What Are Self-Motivational Games and Their Types?

Defining self-motivational games

Even if this might not be by the book, I came to call the results of turning various projects and activities into games self-motivational games. And more precisely:

A self-motivational game is 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.

In other words, when you turn a project or activity into a fun game or a collection of games, then your motivation and drive to design and play this project or activity game becomes a readily accessible resource. Doing something extra to motivate yourself becomes redundant and unnecessary.

There are various ways we could classify whatever we are up to. And you could come up with your types of self-motivational games. Here is how I see them.

Two types of projects and activities to gamify

There are two primary types of activities that you can turn into games. And these types cover everything that you want, plan, or are up to in your life.

These are:

Concrete projects and activities, and
The management part of them, including time management.

That enables you to get twice the game-playing fun out of each project. Isn’t this awareness brilliant?!

I unwittingly turned project management into fun games and suddenly began enjoying it immensely, becoming eager to play with varying the design and developing it further.

Gamification of project and time management has inspired me to play more with the design of each of my projects. The adjustment of to-do lists in general and for each particular project ceased to be a tedious task, but instead a part of my self-motivational game design process.

The experience gathered, and the interest toward it resulted in a little book called Gameful Project Management, which is Book 1 in the “Gameful Life” book series.

Types of self-motivational games depending on the duration

Above, I drew your attention to two kinds of activities, depending on whether they are specific projects or the project management task. Apart from that, we can define whatever we are up to as escape-from and escape-to tasks. These are the types of tasks dependent on how we treat them with our actions and in our thoughts. Here is an article addressing that in detail:

How to Classify Tasks Based on What We Think and Do

And how that can help us to turn our projects into fun games

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There is another classification for your tasks, projects, and activities in Self-Gamification, which has to do with their duration.

They might cover very short periods, like writing a quick e-mail, or going through the latest post-delivery, to periods lasting hours, days, months, and years.

Project and time management games can also run for those periods of time: minutes (such as jotting down a new to-do or checklist), hourly, daily, monthly, or also yearly.

I do, however, discourage you from having yearly rounds for your self-motivational games. Or if you have them, make sure that you also have sub-rounds of months, weeks, and even days. The reason being that you need to keep your goals in sight and find the balance between smaller and bigger goals and game rounds of different duration. Otherwise, you might see yourself giving up your beloved project shortly before the finish line.

You might have heard the story of Florence Chadwick, an accomplished swimmer who gave up her attempt to cross the channel between Catalina Island and the California coastline in 1952 after fifteen hours in ice-cold water and thick fog. Shortly after leaving the water, she discovered she had been less than a mile from her destination. She told a reporter that she would have made it had she been able to see land. Later she accomplished the swim in a shorter time and very similar weather conditions. But that experience and her explanation remained metaphorical and symbolic for many.

In Self-Gamification, as the designer and player of your games, you can set the finish line in such a way as to have it in sight and be motivated to reach it.

You could, for example, base the length of a project game round on something other than calendar periods (a week, month, year). Just as in some games, a round finishes when a particular event occurs (a specific card appears, for example), you might use the tax year ending, a specific regular meeting occurring, or some other particular set of circumstances.

You need to be aware of these possibilities and play with them, not despite but including your current circumstances: where you are right now, what is happening in your life and around you, what you have and haven’t got at hand, your physical condition (e.g., tired or not), and also your state of mind.

Types of self-motivational games depending on their scope and design

And then, there is classification depending on the scope and the corresponding design of the self-motivational games.

For a single project or activity game, these could be:

Booster games — quick self-motivational games to bring you into the flow of your project. Two examples:

A game I call Project Booster. In some of my trickier projects, I use a simple feedback system (usually a tally on a scrap of paper) to get my work flowing, and as soon as it does, I stop recording the points and just enjoy doing the work.
Competing with time games. You set a timer or even count seconds to perform or start an activity. The most famous example is the life-changing #5SecondRule used by Mel Robbins to overcome her procrastination and stop pressing the snooze button when the alarm clock went off in the morning. The countdown “5- 4- 3- 2- 1-GO” is a game in itself. The goal would be the next step that intuition, your gut, or something outside yourself draws your attention to; the rule is to start doing that within the 5 second period, and the feedback system is a quick assessment of whether you went ahead or not. And if you didn’t, then the winner would be the snooze button.

Keep going games — Those you develop to persevere to bring a project to a desired conclusion or to pursue an activity of your choice, such as exercising. A personal example that resulted in a small book:

5 Minute Perseverance Game. The rules of the game are straightforward. You take a project or activity in the game. You have to pursue the project for at least five minutes a day. If you do it, you earn a point. If you don’t, then you lose the point to your procrastinating self. And if you persevere for less than five minutes, you got half a point with the other half going to the procrastinating part of yourself. You can read more about this game in the following article:

Writing Was My First Game

And it won’t be my last

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Stop in Time and Take a Break Games — You reward yourself for, for instance, switching your computer off for the day before a specific time in the evening, or for taking a break from a project and doing something else. The latter can be either relaxing or another type of work altogether.

A famous example for both Stop in Time and Take a Break Games is the widely known Pomodoro Technique of twenty-five minutes work segments (the Pomodoros), after which you have to take a three to five-minute break. After every four Pomodoros, you take a more extended break of fifteen to thirty minutes.

For managing multiple projects and activities:

Project and time management games — You could see these as more massive games integrating the above single games into a daily, weekly, and monthly games, or ones of a longer duration.

Well-being games — These are all the well-being and healthy habits you want to practice. There are usually more than one, and they also need juggling.

A word on self-motivational multi-player games

The process of motivating ourselves and turning a project or activity into a game is a single-player game. Only you can say, and often mostly in retrospect, what suited you and what didn’t in your self-motivational design. Here is an article describing two reasons for that:

2 Reasons Why Gamifying Your Life is a Game of Solitaire

The player and the place of turning life into a game

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Most projects and many activity games are, however, multi-player games. You might perceive your part of the work as a single-player game, but in most cases, you interact with other people, who play their role in that game. An example of that is writing. Here is an article addressing that:

How to See Writing as a Multiplayer Game?

It takes a village to hone creativity

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The same applies to project and time management games. You need to interact with others while at least playing them, but also while designing them. These games have a brilliant feature that each of the players can create their own designs for their part of the game. But they will also have some common rules — or even tools (apps), which often feel like separate games in themselves — to connect project and time management games of individual players into a collective one.

Wrapping up

Here is what I wrote and emphasized in my book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula. I also shared it in my online course on Udemy, Motivate Yourself by Turning Your Life Into Fun Games, which preceded the book:

There is no bad design in Self-Gamification.

The same applies to your perception of how to turn something or anything in your life into fun games.

Even if I have been turning my life into games systematically for several years now, I still learn, and I continue to test. I hope never to stop. My passion and the fun I have in the process seem to guarantee that I will never stop.

But the above classifications, especially the one for the self-motivational design types, might change. In fact, I expect enrichment in numbers and quality of them, as I continue designing, playing, and sharing Self-Gamification.

This article represents a mixture of new material and the content from the following four books:

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed reading this article. I’d love to learn about your epiphanies and ideas that might have appeared while reading this story.

— Victoria

P.S. To keep in touch, subscribe to my newsletter, 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.