One Can’t and Five Don’ts in Turning Life into Fun Games

Turning our lives into games gives us a possibility for the endless, immediate, and effortless resourcefulness. But there are a few things you can’t and shouldn’t do if you want to turn your life into fun games successfully.

The text below is a lightly adjusted excerpt from my book, Self-Gamification Happiness Formula: How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games, which describes the Self-Gamification approach in detail.

A little glossary beforehand:

Self-Gamification: Self-Gamification is the art of turning our own lives into games. It is the application of game design elements to our own lives. Self-Gamification is a self-help approach showing us how to be playful and gameful, and bringing anthropology, kaizen, and gamification-based methods together. In Self-Gamification, we are both the designers and the players of our self-motivational games. Self-Gamification equals approaching life gamefully.

Self-motivational game: A real-life project or activity that you adjust in such a way that it feels like a fun game, with which you are eager and happy to engage, both in terms of its design and the playing of it.

The One Can’t:

You can’t complain and play your self-motivational games at the same time

I learned this wisdom before I started turning my life into games. Maybe even before I ever tried to deliberately turn any activity into a game. The wisdom comes from the many resources Ariel and Shya Kane provide on the topics of awareness, and living in the moment. One of my favorite videos made by the Kanes is “Transformational Tips For The Workplace.”

In this video, Ariel and Shya Kane formulated three brilliant and to the point tips on how to work efficiently and have success at work. If you watch it, make sure to watch the whole video. It’s less than three minutes long. You will be utterly inspired. The transformational tip for workplace #2 is called “Close Your Complaint Department”:

You should recognize that if you are complaining, that’s the only thing you can be doing. Work, complain, choose one. That goes back to that Second Principle again. [Author’s addition: ‘No two things can occupy the same you at the same time.’ — Ariel and Shya Kane] You can only do one thing at a time. If you’re complaining, that’s your moment. You don’t get any work accomplished. — Ariel and Shya Kane, Transformational Tips For The Workplace

Here’s what to do when you have turned your life into games, and you observe that your starting point — where you are right now — is a complaint, which is a form of an upset: stop, become aware that you are complaining, and then choose whether you want to complain further or take the next step in the project game you were playing until you opened “Your Complaint Department.”

The 1st Don’t:

Don’t stop playing

If you want to turn your whole life into games, or at least many aspects of it and not just one project, you need to practice.

Play, design, and play again. Then go back to adjusting your designs and testing them again. In other words, you “level up” in your game of being a self-motivational game designer.

Of course, as in any other game you can — in your mind’s eye — lose (or “die”) any time. But you can also start a new round and win (“rise”) again. And again.

Here’s what to do when you think you have lost in your self-motivational games:

Practice, practice, practice, and always start with awareness.

When you practice, succeeding becomes a constant byproduct. With time, your goal might turn out to be to become more skilled in your life’s game and all the project and activity games within it, including relaxing, being with your family, being present and concentrating, or concrete projects, either technical or artistic.

The thing I love most about Self-Gamification is that I never have to finish practicing it and playing my self-motivational games. I can try out various projects at different times of the year, during different life circumstances, and with altering states of mind.

These endless possibilities have never been as visible to me as they are now, when I experience my life as a bundle of fun and exciting games.

The 2nd Don’t:

Don’t forget to record your points

You won’t be able to avoid thinking about and daydreaming of your project game instead of actually playing it. Don’t judge yourself for it, but bring yourself back to where you are. And feel free to appreciate it as soon as you observe yourself coming back to the present moment and noticing how you move from one little point in your life to another. Even the mental, “One more point for me!” might draw the corners of your mouth and eyes into a smile.

I noticed that I was more diligent about recording the points and bonus points some months (or weeks and days) than others. At those times, when I rarely forgot to record points, it felt as if I had slowed down a little. Before looking at the score, I imagined I would have achieved less because I took time to record all those points. Even if these were only seconds, they did accumulate into minutes, didn’t they? But when I looked at both the score and what I had managed in the project, I discovered that I actually completed much more than when I hurried through and forgot to record the points.

The paradox here was also that, although recording points is technically an additional task in itself, it didn’t feel like I had worked any harder. I had actually had more fun than in those activities for which I didn’t record the points. Here we go again: the success of the game, the feeling of satisfaction as well as the success of the projects, resulted from allowing myself to appreciate every moment of the game and give me time to have fun playing it.

Appreciating what you do with points and also having breaks between the steps (taking a detour to another project or activity game, for example) will let you both recognize what you have done so far, and give your ideas space to ripen, so that the next small step will occur with less effort, more fun, and more creativity.

The 3rd Don’t:

Don’t be too serious about recording your points

However, let’s remember not to be too serious about recording the score. I would like to urge you not to dwell too much on your score. Don’t judge yourself if you forgot to record a point. Your feedback system is supposed to increase your fun, not be an exact record and punish you if you don’t manage to do something or to record everything meticulously.

Here is a lesson I learned in the September 2017 round of my project time management activities, which I like calling the Project (“Crush”) Management Game. At some point into the game I realized that I hadn’t recorded all of the scores immediately after accomplishing a task or attending to a project, and when later trying to recall how many points I should have earned, I couldn’t remember. At first I found it frustrating. But then I reminded myself that in video games you didn’t manage to gather all the treasures available out there either. Some of them needed to be left behind if I wanted to move forward and keep going. I loved this realization because it also showed that sometimes when I didn’t record my score, it was because I was in the flow and enjoying the projects I was working on. So the points I didn’t log were the treasures I didn’t retrieve along the way. But while forgetting those, I gathered others. And I got the best rewards of all — a smile on my face, the warm feeling of achieving and completing something, and the joy of having moved forward.

The ease I felt in myself, as well as honing my creativity and gameful attitude, helped me to come up with a design where I wouldn’t forget how many points I had made in any particular day, because there were only one hundred and forty-four available (one point for every 10 minutes = 144 points for 24 hours).

The 4th Don’t:

Don’t try to find one perfect framework for your self-motivational games

I would now like to draw your attention to one critical lesson.

There is no bad design in Self-Gamification.

Or at least only you can say, and in retrospect, what suited you and what didn’t.

I discovered this truth myself many times with writing, and also from a story Elizabeth Gilbert (author of the famous memoir Eat, Pray, Love) told of having to cut a ten-page short story by thirty percent:

“The new version was neither better nor worse than the old version; it was just profoundly different.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

So are your designs, when you rework them, “profoundly different.”

Another wisdom in this direction comes from physics.

It is the uncertainty principle:

“The Uncertainty principle is also called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Werner Heisenberg stumbled on a secret of the universe: No thing has a definite position, a definite trajectory, or a definite momentum. Trying to pin a thing down to one definite position will make its momentum less well pinned down, and vice-versa.” — Wikipedia

So to “pin down” for sure what your design (or your project) feels like and whether you should make changes or not, take time testing it. Be your game designer’s (reminder: that is yourself) most engaged player. Play it for the length of the round you set up, make notes and suggestions for improvements, and then implement these before starting the next round of your games.

The 5th Don’t:

Don’t stop learning and discovering

I once read a quote by Sandra Bullock, where she urges to

always be the student.

It applies to life in general, and to Self-Gamification. I often experience epiphanies and recognize new things several times a day. Or I rediscover those I had earlier, in a new context. There is always a new context, even if we try to tell ourselves otherwise.

I discovered that when I observe the flow of my project and project management games non-judgmentally, along with those changing contexts and circumstances (one of which is my mood), my thought processes no longer bother me the way they used to. Instead, seeing them without reproach helps me to investigate different strategies for my self-motivational games in varying conditions, and adjust them accordingly.

So what do I think now after playing this game every day for several years? I believe that my experience and creativity will continue evolving from round to round, from one project game to another, from one move I make in each of those games to another, from one moment of my life to another.

Here is a brilliant quote illustrating the dynamics of practicing a gameful and playful style of life:

Creativity grows out of a certain type of hard work, combining curious exploration with playful experimentation and systematic investigation. New ideas and insights might seem like they come in a flash, but they usually happen after many cycles of imagining, creating, playing, sharing, and reflecting. — Mitchel Resnick, Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play

Immediate and continuous effects

A quick reminder to be here, where you are right now, in this moment of your life fully, with will, and attention. Because when you do, then each moment will feel amazing and crisp. All these new moments will also accumulate and will facilitate your practice and experience of life as a fantastic, always changing and exciting collection of your favorite games.

The text above is an edited excerpt from my book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula: How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games. I hope you enjoyed reading it, and it inspired you to see what is possible when you turn your life into fun games.

— Victoria Ichizli-Bartels (= Itsy Bitsy Bartels = Vica)

P.S. Thank you for reading this article! If you want to learn more about turning life into fun games (in addition to my work here), subscribe to my (occasional = mostly monthly) newsletter, Optimist Writer. For blog posts on turning life into fun games, tick the Optimist Writer’s Blog.

Here are some of my other articles on turning life into fun games:

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.