How To See What We Do As Games

Game design isn’t just a technological craft. It’s a twenty-first-century way of thinking and leading. And gameplay isn’t just a pastime. It’s a twenty-first-century way of working together to accomplish real change. — Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

Any project or activity contains or can contain the same components as games. Or at least, it includes the primary ones: goals, rules that the player must follow, feedback (or reporting) system, and voluntary participation.

Stories in Games and What We Do in Real Life

In a discussion about games, I also heard the following statement: each game has a story behind it.

But projects and activities have stories behind them too. Because they have goals. There are wishes and emotions connected to each project and activity. And each dream has its story.

Jane McGonigal, whom I quote many times in my work about Self-Gamification along with other famous authorities on game and gamification design, seems to agree. She says,

A compelling story makes the goal more enticing. — Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

Recognizing the story behind the goals of your project can be a precious gift, giving you insight into the reasons for it coming into existence. It might encourage the project to become part of your dreams (if it wasn’t before), or remind you of the beautiful or brilliant reasons why you started it in the first place.

If, however, you don’t find the story behind the project goals compelling, but still want to accomplish it, then you can build a compelling story of your own around it. There are no limits to creativity here or anywhere else.

Strategy in Games and Projects

Another component that was pointed out by a follower of Self-Gamification who, like me, is from outside the game and gamification design world, was the strategy.

After some contemplation, I realized that strategy is two-fold in Self-Gamification. There is strategy while designing self-motivational games, and also when you consider what moves to make as the player.

Since I am neither a gamer nor gamification designer or scholar, I referred my discussion partner to the expertise of others. But I could say one thing for sure, which is that strategy is a component of both games and any project or activity.

When it comes to the strategy in self-motivational game design, it is partly about setting the goal, and partly about designing the rules. When you play you set up a goal for the next (smallest, most effortless, most efficient) move, then consider how to reach it, while following the rules you developed as a designer.

Even the Oxford Dictionaries mention that various activities and businesses can be informally regarded as games.

Can a Project’s Flow Chart Be as Fun as a Leaderboard in a Board Game?

While I was spreading awareness of the benefits of developing various projects and activities into games, I got another fun question. The question was whether flow charts in a project plan could be created and laid out like a board game, and progress be followed by moving figurines along the board.

I immediately answered “Yes” and loved the idea. Of course, you would also need to record progress in another type of feedback system (one you have agreed with your customer or boss), but if this approach will benefit you, your colleagues, and the project, then, by all means, do it.

There are no limits to creativity here either. The trick is to see what you are doing as if it is a game. Mind you, not something to disregard as a waste of time, but something you are eager to be great at, like your favorite game.

Designing Projects and Activities as Games

We often put too much drama into our projects. But approaching them as a designer would while creating a fun game, can help to simplify and improve the whole process of carrying those projects out, remove the tragedy we might see in them — and often ourselves as their victims, and turn these activities into games that excite and engage us.

Of course, you need to be aware of what is happening while you design your project and all its components. If you notice that the design and its creation (such as making a board game) is taking too much time and has turned into an escape-to activity, then it is time to simplify it and make sure that you also work on the project itself, not only on adjusting its design.

It’s worth repeating the following: Starting with seeing the entire thing, ourselves and the world around us non-judgmentally is one key. The next key is to identify the next small, effortless step, also in designing your self-motivational games. And the third is to identify the game design elements for a system that will allow you to appreciate all those small steps in the most fun, simple and effortless way.

Being Serious about and Excellent in Games and Projects

Let’s touch on the topic of being serious about and excellent in what we do, and whether they mean the same thing.

I used to think that it was forbidden to approach anything in a relaxed, gameful way. I thought that if I wasn’t being serious, and even dramatic, about what I was up to I wouldn’t be (or be seen as) excellent.

But since discovering the anthropological approach to living in the moment, and having turned first writing then more projects into games, I realized that I could be both playful and excellent at the same time.

Detecting Fun in Games, Projects, and Self-Learning Processes

Another brilliant outcome of seeing what you are up to as games, and testing various projects and activities, is that you can more easily identify what is fun for you, what resonates with you, and what excites you.

I also discovered that I learn better, I am more open to new ideas, and that there are many more “Oh wow!” moments in the same day, than there would have been before. Life is so colorful now.

Even though I’ve been turning my life into games for several years, the more I gamify my life, the more I learn, and the more fun the learning process is — of Self-Gamification itself and of other new skill sets as well.

If you research more about the application of gamification, you will discover it is widely used for educational purposes. So if it is used in the learning systems designed by others, why not apply it in self-education too?

The Game Plans of Everyday Life

If you are still skeptical about the possibility of seeing what you do as games, then please answer the following question. You don’t need to tell anyone your answer. Have you got one or more of the following items recorded on paper, in an app, or stored in your head:

• To-do lists,
• Weekly, monthly, yearly, plans,
• Project plans,
• Road maps,
• Notes on how you want to accomplish specific tasks,
• Something similar?

I would bet that you have more than one of the above recorded and saved somewhere on scraps of paper, in notebooks, calendars or apps, either set by yourself or by others.

Then I have the following news for you:

These are also all Game Plans.

Thus, even before you started reading this article or any of my work on Self-Gamification, you were already a project game designer and player. You just didn’t know it and didn’t think of it that way.

Every One of Us is a Game Designer

I used to envy game designers, having the most fun job in the world. I was sorry that I wasn’t that interested in games.

After trying various art forms (including singing, playing guitar, painting, making jewelry, and decorations), I discovered that writing was the best one to express myself. So storytelling, both in fiction and nonfiction, was what attracted me most.

Yes, stories were also part of the games, but I wasn’t aware of that then. I often heard that writing was hard work. And if I thought of the time it took to write an entire manuscript, it did appear that way.

We often associate the time it takes to finish a project with how difficult it is.

A. J. Jacobs, the author who often turns his life into an experiment, says the following in his book My Life as an Experiment:

It’s a strange tic of our brain. Sometimes, the more goal-oriented we are, the less likely we are to attain that goal. If you really, really want something, you have to forget how much you want it. Or else you’ll be too nervous to get it. But dear Lord, that’s a cruel and paradoxical system evolution has devised. — A. J. Jacobs, My Life as an Experiment: One Man’s Humble Quest to Improve Himself by Living as a Woman, Becoming George Washington, Telling No Lies, and Other Radical Tests

Gamifying writing, and doing it for a specific work-in-progress for about five minutes a day, was the solution to this dilemma for me when it came to writing. It showed me that the writing process wasn’t hard at all, as long as I didn’t think of it as such, let go of any thoughts of finishing the manuscript, and instead just wrote.

It was then that I realized I didn’t have to envy game designers and gamers. I could design and treat anything as if it was a fun game! That was one of the best discoveries ever.

I realized that Self-Gamification allows me to treat myself as:

• my best (customer) player, and at the same time
• my favorite game designer, to whom I gladly give my feedback to improve our favorite games.

Emulating Favorite Games

So my advice is to emulate the games that you like or that make you curious, and bring their elements into your life.

Try them out. Observe how you argue with yourself and attempt to deviate from the rules you set up. Try not to judge the rules before you have let yourself feel what effect is caused by any game designed to increase motivation.

But don’t judge yourself for judging. It’s quite normal for most people, and observing the grudge you might hold against yourself, without judgment, will cause it to resolve itself in an instant.

If you don’t judge yourself for having thoughts about seriousness and so on, you might find humor in the whole situation.

More than once, I have found myself fretting about whether I chose the best activity for that part of the day. Thoughts such as “I would rather write than take the dishes out of the dishwasher, then I would get more points.” I was somehow sure that the dishwasher would earn me fewer points because it was easier than to write a page.

But then I observed the thoughts without judging them, had a good chuckle at the lack of sense in it, and came up with a fun idea instead: “I am the Super Mario now” and simply chose one track in the game instead of another. I realized that I might be earning a different number of points, but I would be faster on the more straightforward track (whichever of the paths I perceived as the easier one).

This idea of being a figurine in a video game made me smile and even hop in the kitchen and finish the chores with a wide grin. After checking the character description on the official website that described Mario as “Cheerful. Inspiring. Jumpy.”, I had to grin even more. Yes, I did become “cheerful” and “jumpy,” and also did my best to infect others with good mood and humor; thus, I hoped, inspiring them when I shared this experience with others.

A side-note: If you have heard about Chore Wars, then my little one person Role-Playing Game (RPG) might remind you of that. However, this fun family or office RPG is about organizing and delegating chores. In Self-Gamification, I am concentrating on only one person, myself. In addition, my one-person RPG is meant to be short.

I had similar experiences with other chores too. One of my first associations of household chores with games was the laundry. Once, when I was folding the clean and dry clothes, I realized that finding matching socks was like playing one of the Match Pairs Memory games.

I also saw that others draw such associations and bring the humor in what they do, too — often unwittingly applying gamification. On a German cooking TV show I saw years ago, a prominent restaurant chef, when challenged to include French fries with the meal, arranged them like Jenga bricks and claimed that they were Jenga potatoes.

During the 2018 Christmas holidays, my father-in-law said that he had had to play Tetris with the garbage because the trash containers were so full during the holiday season. He described turning the trash bags back and forth so that their shape would fit the small spaces left by the bags of other residents. I had to grin at that because, since practicing Self-Gamification, I had often also thought of it as playing “trash-Tetris” when I was throwing away our trash bags and trying to make one even layer of bags, even if the trash container wasn’t full yet.

Some Words in Conclusion

You can turn everything into fun, engaging games if you just get inspired by and draw similarities from games that already exist and also new ones that appear on a daily basis.

When you learn to see what you do, want, or have to do as games then even your procrastination stops being that and instead will look like an alternative route in the game you play. It will cease looking tragic and wrong, but just a trail you can leave at any time to pursue the path leading to the goal of your game instead.

A note to this article: It is a modified excerpt from Self-Gamification Happiness Formula: How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games.

P.S. To stay in touch, join my e-mail list, Optimist Writer.

About the author:

Victoria is a writer, instructor, and consultant with a background in semiconductor physics, electronic engineering (with a Ph.D.), information technology, and business development. While being a non-gamer, Victoria came up with the term Self-Gamification, a gameful and playful self-help approach bringing anthropology, kaizen, and gamification-based methods together to increase the quality of life. She approaches all areas of her life this way. Due to the fun she has, while turning everything in her life into games, she intends never to stop designing and playing them.