Anytime there’s a task you don’t want to do, there’s a guaranteed way to make you feel worse about it :JJust add a whole layer of guilt and disappointment on top. Stripes you’ll inevitably break, badges you don’t care about, check-in notifications that annoy you when you were just trying to relax. Ahh, gamification.
Before we talk about all the reasons why gamification sucks, let’s talk about why games work the way they do. In an RPG, you earn “experience points” as a metaphor for real-life experience. You earn fake money because it pretends to mimic the real life concept of money. You have a mission because, in real life, people work hard to achieve their goals. Games have these metrics and structures because the game is trying to mimic real life.
Real life doesn’t require fake metrics. You don’t need to accumulate XP, because you are gaining real experience. You don’t need a fake mission, because you are on a real mission. Whether you’re deadlifting 500 pounds or seeing better cholesterol levels the next time you go to the doctor, your health habits have real-world rewards and consequences.
So let’s take a look at some of the ways that gamification of health habits can backfire. Lifehacker Staff Writer Stephen Johnson explains the most common game tactics here, and it’s worth a read if you haven’t already checked it out. Gamification is usually just manipulation and often has more drawbacks than benefits.
Instead of chasing game metrics, what if you put your focus on real life results of your habits? This is what I mean.
aim acconsistency, no streaks
The streaks entertain you in the good times with the explicit goal to heap disappointment on you when you’re wrong. And they’re a particularly harmful type of distraction, because people easily become more focused on the streak than the reason they were doing the streak in the first place.
I argue here that if you ever get tricked into chasing a streak, you need to break your streak before the streak breaks you. No need to do any health habits. each day without fail. Even apart from the fact that rest days are good and often necessary for physical and mental reasonsDo you think your body can tell the difference between 9,999 steps and 10,000??
Long-term consistency is what matters to your body. Stripes are only important to app developers. Why do you think the Apple Watch wants you to be on your feet for 12 hours every day? Is for you to wear his watch during all your waking hours. The “stand” goal is programmed into the app because it benefits Apple, not you.
So how do you build consistency? Well, you can keep track of your workouts or habits on a calendar or on a training diary. No, I’m not just reinventing the streak. If you did your habit seven times the first week, six times the following week, and then four to five times a week for the rest of the year minus vacations, you were extremely consistent. (Thanks to the Peloton app, which counts the streak weeks instead of days.)
In that case, a streak-keeping app would think you’re a failure. But if those were workouts, he would end the year much fitter, stronger and more flexible than he started. If those were the days you flossed, you’ll end the year with a much lower dental bill. You get the idea.
I like to think of habits not as dashes on a calendar but as coins in a jar. Every day you eat a vegetable or go for a run, think of yourself as flipping another coin. Some days it’s a dime, some days it’s a quarter, some days it’s nothing, but no matter what, that jar is filling up.
compete in real contests, not fake contests
Some apps try to harness the power of community by having you join a group of people you barely know, either cheering each other on with emojis or battling each other on a leaderboard (or both).
But… who cares about the people on that leaderboard? If they’re not well matched, you won’t mind beating them. And if they’re not your real friends, you won’t mind if they shake hands.
Now, here’s another idea. What if you had real teammates and gym buddies? What would happen if you entered a real competition? This can take many forms, but here are some examples:
- Run a local 5K race and try to finish in the top X percent of your age group.
- compete in something like a weightlifting meeting, where you try to put up the best possible total on the day of the competition.
- Join a recreational sports league and meet the members of their softball/soccer/pickleball team while crushing the competition or feeling sorry for your inability to do so.
go after gOals, not quests
Gamification, like Overrated SMART Goals Framework, is what you end up with when you let someone else tell you what your goals are. Nobody is born with a deep and sincere desire to get a digital badge.
So why did you join a gym, if not for digital badges? Probably because you wanted to get in shape. Well, what does fit mean to you? Squat a certain weight? Hiking without the need to stop to rest? Shovel your driveway without spending the next day on the couch?
Whatever it is, that is your Big Goal. Next, you need some small process goals. those who to mean something. You have to squat 200 pounds before you can squat 500. You have to follow a good training program to improve your squats. So your process goals might be to (1) find a good training program, (2) stick to that program, (3) finish the program on time, and (4) retest your squat max.
You don’t need stripes, badges, or registration to do any of that. You don’t need to chase a false target to be able to chase the real target. Just go for the real thing and cut out the digital middle man.
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