What is the Setup for Your Real-Life Games?
When designing a game or a gamified solution — and this is what you do for yourself when you turn something or anything in your life into fun games,
it is important to create a setup where the user is given a goal, as well as a variety of tools and methodologies to strategize towards reaching that goal. — Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification
And when you turn a project or activity into fun games, then you also play a game, a “game designer’s game.” I call this game the Self-Gamification (= self-help + gamification) game.
The main goal of your Self-Gamification game is to make your reality engaging, entertaining, and fun.
Let’s take the example of one project that you procrastinate and therefore want to turn into fun, for you, game, or a collection of games. In this case, you are on a mission to transform each bit of the project into an enticing and fun activity for the project game player, yourself.
The roles you play in the Self-Gamification game
The mission of the Self-Gamification game reveals that it is a role-playing game. Here, you play at least two specific roles. These are the roles of designers and players of your self-motivational games, which are the projects, activities, or challenges turned into games. For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to these as “project games.”
Thus, when you play the Self-Gamification game, you are, first of all, your project game designer. But you are also the project game player.
While being in the latter role, you give the designer of your project game several or maybe many cards, which are nothing else than your thoughts and feelings toward that project game and, of course, anything that the project comprises.
Then you, as the Self-Gamification game player (= project game designer), come up with an improved project game design that will prompt you to leave the Self-Gamification game and start playing the project game.
In other words, as soon as you stop procrastinating your project as a result of your gameful approach to it, you win this round of your Self-Gamification game.
Definition of a setup
So, we have a great goal in the Self-Gamification game. Now, it’s time to think of a setup defining the frames, in which the Self-Gamification game player in you can reach the goal of making your project feel like a brilliant game for the project game player part of you.
Before looking at the setup of the Self-Gamification game, let’s find out what the word “setup” means in general and in games.
In general, a setup is:
“the way in which things are organized or arranged.” — Cambridge Dictionary
In video games, it would be the hardware and the software you need to set up to play a specific game.
In a board or a card game, these would be one or more boards, decks of cards, dice, figurines, and possibly others.
The description of how to lay out the tools you have so that you can start playing the game also belongs to the setup.
The setup in the Self-Gamification game
So what is the setup in the Self-Gamification game?
Hm, that is a tricky question.
Once, I wrote a little book, 5 Minute Perseverance Game, and I wrote it before I had heard about gamification. I structured this book as a description of a board game. Like most board game descriptions, it has a section called “Setup.” It’s short in the book, so I quote it in full length here, and I also add the title and the beginning of the subsequent section called the “Flow of Play and Rules.”
“Setup
You put yourself in front of what your project demands to be carried out. That could mean a notebook and a pen or a computer for a writer, a guitar and sheet music for an aspiring musician, or a dictionary and exercise book for a language learner and so on.
Then you sit, stand, lie down, or take whatever other starting position you need to work on your project. And…
Flow of Play and Rules
You play.
Well… you work on your project. “
— Victoria Ichizli-Bartels, 5 Minute Perseverance Game
Thus, anything you need for the project would be a part of your setup also in the Self-Gamification game.
But this is not all.
Anything you are aware of about your project game player (yourself), especially at the moment of turning that specific project into a fun game (or a set of games), is a part of your setup.
Game analogies
Some games have several decks of cards, such as a deck of action cards and a deck of situation cards, for example. Then, there could be small cards to indicate a place on the table where you need to put the sets of the other cards.
Let’s imagine you have several decks of cards describing the characteristics, actions, circumstances of your project game player, and what you know about this player — yourself.
Here is a list of your figurative decks of cards:
- Feelings,
- Judgments and Prejudices,
- Things, which ignite your curiosity,
- Things you are passionate about,
- External challenges,
- Internal responses, and
- Many others.
Besides, you don’t know exactly which cards make up these decks of cards because it is a collecting game.
Some games, like Pokemon, are designed for collectors. For them, part of the game itself is trading and hunting down all available cards to complete your collection. — Brian Tinsman, The Game Inventor’s Guidebook
And like in those super popular collecting card games, the producer of your life’s games — the life itself and how it reflects in the interaction between the world around you and yourself — always comes up with a new “card.” So it’s an endless collecting card game, where you as the designer of your project game (and thus the player in the Self-Gamification Game) can trade cards with yourself as the project game player.
Here is another game that can serve as an analogy. It’s a video game I saw my five-year-old daughter recently playing. I don’t remember its name, but it was an interior design game. You get a customer unsatisfied with their living room, for example, and you have to come up with the solution for her with what you have in your store or warehouse. The goal is to make the customer happy. So you try out many different combinations of the furniture, colors on the wall, and accessories until your customer is satisfied and pays happily.
When you play turning a specific project into a fun game, you have a very similar situation. You get an unsatisfied and complaining customer (the player of your project game) — yourself — and you need to come up with a solution to make this customer happy to enjoy the project game, and above that, also be happy to engage in it in the first place.
Let’s bring back the card analogy. You have to design (or re-design) your project game in an enticing way with the cards you’ve been dealt with, plus maybe the default resources you had at the start of the game. In other words, you have to play the project game designer’s game with what you have at your disposal or can get easily and with the resources available to you. Not more, often less.
You might have another game analogy that would suit to symbolize the setup in your Self-Gamification game. There is no wrong way to do that in the same way as there is no false self-motivational design. The clue here is to be eager to study and explore.
Studying a setup can be a game too
In contrast to games in the traditional sense, the setup in the Self-Gamification game changes at least a little, but often considerably, every time you play it.
Although, also in “regular” games, we can perceive the setup differently at times, especially if a prolonged period had passed between two subsequent occasions of playing that game.
What do we do then? We study the setup and the rules.
That is what you do in the Self-Gamification game too. As the best self-motivational game designer, you study your project game player without judgment, as an anthropologist would do for the culture, she is eager to explore.
Thus, the ultimate tool to reveal your Self-Gamification game setup is the anthropologist’s role-playing game. In this game, you play the role of an anthropologist studying the culture of the project game player, in other words, yourself put in the context of all the factors, including your state of mind, of that project.
Three roles as a part of the Self-Gamification game setup
Thus, we have an amendment to make in addition to the statement above. We don’t have two roles in the Self-Gamification role-playing game, but three:
- The anthropologist “observing a culture of one — yourself.” — Ariel and Shya Kane, How to Have A Match Made in Heaven
- The Self-Gamification game player, who is, at the same time, the project game designer, and
- The project game player, the one who deals the cards with thoughts, feelings, and emotions to the other two players inside you.
And these roles, along with all they entail (all the figurative decks of cards they bring along), are the significant part of your colorful and dynamic Self-Gamification game setup.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Want more stories like this? Here they are:
