Gamify Your Health

I started gaming as a wee lad. Somewhere around 5 years old.

Luckily I was raised in the 90s, so I had lots of playtime outside or at least away from screens with toys and my own imagination. There wasn't much internet going on to give me a gaming addiction yet. Yet games drew me in so much. Luckily my parents gave me a rule that I couldn't play during school nights, and my busy high school schedule made it to where I couldn't.

But then I got to college, and the floodgates opened in the form of online competitive gaming. I spent an unhealthy amount of hours on all of it.

As far as working out goes, I went from playing to P.E. to football to lifting to playing random intramural sports in college to the point where most adults find themselves: "just working out."

With training for football, I always had goals. More pushup reps or heavier weight before the season started.

Weightlifting was more of the same: higher numbers on the bar and pvp in the form of competition.

But as we grow up, "just working out" is a horrible place to be.

It's a great start for most people (and most of your days should be filled with activity), but the term I'm referring to means that you show up and do some exercises, with no regard to the past or the future. Eventually you're going to want more, otherwise you'd get bored and quit.

When we start training, or start training again, our brains are going to rebel. Our brains don't like doing hard things. You can detox to increase your motivation, but let's look at gaming.

Why does it draw us in so much?

Why is it so much easier to do than working out?

Why was it so easy for me to burn hours on World of Warcraft or Halo or DotA?

Wouldn't someone improve in any area of their lives if they spent the same amount time in an area as they did in video games?

Can we apply the principles of gaming to our lives?

The answer is yes.

Here's how.

How Games Draw Us In

There are reasons why video games are so addicting for us.

One of them is the Flow State. It's the same thing as getting "in the zone" in sports. It's when you're so involved in the task that the outside world doesn't exist (like your mom telling you to come eat dinner for the 5th time).

I was a big fan of World of Warcraft (vanilla), so I'll use parallels from that.

Starting out, you get immersed in a world. You choose the faction and race for your character, your class, how he or she looks and give it a name. (Talk about building a connection.) What you pick determines where in the world you start.

The starting quests aren't too difficult.

The monsters are challenging but not impossible.

And after the first quest, what do you get?

REWARDS.

Rewards are there along the way: some experience, some gold, armor upgrades, new areas, new dungeons, and new skills become available to you.

At some point you interact with other characters and make friends. You probably eventually join or form a guild. This is adding to the social aspect of the game. That's a huge dopamine spike, because we want to feel like we're part of a tribe. It's linked to survival (both from real life and in the game).

In the early stages of leveling up, you eventually get a quest to go to a major city and it's there that you can see your long term goal: level 60s walking around with cool armor. (That's a clever strategy by the developers.) You want to get into guilds that are good enough to do endgame content for no other reason than max armor and clout. It's a status symbol.

So we can see the layout:

• A starting point (character, class)

• Starting areas with quests (TODO lists)

• Long term and short term goals (levels, gear, new areas)

So for all the areas of life you want to improve upon and you want to hit the flow state, you need to have these three factors in place.

1. We play to win the game. (Big goal)

2. We start with the flow state, small quests that are just challenging enough (Daily tasks)

3. We get rewarded along the way (not just hitting max level or final goal)

So now that we know what to do, how do we organize things?

Do we get paper and spreadsheets?

Luckily we can use just as nerdy of a device as the analogy of this article.

Enter Habitica.

Habitica Overview

I first learned about Habitica (formerly Habit RPG) from productivity YouTuber Thomas Frank. He said that we can achieve goals by using the same nerdiness we apply to video games but in the real world.

Habitica is the perfect setup for this.

You create a character, name it, create the class.

You set up a few lists.

• Habits (either good or bad) are in place that can be repeated. It's like setting up "Healthy meal" as a habit. You get a positive reward (using the +) and you'll get some gold and experience. If you eat a junk meal, you'll take damage (using the -). As an aside, I don't like the idea of hurting yourself for doing something you shouldn't be doing. I don't even like focusing on what you shouldn't do (at least not initially). You want to think about positive things you DO want to do, so you'll run out of time for the bad things you don't want to do.

• Dailies are things that you want to try to repeat daily, but don't repeat so you can't spam it. Something like going to the gym or on a walk each day. Once it's done it's done.

• TODO lists are things that you think of as you go. You can put in chores or any other tasks you need to do and get rewarded fro it. Since it's a TODO, they probably won't repeat.

Setting Up Your Questline

I talk about dopamine detoxing quite a bit in terms of increasing motivation on hard things that get you closer to what you want.

That's a good way to go about things.

But I forget sometimes that we're still animals.

Unless you can super vividly see an end result super goal 5 years from now (which is also its own skill), another trick to get you to do what you want to do is to reward yourself like a pet you want to train.

I need to re-read Atomic Habits because I think this is where it's from, but I believe that if you keep rewarding yourself for doing a task, eventually your brain will start to associate the work task with the reward, so the work task will start to feel good again.

So the lesson is this: reward yourself for the small tasks along the way.

Habitica has some items in the game to add stats to your character and make it look nice, but guess what? You can make your own rewards. So now you'll be doing your tasks through the day for rewards in the real world and not just loot in the virtual world.

And before you get worried that you'll throw your gains away by workout out and eating ice cream as a reward each night because I said so, I'll show you ways to ensure you don't go off the rails.

Enter the Game

This is going to set up both your own life and Habitica. Let's begin.

Endgame Goals

• Figure out some medium to long term goals for yourself.

• I recommend going no longer than a year so that you can have a big goal, but also break it down into quarters so you don't slack off and forget about them.

Daily Tasks/Quests

• Based on your goal list, what do you need to do every day to get there?

• These are non-negotiable. If it's working out and hitting a certain weight goal, then it's probably just hitting a calorie target and strength training a few days per week. Add in some mobility and walking and you're set.

Habits

• These are things that you can add in that don't affect your goal directly, but are nice to do.

• You don't have to stretch every day or read about training or watch training videos, but they're nice and help a lot. Think 80/20 with your goals: 80% should be in the dailies and the other 20% are in the habits.

TODO List

• Again, these don't directly affect your training, but it's nice to see that you're putting in work in other areas of your life and getting some experience and gold from it.

• Need to go to the grocery store? Do a load of laundry? Make your bed? Throw them in there.

For any of the above, use some brainstorming and think whether or not something should be easy, medium or hard difficulty. Don't spend too long on that, just guess.

Rewards

• This part is so cool and important I think I'm going to make it's own section of this article for it. So here we go…

Reward System

Why rewards in the first place?

Because if you're just getting started, the inertia of going from zero to hero is hard at the beginning. No one starts out with consistent 2 hour gym sessions. You may need to muster up all the power in your body to just get your workout clothes on and go outside for a walk.

When you do, you need to reward yourself so your brain looks forward to it the next time.

The good news is that you don't need to do a ton of brainstorming for what a good reward could be for yourself. You're probably already doing things that will work.

Level 1 Rewards

• The easiest starter rewards are the things you're already doing for fun. You're going to put these behind a gold cost.

• Your dailies and habits are now "in the way" of all the fun stuff you want to do that you normally do. Do you like scrolling? Watching TV? Playing video games? Now you have to earn them.

• Brainstorm how to set up the reward: "2 hours of video games." Then set a price.

• To make things harder, you could also only allow yourself to have the reward after your daily tasks are done.

• You could buy a simple reward every day, but we're going to talk about how to scale better rewards so you'll want to save up.

Level 2 Rewards

• Are there fun items you want to purchase? These are now level 2 rewards (like new armor).

• You can see now that if you start to burn all your gold on smaller rewards, you won't be able to save up for these.

• These could be things related to working out (new clothes, shoes, equipment, etc).

• Or it can just be fun stuff you've looked forward to (new game, going to a movie, etc).

Level 3 Rewards

• More of the same with level 2, but with more intensity.

• Don't go too crazy, but these could something like more expensive workout equipment or a new console. Get creative and make it something you'd look forward to.

So there you have a reward system that works for you, but the gold economy should keep you safe from going too crazy. If you're a nerd like me, especially a WoW nerd, you know that you can't just buy or do whatever you want willy nilly in the game (at least in Vanilla), so this is going to replicate it so you're a responsible player in the game of life.

As far as reward frequency, if you're nailing your workouts but staying up late with your gaming reward and eating ice cream every night (shame), here's how to space things out so that you can get more immersion and fun with your rewards instead of tiny bites.

Entertainment Frequency

Let's say one of your rewards is "one hour of gaming."

• Only allow entertainment for 2 hours per day max (probably at the end of the day).

• Later scale it back to one hour per day.

• Scale it back even more to weekends early. This way you'll have more time each day to really get into what you want to. As an example, if it takes 100 gold to play for 2 hours, you can save up and play for 4 hours each day.

• One day per week. This could be a big gaming day if you have the time.

• Once per month for a few days at the end of the month. If you save up for this, you could complete an entire game in this time span. This could last anywhere from 3-5 days.

Food Reward Frequency

Be a reasonable adult here and be honest with yourself. Nibbling on treats every night isn't the same as just playing video games. One directly affects your health. If that's the case, then you should probably only be eating a "cheat" meal or treat once or twice per week on weekends.

Make it something like one dessert instead of a full blown meal. Or if you've saved up enough gold then a full meal.

Get creative here, but I'll give a little guidance.

• You could have a little treat each night if you finish your tasks and have the gold. Yes, something SMALL. But if you have a hard time limiting yourself, you should probably limit to…

• Weekends only.

• One day on a weekend. (Preferably Sunday so it doesn't creep into the entire weekend).

• Once per week for a couple days per month (like a weekend), because 5 days straight of horrible food is a lot more damaging than 5 days of video games.

I don't talk a lot about diet, but if there's one thing that I've discovered for myself, it's this: if you tell yourself you can't have something, you're going to want that thing even more.

Go ahead and eat whatever you want, but the size and frequency are the things you need to control. If you eat healthy for 6 months straight and have a treat at a birthday party, your progress won't magically vanish.

But then again, you shouldn't be having birthday cake every night (that would be an interesting grocery store choice too).

Plan your rewards wisely.

If You Can Level Up In A Game, You can level up in life.

Video games can be addicting.

But it's not because you're a bad person, it's because that's the way they're designed. Otherwise people wouldn't buy them or keep playing them.

You can see from above the reason why video games suck people in so much. So if that's happening, we just have to do our own engineering for our own brains to put us on a better path.

I spent somewhere around 6k hours in DotA 2.

That's just DotA 2, because there wasn't a way to track time in DotA 1.

It's a lesson learned, but what could I have done with that time? If each game lasted me about an hour, and I played 2 games per day, what could I have done with 2 hours per day free?

Now that won't always be a 1 to 1 relationship. Meaning if you quit playing WoW for 8 hours on weekends your brain isn't going to want to read for 8 hours.

But you can see that the time is there.

Start small, and more importantly, start applying the ideas of gaming.

Doing an easy workout then rewarding yourself will start to train your mind like an animal you want to train. But this time, you get to train yourself.

Now go play the game.