Thanks! I’ve been looking into gamification recently, with Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, and this post seems to be very much in the same lines.
I’m also testing a variant of the Habit Judo system from MetaFilter. Instead of trying to install specific habits like the habit judo thing does, I’m just assigning scoring criteria to everyday activities (1 point for every 25 minutes of uninterrupted, focused work, 1 point for getting up before 7, 1 point for every kilometer run and so on), and summing daily scores with a pseudorandom randint [1, 6] for each point for the day. So far I’ve only done this a couple of days, so no proper idea if it’ll keep working in long term. Seems like an interesting idea so far.
This is just doing the artificial task thing so far, will need to see if it could be made to address the balancing failure modes you describe as well.
Why the random aspect? The “Habit Judo” link includes this as well, but didn’t seem to offer an explanation either.
Personally, I’ve just kept a calendar on my wall, with check boxes for each habit. Looking at it and seeing a string of failures or half-completes is usually enough motivation, without needing to bribe myself. I tend to do horrible with self-bribes, though :)
I’d be interested to know how well this works, especially if you get more than short-term success (say, more than 4 uninterrupted weeks) for a non-trivial habit.
As I previously mentioned in a comment to a different post, my gamification experiments all backfired horribly. One of my own systems looked pretty similar to Habit Judo (using little buckets and marbles instead) and accomplished nothing. Maybe I was too greedy or my rewards were flawed, so if it works for you, I might experiment some more.
I kinda worry about the extrinsic motivation snuffing out the intrinsic one too. I haven’t really figured out a good reward mechanic yet, I’m kinda hard-pressed on finding stuff outside things I’d do anyway, things I shouldn’t do in any case and things that’d probably mess me up if I’d try to turn them into rewards.
The more interesting thing in the system is just the plain keeping track of stuff aspect. I get to codify the things I want to accomplish into easily chunkable bits (current rule of thumb seems to be that the stuff that earns one point is achievable in under half an hour), and I get an accumulating log of how I’ve been doing. So there’s a combination of setting up chains I don’t want to break and starting to pay more attention to things I’m explicitly measuring.
I’d like to have some kind of leveling up mechanic that’d bring extra capabilities, like the Habit Judo thing has, but haven’t figured out what that’d be. Habit Judo only lets you add an extra habit after leveling up, so a somewhat similar thing would be to actually have a daily point cap and expanding on that. So you could only have, say, 6 points that count each day at level 1, and then it’d go up to 8 at level 2 and so on. And you’d also be expected to max things out each day in order to get the score for the level up in a week or two. The other thing is to add more scoring criteria.
Thanks! I’ve been looking into gamification recently, with Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, and this post seems to be very much in the same lines.
I’m also testing a variant of the Habit Judo system from MetaFilter. Instead of trying to install specific habits like the habit judo thing does, I’m just assigning scoring criteria to everyday activities (1 point for every 25 minutes of uninterrupted, focused work, 1 point for getting up before 7, 1 point for every kilometer run and so on), and summing daily scores with a pseudorandom randint [1, 6] for each point for the day. So far I’ve only done this a couple of days, so no proper idea if it’ll keep working in long term. Seems like an interesting idea so far.
This is just doing the artificial task thing so far, will need to see if it could be made to address the balancing failure modes you describe as well.
Why the random aspect? The “Habit Judo” link includes this as well, but didn’t seem to offer an explanation either.
Personally, I’ve just kept a calendar on my wall, with check boxes for each habit. Looking at it and seeing a string of failures or half-completes is usually enough motivation, without needing to bribe myself. I tend to do horrible with self-bribes, though :)
Intermittent reinforcement. Brains seem to get hooked on that better than to deterministic rewards.
The calendar chain sounds like it does most of the same stuff as this one does, and is a lot simpler. I’ll keep that one in mind too.
I’d be interested to know how well this works, especially if you get more than short-term success (say, more than 4 uninterrupted weeks) for a non-trivial habit.
As I previously mentioned in a comment to a different post, my gamification experiments all backfired horribly. One of my own systems looked pretty similar to Habit Judo (using little buckets and marbles instead) and accomplished nothing. Maybe I was too greedy or my rewards were flawed, so if it works for you, I might experiment some more.
I kinda worry about the extrinsic motivation snuffing out the intrinsic one too. I haven’t really figured out a good reward mechanic yet, I’m kinda hard-pressed on finding stuff outside things I’d do anyway, things I shouldn’t do in any case and things that’d probably mess me up if I’d try to turn them into rewards.
The more interesting thing in the system is just the plain keeping track of stuff aspect. I get to codify the things I want to accomplish into easily chunkable bits (current rule of thumb seems to be that the stuff that earns one point is achievable in under half an hour), and I get an accumulating log of how I’ve been doing. So there’s a combination of setting up chains I don’t want to break and starting to pay more attention to things I’m explicitly measuring.
I’d like to have some kind of leveling up mechanic that’d bring extra capabilities, like the Habit Judo thing has, but haven’t figured out what that’d be. Habit Judo only lets you add an extra habit after leveling up, so a somewhat similar thing would be to actually have a daily point cap and expanding on that. So you could only have, say, 6 points that count each day at level 1, and then it’d go up to 8 at level 2 and so on. And you’d also be expected to max things out each day in order to get the score for the level up in a week or two. The other thing is to add more scoring criteria.