this article's topic. And it had its appeal from all those angles. I had fun coming up with different ideas. But at some point, I wanted to taste another activity game inside my Medium game. I couldn’t wait to start putting words on my screen and test how it will go.

As I became aware of that, it dawned on me. Every step on the way to an idea, then jotting down the tentative title on a scrap of paper, then testing the title with headline analyzer, and starting writing the article, as well as doing everything in-between, including breakfast, helping my children with home-schooling and so much more, followed one essential gameplay loop, especially when I felt that I won that mini-game.

A gameplay loop

I formulated the gameplay loop for the “turning life into games” game in this story:

First, I introduced what a gameplay loop is. Here is a summary of it in my own words.

A loop in a game is basically one step you repeatedly do in the same way to make progress in your game. Each of these steps has components.

Just think of your actual, physical step when you walk. It includes raising your foot, holding balance while moving the foot forward, setting the foot down, shifting your weight, and repeating the whole process with the other foot.

A game loop versus a mini-game

Writing a paragraph for your Medium could seem like such a loop. But I would say it is a mini-game, which has its goal to write the paragraph, rules being maybe to write it in one sitting, within three minutes, or with as many sentences as the dice, you rolled indicated. The feedback system can either be inside your head, on a scrap of paper, or in a file on your computer. Whatever is fun and easy to maintain.

But your gameplay loop is different. It is related to the approaches that Self-Gamification — the art of turning life into fun games — embraces.

These three approaches are:

• Anthropology → nonjudgmental and objective study of culture. Note: a culture can be anything, even yourself (Credits for this idea: Ariel & Shya Kane), every person you interact with, or even yourself, but in various circumstances and situations.
• Kaizen → breaking any challenge, path to a goal, rewards, moments into small, effortlessly digestible, doable, and quickly achievable bits.
• Gamification → bringing game elements and techniques into real-life situations, projects, and activities.

If we translate these into a gameplay loop, you will get three sub-steps for your one-step (loop) in the game:

1. Look = Be aware of where and how the world around you and you are (or are not) and see all that non-judgmentally, without labeling or validating. Look also at your thought processes and feelings. It is also about becoming aware of what you want, need, and can do right now with the smallest, effortless bits, and what would be the most fun way to do them. In another way, have your, as I like calling it, “Fun Detecting Antenna” on when you identify what might be fun and easy for you to use right now. Is it to set a timer, background music, performing your task in an unusual place (like under a table or sitting on the floor outside of your little home-office), or anything else? Do this assessment quickly, as you would do it in a game.
2. Go = Make that little step as you identified it. Do it quickly (= don’t overthink it) but give yourself enough time to experience it.
3. Measure = As soon as you took this mini-step, take a look at your “excitement barometer.” This is also an assessment activity. If you feel excited about what you did, you went in the direction to your win-state in the mini-game you are playing. Or that could also mean that you are further excited about the mini-game you play. If it is not the case, you might be on a side-quest — an additional quest you haven’t planned or preferred, but which still earns you experience points. Whichever path you took, the next step is to go to sub-step one of this gameplay loop and look again.

The game(s) is (are) never over.

If you look closely at this loop, you will see that it applies to anything you are up to, especially if you want to turn it into games. Even turning life into games itself has the same loop. Thus, this gameplay loop applies also to any mini-game you play when you write on Medium.

While writing this article, I played many mini-games. Both connected to writing this article, but also other, such as assisting my children in doing their tasks during homeschooling, household chores, which I could do in-between, drinking water, having a break, reading e-mails and personal messages on social media, congratulating friends to their birthdays, and many more.

I tried to concentrate on each one separately I took on to play. It didn’t always work, and I didn’t excel in each of them as I would prefer, sometimes being in a hurry and thinking that I wasn’t good enough with what I was doing. But reminding myself of the simple gameplay loop above helped me tremendously to relax and succeed.

So each of the mini-games I played while writing this article worked perfectly if I looked at how I felt, what I wanted or needed to play, where I wanted to go in any particular mini-game, how I could do that. Then I made that step and assessed (measured). And then I looked, went, and assessed again.

As my day progressed, I realized that a game flows and I feel successful if there is movement, if the story of my day evolves further, and that I am the author of this story.

I was briefly upset that I wasn’t progressing with this article when my children asked for my help. But then I chose to concentrate on the homeschooling game and gave myself a chance to enjoy it. My six-year-old daughter ended up finishing most of the tasks she had in her exercise book for two days in just a few hours. Now, she is happily busy with a learning game on the computer, and I have time to finish writing this article.

I’m super happy that I had this wish to search for a gameplay loop for writing on Medium. While doing so, I discovered that it equaled the fundamental playing loop of having fun with what I am up to right now while turning it — be it a Medium article, household chore, homeschooling, or relaxing — into fun games for myself.

Now, all there is to say is to wish you to enjoy designing and playing your multiple mini-games in your daily game collection. And to let all of them, including writing a story on Medium, bring you immense joy. At the same time, I hope you enjoy the utterly simple and tested through centuries game loop (even if it might not have been formulated this way until now) — look, make a step, and assess. Then look where you want to go, go, and recheck your excitement barometer. Then repeat.

In other words:

1. Look.
2. Make a step.
3. Assess.

Repeat. And have fun.

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this article, then in addition to the ones referred to above, you might also like these:

P.S.

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