Its really good man, I also felt need to do such thing because i haven't found any tool in the market that could do that, im glad you are working on it
The game of life isn’t as clear cut as video games where it is clear what you need to do to win. It is one thing to design and optimize how you plan to approach the game. it is a whole other beast to figure out how to get yourself to take action to move forward My channel uses some of the concepts you strongly criticized in this video. While I don’t disagree with what you shared, I found that over planning adds more friction to taking action to move forward We play the game to have fun and everybody enjoy the game differently from one another. Keep up on the great content brother. Love hearing your perspective and contrasting it with my own
Love from india brother, I am a college student, and had wanted a system like this for so long, i was like i am gonna make my own app if no one else does it, and then here u are the mighty savior.
It's been such a long time since then but what I think I did was switch it out for binge watching RU-vid or podcasts. I think if I did either of those things - playing games or watching "infotainment" it would have been better. I think my underlying issue was that I wasn't being intentional with what I wanted to do - I didn't design my life, it was by default.
Very interesting take and love to hear different oppinions on this topic. But I have to disagree on two things: 1. XP bars implemented in the daily logs of my simple Notion setup helped me tremendously to achieve the most important task (and 1-2 smaler tasks) of the day. Just visualizing the progress was a big and motivating improvement on the already great system of doing one thing every day that moves you forward. 2. I understand your argument, that life is to complex to be represented by only 3-4 areas - that's why you created your octacore system. But in my experience that's exactly what makes it difficult for new people to achieve progress. They don't want to have a 1:1 representation of life. They want to improve their situation asap and with an easy way. For most of them it is totally fine to focus on the core areas (eg. health, wealth, relationships, maybe add fun/experiences). Help them figure out what they want in each area and why, define a system to regurarely make and track progress and design it to be an enjoyable process. Just my 2 cents. Hope to see more from you!
Thanks for this Critique Thomas ! I think we misunderstood each other on the XP system - my app uses what you mentioned - a progress bar that shows your completion of tasks in a project. What I was critiquing is a leveling system - I imagine something like if I can hit a 100kg bench press I'm "level 45" in weightlifting. - doesn't help for reasons I explained in the video. As for OctaCore having too many areas for new people to figure out what to do it's exactly why I created a mini course in the app that encourages people to only focus on the areas relevant to their lives. At the same time - these are 8 areas of life that no matter what, we'll need to manage in life anyways, I think hiding that fact reduces clarification and adds confusion - also why I designed this system for gamers like myself who are used to complex systems in the games we love because we understand that simplicity limits ability. I really enjoy discussions like this and people who love the nuance of things so hope to see you around!
@@LifeGameDesign Thanks, I love such conversations myself! I am starting a self-improvement community in Germany myself and want to implement methods like gamification and feel-good productivity to design a fun journey for reaching one's goals. Although I don't use a leveling system (yet), I think this could work. For me, leveling is not about the number itself, but about the process of filling the bar (visualization) and the associated reward for doing so. If the reward is something that really motivates you, e.g. playing a video game that you really crave, it can motivate you big time to do the tasks you need to do. Of course, this is only one piece of the process. A far better way in my opinion is to build an identity with a strong why and intrinsic motivation that makes doing the task feel like play (eg. for a body builder, going to the gym isn't hard, it's an existential part of his life). I like complex RPG systems myself, but for my personal life I rather keep it simple. IRL, I don't feel like simplicity limits you. It lets you focus on what matters most. But everyone has their preferences :) Wish you the best and will check your system in more detail soon!
Thanks brother! I honestly beat myself up so much ages ago about not having a "perfectly gamified life - because I didn't have an xp leveling system, or an inventory / rewards system and things like that. The mentality of treating life as a game can help, but being stuck on the gimmicks of game design don't help at all.
the funny thing is that in order to succeed in a game "over other people", nearly every single factor involved has absolutely nothing to do with the game itself, it just rolls back to real life skills aka, having more dedication than others, being smarter than others, being more skilled than others, having more motivation that others, being healthier than others, having more charisma than others (helps in team games), it boils down to the same factors whether were talking about gaming or life
Exactly! The coolest thing is game designers optimize for player engagement and what they learned is that in order to keep the players engaged they had to keep them learning and building new skills. If we understand the underlying game design techniques behind this we get amazing insights in how to rapidly and sustainably build new skills
Possibly for only mobile games that are extremely easy, but the idea is not as shallow as this. Watch the average person play COD, LOL, APEX Valorant, any souls like game. They are not having fun 😂 they go through a whole range of emotions, mad , sad , happy victorious, bored, upset. Game Designers Hacked their motivation and if you don't know why or how they did it you fall into the same trap
As someone who worked in tech in the 2010's till now and has had so many people try to push "gamification" on everything, I can tell you the problem is that games have a goal with rewards like story or powerups or new levels, and the leveling up or challenges within the game are meant to keep you from those things so it's more of a reward when you achieve them, but "gamifying" some functional app just means putting the parts of a game that are *not* fun, and leaving out the fun parts. People don't play video games to collect powerups, they play it to....play! But the tech industry didn't seem to understand this. It seems like that mentality went back into games themselves where now they're just made to make you grind and powerup, with little reward for doing so.
Absolutely! Just like yu kai chou mentioned in actionable Gamification - when businesses picked up Gamification they just copied surface level ideas and expected them to perform well.
Games have a very narrow systems and mechanics that you can wrap your head around easily. Real adult life is so much more complex and complicated, just your motivation and emotions alone can't be summurized by a HUD. I like Dr K though because he is very clear that his game terminology is just metaphors and not meant to be direct comparisons with real life and games, it's mostly for entertainment and understanding
Yo! Love Dr K - and what you mentioned is exactly why Gamification never took off, the game design elements are taken too literally at a surface level and ignore the underlying motivations we act on
I'm not convinced. If this is about how gamification is flawed and too simplified, then I wouldn't want life advice on multidimensional gamification from you - it defeats the purpose of the initial criticism. And it also defeats another purpose of gamification: Breaking down big things into small tasks. If the gamified theory gets too complicated (approaches the complexity of real life), then it is not easy anymore and therefore an unnecessary step in between. How about we just drop the gamification and directly adress the underlying physiological and psychological mechanisms? I personally prefer a professional and scientific approach rather than something gamified.
As someone who gets instantly bored of list and bar content if the gameplay is shit, gamification has never worked for me. Just because a dumb and boring process fills up a bar or a list doesn't make it any less boring and dumb to me. I was completely baffled when games started introducing achievements and suddenly people started doing stuff they would have never considered doing before, and I still can't understand it. It just does not work for me. I can also fill up some game bar task to 95% while enjoying it and then just get bored and stop, with zero regrets.
@@p.s.8949 hahaha you're right on that, that's why we have to implement the game design ourselves - Listen to good music / video - set yourself a time limit -
Maybe part of that could be explained by the social media aspect brought to games? Them being attached to a public account and avatar profile for everybody out there to see might be helping not hat. So for example, if you don’t have a bloated Instagram (or similar) and are constantly searching for the latest best trend, photo snap, one liner comment to scavenge a chunk of likes and upvotes; then there are higher chances that you don’t care about said random achievements especially if they get too out of the way from the game at hand.
@@alejmc It's possible. I don't have any Facebook or Instagram or Twitter accounts, nor do I care about likes or what people think about me online. In many accounts I never even go as far as to change the avatar from the default one. It's all useless fluff to me that just takes up my time for no benefit.
Will openly criticize actions, not individuals. There's a reason why I didn't share the channels I was thinking about in the video. I follow Alex Hormozi's advice - Criticize Vaguely - Praise Directly
I see the thought you had and pondered this. "We only discover our limits once we break them." To me 4 years ago in weightlifting I thought I would never be able to do a 10kg weighted pull-up . When I hit that I realized that I could do far more. If I created a leveling system it would need to be under the guidance of a plethora of experts who are specifically looking at my individual abilities and factoring in the impossible task of knowing exactly what my limit could be. In this case I would have hit "level 100" and now I would have to rescale the system every time I hit a new pr. Like I mentioned, there are so many more, effective ways to show progress than just an xp system. Life game design does it through achievements with a simple tier list system to hit all areas of life. Thinking like a game designer > thinking like a gamer.
XP can mean many things in games as it can impact skill, knowledge, progression, reputation and much more. If you use XP in a self referencing way with something personal like skill or knowledge it would work reasonably well, but as allude to the world doesn't stand still. For instance you may be far better at photoshop then you were a year ago the skill may have become commercially irrelevant because of AI. It does however add to you TALENT STACK. Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic, coined the term for the idea that you can COMBINE normal skills until you have the right kind to be EXTRAORDINARY. He himself is an example of this as he is a fairly unique combination of ordinary business skills, strong work ethic, risk tolerance and a reasonably good sense of humour, that makes that uniqueness have commercial value.
If AI could manage the scaling and such automatically it would work amazingly in my opinion, what we have now and what people are trying to do with xp leveling systems now is wasted effort and talent
Just found your channel yesterday on my youtube sidebar. You can guess which video it was. You're really on to something with this idea. I encourage you to keep at it, through the struggles. As a life-long gamer myself with many thousands of hours doing complex design work inside games that don't pay me anything, I know you're absolutely right about the game designers somehow finding the solution to human motivation. Dopamine can be a powerful motivator, and if only employers could tap into that, imagine how productive their staff would be! I never quite thought about it in these terms before, that there's a "key" to motivation that somehow games have captured, EVEN in the mundane tasks. Part of me thinks one reason it is harder in life is because life's balance is far more cutthroat than games. In a game, it's designed in a way that tangible progression can be achieved in a matter of hours. In real life, tangible progression can sometimes take months or years on the job or in personal goals. It's FAR more tightly balanced and there are many setbacks that can cause life to go backwards regardless of how skilled you are. One game that I find shares this cutthroat balance is Eve Online, in the sense that you are competing with real people rather than NPCs. Making it big in Eve takes the cooperation of dozens or even hundreds of people to really get somewhere big. Though despite this, you still get very cool toys to play with after your first few days even. In that respect, it's still way easier than in real life. It's something I'm going to have to continue to think deeply on, and I'm thankful to have come across your channel, showing a fresh perspective on the subject!
Thanks you for sharing such deep thoughts on this ! It's really hard to accurately relate life to a specific game because it is so unique. I think the biggest lesson we can learn from the relation is that the best games have very intentional design And from what I've learned the people with the most fulfilling lives have very intentional design
@@LifeGameDesign That's true. It's one thing you can have in common between life and gaming, though it looks different in life of course. I wonder... in life how can we avoid the problem that we encounter in games where you feel like you've maxed out and suddenly motivation drops off a cliff. Surely you've found this in some games where you finally experienced all the content, got the best weapons and armore, defeated the last boss, and now it's basically just open ended where there is nothing new to strive for. That's the moment when most people will simply quit and move on to another game. It's a very distinct and reliable phenomenon... Clearly, we have to avoid this when it comes to life, as we have to convince ourselves that we're not done yet. People with fixed pay might really struggle with this. Imagine how it might go if an employer gave extremely small and frequent raises based on certain performance goals being met. Like getting a $0.10 per hour raise for going above and beyond in a way that benefits the company. Having a raise once a year is tough on motivation because you have such a long time between tangible "leveling up". Our human minds consider ourselves leveled up if the number changes _at all_ even if it doesn't bring us a tangible benefit. Worth thinking about.
Because they're fun. All there is to it. I guess I don't play enough MMOs to even entertain idea of "doing so many boring things while playing", if inventory management is shit, that means the game itself is most likely shit, so I play a better game instead. Managing inventory in Resident Evil is extremely fun, because those games are actually well designed. Same thing with grinding, if the game requires it and the process isn't fun, whether that be due to bad combat or any other factor, that means the game is probably not very good in the first place. So I'm probably gonna put my time into a better game instead. Though I guess this makes me a minority lmao
First you said "Because they're fun. All there is to it." Then you said "Managing inventory in Resident Evil is extremely fun, because those games are actually well designed." And I'm so happy because you just showed yourself that you are thinking far deeper than "because games are just fun." Now you know that "Managing inventory [in Resident Evil] is extremely fun, because those games are actually WELL DESIGNED." A life that is fulfilling isn't by default. It is by design. It's not that you need to make everything fun, you just need to make the process clearer, more streamlined, or engaging. Think like a game designer, not like a gamer.
@@LifeGameDesign On that front it's more about looking into what makes fun things fun. I try to carefully tread the line of choosing specifically which things merit a deeper analysis vs which don't lol Issue is that life imitating art doesn't translate to every aspect of it unfortunately. And that conversion has a ton of key issues which sort of negate the point. Without writing 80 paragraphs, I'd in short say that essentially certain aspects comprising elements of the fun can be somewhat translated, but not the fun itself, due to those issues.
I think a major factor in games that motivates people to expend effort is that reward structure is well defined. Even if there is RNG with loot drops there are plenty of progression options that are not random. In real life that is true for some things like working out but not true for career advancement. You can put in high effort and not get significant raises or any promotions. You can put in minimum effort, which is sometimes almost nothing, and still get paid the same. I have done both in my career. Minor effort and job hopping got me to upper middle class income. Hard work and loyalty got me at or below inflation level raises. That is why being productive in real life is not very motivating. Rewards are arbitrary for many things. Imagine a game where xp was rewarded at random times. Sometimes you got xp for completing a quest. Sometimes you were afk. Sometimes you were chatting about non-game things. Would anyone want to play that or understand the progression system?
There's an underlying reason why the reward system of modern life is so unsatisfying. at 10:50 I mention in the video about the contrast of Game Designers, Business owners, and ourselves. How much time have game designers spent making a fulfilling rewards system for their specific game? How much time have we spent making a fulfilling rewards system for our specific lives? If you live by default - you are forced to live by the external rewards system that others give to you - especially in business, only rewarding you when you get a promotion, or are extremely productive. If you live by design you can find what is truly fulfilling to you and reward yourself with visual and physical rewards that will help you do more of what you love. So much nuance to this I need to cover in a specific video but please do not fall into the trap of copying a rewards system from a game and thinking it will work IRL - that would be cringification.
I was just watching a band last night and started thinking about this. They’ve spent countless hours practicing their instruments and it’s mostly an internal reward of voluntary effort. Then I thought about all the voluntary tasks I’ve mostly avoided, like fitness, and couldn’t figure out why it was something I was never passionate about or internally driven to succeed at.
I've found that the internal reward that you get is not something that you can foresee - it's something that has to be "play-tested" in games like skyrim, fallout etc where there is a lot of playstyle choice you have to experiment to see what you actually like before you actually develop the drive to put more hours into it. It's also the reason why parents get us to try so many things when we are young to discover what we are intrinsically inclined to - then they help us develop our passion further once we find something we are interested in. We have to be the game designers of our own lives, experiment with what we think we would like and go on the journey of discovery.
Use S.M.A.R.T.: Specific: Targeting a particular area for improvement. What do you want to improve? eg. Get into the gaming industry Measurable: Quantifying, or at least suggesting, an indicator of progress. When do I progress? eg. When I sign my first contract. Something permanent and life-changing, but still achievable. Assignable: Defining responsibility clearly. What am I doing in-order to achieve this? eg. Learn making games. NOTE: This can be considered a sub-task which should have it's own S.M.A.R.T. criteria. Sub-tasks can also have other sub-tasks nested into them. Realistic: Outlining attainable results with available resources. Is what I'm planning possible? Try to get examples of success stories. eg. "other indie studios have succeeded making their games, but only with prior experience. finish the 'The 20 Games Challenge' before making something big with your engine of choice. and remember that overfocusing on perfection never makes you finish your game don't do too much and start small, once you get revenue and you hire more employees you can start setting higher goals. bugs can be features if they make new strategies possible." <-- some actual hints for people who want to actually make an indie studio. Time-related: Including a timeline for expected results. When will I finish this task or when will I measure my progress? eg. every week I look at my own performance report and write down a list of 10 thing of what I did. and what I didn't. perhaps even what to do next week. write reasons as to why you did that or didn't. improve. Most important tip for this tactic: Set your OWN goals. Don't set goals based on what other want you to do, but you have no optimism for.
I saw from the research: Games give you immediate feedback. Real life you often do something and have no idea if this done any good or if this will actually lead anywhere. Like you don't eat too much for one day and you see no weight loss, only many days lead to a sustainable result. This sucks. Other thing is rewards are kind of random in games. Sure rewards are not as addictive as semi random rewards.
Absolutely - leaning into "actionable Gamification" from Yu-Kai Chou these elements that drive motivation in human behavior like feedback and rewards help game designers figure out how different game design techniques play on those core drivers. In real life we have to design our own feedback systems/rewards based on our own values. Thinking 1 dimensionally and just copying feedback/ rewards systems in games will only take you from 0-10 and keep you stuck there. That's what I describe as "cringification" Practically - giving yourself visualized rewards from sticking to long term habits is a great way to redesign a rewards system that fits life better - that's why it's in the app.
Another thing is "what you do for fun and for work" and with that "if your work is your fun" (or maybe u can turn your fun or less "work" with another point of view) for example, i work as a voice actor so... my work is my fun at the same time nowdays and i like to sing, dance and that kind of stuff so... in many cases, i turn my life even more fun that a game many times, watching an anime too for example. In my particular case, common games are bored to me. I preffer fighting games, or something with a great story or combats ´cos that kind of difficult and competitive games push you to a better version, but for example a game like Genshin Impact is bored for me, u can´t learn to much with that game. And another thing related with this is, in real life YES, we can fail and we can´t go back like games in general, but the important thing in this, is to change our minds with a new setup that says "fail is a step for another thing or a path for a new way to do what we want to do". That i can say with my experience. Good video!
Thank you! I love to see that you already understand it so well😁😁 what you said about the separation of your work and hobbies as you have a creative contribution is something that I deep dive into with my octacore framework In OctaCore I separate the life areas of Creativity and Contribution because what you do to pay for your living costs must be separated from how you express yourself creatively - for no monetary return or you fall victim to the overjustification effect - where you start to subconsciously devalue creative works that are done for the sake of monetary or extrinsic reward. Even at <500 subs I'm finding my people.
I love the tie in with the infinity stones! It sounds like these are more like resources or stats, that can go up and down, rather than the relatively fixed attributes in Fallout? Eg i might notice my creativity stat is running a bit low, so I play on my piano for a bit. Is that how I'd use them? For that minigame diagram where envision goes to a circle of design, focus and reflect, how about putting envisioning inside the loop? So it is done as part of each iteration. Or do you see the envisioning step as belonging to a bigger loop?
Without watching the video its because you have a set of rules that say "do this and you get exact reward" and it takes dedication and patience from you without any real physical effort. Hope the video says the same but if so then why is it 12minutes then.
I saw the title and I laughed out loud. This is exactly me! I'll spend hours organising my inventory, selling loot etc in game but ignore my messy room or unread emails IRL 😅😂
Here is a psychology correlation. If you observe people that enjoy open-world games, you’ll see in real life they’re risk takers. They’re curious and enjoy going head first into murky water.
I don't think so at all. Right now I am stuck watching YT & gaming just because I can't solve a problem that I am facing IRL. Last week I started teaching myself how to develop neural networks for fun and got stuck 3 days ago on a backpropagation algorithm. All the explanations I could find on YT or stackoverflow sucked big fat DI*K, the explanations of chatgpt suck even more since that dumbass AI can't actually solve anything and there are no teachers for this stuff unless you are willing to pay tons of money which I dont have. Fck productivity, let me be a loser in my basement.
You wanna know why I can remember lines from Looney Tunes verbatum? Because when I saw Looney Tunes as a kid, I was "open". You wanna know why I can remember : "Eight Handled Sword Divergent Sila Divine General Mahoraga." ? Because when I watch Jujutsu Kaisen or read it, I'm "open". You wanna know why I remember that scene from Persona 3 The Answer after the party defeats "???" (Spoilers for folks this summer, don't ask) Because I was "open". If you can figure out how to "open" yourself, its yours.
The mindset of fun and control are big but remember - you won't always be in control and have fun in life - that's the cringification mindset. We're thinking of life as the hardest game ever - and it needs to be designed with that in mind
I got to the point where I barely can play types of games I used to enjoy and barely can read. I usually have to force focus when reading nowadays which is exhausting.
I'm not even a minute into this video, but I came upon a revelation I think... 80, 50 years ago, the same population / demographic / mindset that gets addicted to video games today would have been factory and assembly line workers. Those same motivations have simply been transferred from being a liability (paying someone to work) into a profit (selling something to play).
Thank you. RU-vid algorithm is interesting. I tried to apply for a gamification phd but didn't have enough credential and a good country of birth so failed. Now a quality video on life gamification with 418 subscribers when I get pushed of your content...I have mixed feeling...
haha appreciate you bro! Genius is being too nice but I remember a video I watched recently and a funny analogy. " you aren't microwavable. - Quality doesn't come from 2 minute heat up foods." " you're cooking slow like good food in an oven "
