I came across Yu-kai Chou’s book, who is a master in the field of gamification and whose work is often cited as an example. On his website, https://yukaichou.com/, you can see in his blog that there are numerous techniques from different video games. However, the challenge is how to apply these techniques in real life when the task is to learn content from a textbook. How can you make it more fun? He suggests using the 8 Core Drives, but not all of them are applicable, especially when you’re on your own. For instance, using a collection technique like in Pokémon games doesn’t seem to translate well into real life. It feels like these techniques are mostly suited for virtual worlds or app development. However, if anyone knows how to make this work in real life, I’m all ears.
It’s a good question. How to gamify?
Fundamentals first:
What is a game?
Go figure that there are tomes devoted to pondering that question.
Here’s a not-all-inclusive guideline:
- It’s a game when you keep score.
Where have you yet to keep score?
A game for me is an objective with rules, and the rules allow for modifying the game’s difficulty and also serve as feedback.
Delightful!
What tasks of yours don’t have those attributes yet? 
I am currently studying the content of a manual. Actually, I wanted to apply extrinsic motivation to it, like badges, rankings, collections, and maybe even a sense of urgency or loss. But the problem is that since I’m doing it alone, I don’t really feel the urgency or loss because no one is monitoring me. Even if I tell myself that if I don’t learn the content today, I’ll give $5, it doesn’t make a difference because if I want to, I just won’t give it.
I felt this. Smh. I could have written that very sentence.
I was trying to find out what works for me.
I’m not a competitive person and I don’t care about streaks, badges and leaderboards… In fact I’m more likely to be annoyed to receive a completely meaningless “reward” (high five from the green owl, yay 
) when I forced myself to go through a boring lesson.
I also tried Habitica for a while and while I found the idea great in theory, I got bored of it after a while. So no collecting cute/cool things.
Everything where I have to click/cross/write down everyday to keep track, I gave up after a week max. But once a week sitting down and looking where I’m at now is fine.
I think the most helpful for me is to have people to talk to. Even if they don’t learn the same things as me (or anything special at all really), they just have to show some interest, so that I can (briefly!) talk about what I’m interested in at the moment. And having to explain things to people is a very good way to check if you actually really understood them.
But they are not “accountability partners”. Because really I don’t actually owe them anything and the idea that somebody’s job would be to shame me if I didn’t do what I should makes me run the other way. (I know that’s not exactly what an accountability partner is, but my brain still goes in that direction).
I don’t know… looks like I have an annoying personality to motivate…
Beau’s “keep score” is right on the mark though. That is the core of what makes gamifying work. Probably the first place I came across the idea had nothing to do with the term at all. It’s the Seinfeld Strategy.
The TL;DR: Jerry set up a calendar on a wall that shows the entire year at once. Every day he wrote jokes, and every day he wrote jokes he put an x on the calendar. The game became don’t break the chain.
I made progress bars when I was still trying to work through drawabox, and would fill them in one increment at a time.
Before gamifying you need to cultivate an interest in whatever it is you’re working towards. Become curious, try to relate the new information to outlandishly unrelated subjects, find passionate nerds who talk about it, brainstorm why you even care in the first place, and make a collage of images related to whatever it is you’re striving towards.
Then you can try and gamify things to help nudge you away from sacrificing this interest to short term whims and lazy tendencies.
Ok this, this is really good. Interest and curiosity and fellow nerds first. Gamification afterwards as a nudge to help, but not the source of inspiration.
Probably explains why all the systems I’ve tried didn’t work if I’ve been going at it taking it by the wrong end
There is a study I recall about how external gamification (I believe they used Habatica, a “life rpg” system) led to decreased interest and performance in a classroom.
The problem of gamification is that gamification works by getting you increasingly addicted to a sequence of actions via contingent reinforcers. The reinforcement (the rewarding end-result) is contingent on a sequence, meaning there is no other way to obtain it except by the sequence. If you take a video game like World of Warcraft, it gets you addicted to your character’s appearance and abilities and reputation, as well as novel exploration, which increases through repeated sequences that increase your level and income. You have to play the game for these rewards to occur, there is no other way; you can’t switch to a different game, because you are invested in the character and the particular cues of the game (sound, names, etc). With studying a topic like mathematics, you usually can’t arbitrarily “add” your own gamification because the gamification isn’t actually contingent — you can do the gamification without the math, meaning it isn’t really tied intrinsically to math.
In the real world, I think people become addicted to math (as an example) for truly contingent reasons, and which aren’t gamification per se:
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they are in a competition with peers, and they want to do well compared to them, hopefully beating them but hopefully not doing obviously terrible. This is contingent because a person makes friends at school, their grades follow them, and their ranking is obvious (gpa and class difficulty). There’s also the vague contingency of future income based on one’s academic ability. This means that being bad at math leads inevitably to feeling bad about oneself. It’s truly contingent.
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they have deeply internalized the status associated with being good at math among math connoisseurs, and now they have an “intrinsic” interest in the subject. This interest is actually the result of hundreds of small positive experiences associated with math-interest (praise by others, a sense of security, a sense of being a well-adjusted person)
I’m very suspicious of the idea that a person can just will themselves to be “naturally” interested in math, or any subject. I don’t think this is how our psychology operates. We have no evolutionary adaption to being interested in boring things, so it must be a socialized interest. Animals are captivated by colors and excitement and so on, so tik tok is always going to be more innately interesting — unless you have firm contingent reinforcers.
Most people that love math are just wired for it, math delights their brains. The rest of us? We need other factors to become interested. Math isn’t intrinsically boring, it’s boring because we don’t find it personally relevant, and we have no reason to care.
When a kid says, “I don’t want to do it, it’s pointless.”
The answer is always, “But you need it as an adult!”
Then the kid looks at calculators, thinks about their parents who are bad with math, their parent’s friends that are much the same, and rightfully conclude, “Not really, no.”
A better approach would be to find things the kid is already interested in, and help them explore how math relates to those interests; how math can enhance those interests.
Would it always work? Definitely not, but chances are better than, “You need this one day too far out for you to care about, pinkie swear!”
I could have written this sentence too.
I find that if I even begin to “should” on myself (“I should do that”), even I start to get annoyed with my ability to motivate myself… perhaps because that phrase will not do it. I still haven’t written up and sent the notes I promised the folks here who joined my study group for long-term mnemonics.
Why? The only common denominator I see is that I thought I “should”, so I haven’t.
Motivations are like snowflakes. They share patterns and no two are the same. And how long the they last depends on the environment. And I can write about both in a simile with a punchline.
Regards,
Beau
Yeah the shoulds that spawn in my head tend to be guilty words. Well meaning though, right? Something in there is keeping track of goals an intentions, and trying to help you get back to them. That part is kind of dumb though. Like it can understand rules and complex ideas, but it is just not capable troubleshooting why it fails.
So I wonder if we could help that thing be more useful to us. Maybe by reframing it from should, to could. Should is very closed, very direct, very guilty. Could has a connotation of possibility, if not tainted by “instead.”
“You should write those notes.” I don’t feel like it right now. “YOU SHOULD JUST DO IT!” Begone, thought!
“You could write those notes.” I don’t feel like it right now. “You could write your ideas for them.” Yeah I could, but… “You could write one word per idea.”
Or something like that. I’m no expert, just sometimes have luck with reframing. An example of one I find a lot of success with: looking at things through “get to” instead of “have to.”
After giving it some thought, not all tasks are meant to be gamified. The most common aspects remain feedback and random rewards, like gambling, which is a powerful motivator.
Afterwards, I don’t agree by default, I’m not a math person, but as soon as you do a dopamine detox or live in such a hedonistic mode and do nothing productive, believe me, the desire to do this kind of thing becomes very tempting.
Once you have finished your crash diet, how do you maintain interest in math?
By making a to-do list, if you have too much free time, your brain will seek immediate gratification. The more structured your life is, the fewer opportunities there are for temptation, and the same goes for your environment. You remove everything that’s more rewarding than math; put those things in your attic if needed. Rewards are only allowed at the end of the day, and you limit them, like 30 minutes of video games per day. The same goes for sugar, pizza, etc., only once a week. If you indulge in too much dopamine at some point, your brain will seek something equivalent, like gambling, porn, etc. So don’t try to be David Goggins at the beginning; otherwise, you’ll fail. Just be balanced and increase over time. Otherwise, a method I use is Victor Hugo’s: I lock myself in a room, sit in front of what I need to do, and it’s that or nothing, and I don’t move until it’s done.
I experience at least three types of boredom, and wonder if others do as well. The first is probably the kind you’re looking for, basically just a desire to do something.
The second is deeper and unproductive. It’s a boredom that does not care what form of stimulation you throw at it, it persists and you lack desire to engage with much of anything. This boredom has layers; the first layer is perfectly comfortable and just a low day where your body and mind have decided to rest and wait (I remember these days once in a while as a child, when it was rainy.) Deeper layers are related to depression. I will be surprised to discover no one teaches themselves this level of boredom by engaging in the extreme “dopamine detox” routines, and bet you can find many cases of people putting themselves in this state for long bouts of time during the lockdowns.
The third boredom is the most interesting in my opinion. It’s my brain rebelling against tasks it doesn’t care about. If I have to sit there and concentrate on something actively boring and without value, I can quite literally feel my cognitive ability shutting down, and it’s painful in it’s own way. Fog comes in, concentration is difficult, time both stretches and condenses at once, short term and working memory are crippled.
The third boredom has become less common over the years, but it’s still something to contend with. There is nothing inherently productive or valuable about doing math, so without strong reasons, or far more preferably, finding actual relevance in it, it’ll lead to the third boredom.
My thought is: is gamification actually a good thing at all? For any task?
I think finding ways to motivate yourself by making things you don’t care for more palatable is good.
But if we understand gamification as “making you addict” then I’m not sure that making you addict to good things is beneficial. It may be better for your life to be addicted to “good” things than “bad” but in the end it also means you stay in the pattern of addiction, making you vulnerable to all potential addictions, and there are going to be many tempting you…
… you usually can’t arbitrarily “add” your own gamification because the gamification isn’t actually contingent — you can do the gamification without the math, meaning it isn’t really tied intrinsically to math.
This is my thought on this as well. However, if you make a sufficiently convoluted program with no easy quit or skip mechanism, then you can begin to mimic the “intrinsic” element of a game such as WoW.