As mentioned in earlier chapters, our intellectual consciousness is inherently lazy, and if tasks at hand do not demand immediate attention, the neocortex delegates the mental legwork to our subconscious mind, or “System 1” according to Economics Nobel Prize winner and psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
So why not sprinkle a little into your lifestyle gamification design? Whether chores or fitness or nutrition or relationships… Here’s a few examples to get you thinking!
This series is written by Erik van Mechelen, based on the Octalysis framework designed by Yu-kai Chou.
There’s not enough time
There’s not enough time. So we better get started now.
Time and attention might be the baseline resource we are all playing with.
Apps like Uber and Lyft save us time, removing the impatience of dealing with, say, the scarcity of regular taxi cabs.
But there is a downside to the Black Hat Core Drive 6…and that is burnout. For this Core Drive, the takeaway might be to reduce the amount we use it (or fall victim to it) in our daily lives.
Then again, a little Black Hat can’t kill you.
Moderation in everything.
In this post, I’ll highlight how to use 10 Game Techniques to boost various areas of your everyday life! Let’s press onward valiantly and impatiently.
This series is written by Erik van Mechelen, based on the Octalysis framework designed by Yu-kai Chou.
How to Live with and through Others
How to live is a question that’s been debated through the ages.
Our world is changing. We’re changing with it.
So far, we’ve touched epic meaning & calling, accomplishment & development, empowerment of creativity & feedback, and ownership & possession, each in respect to lifestyle gamification and the Octalysis framework.
That is to say, we’ve investigated how our 8 Core Drives play into human-focused designs for our lives in totality. No small task!
Ownership and Possession, the fourth Core Drive in Octalysis Gamification, is based on the principle that because you own something, you want to improve it, protect it, and get more of it.
This Core Drive is related to elements such as virtual goods and virtual currencies, but it is also the primary Core Drive that makes us want to accumulate wealth. Also, on a more abstract level, if you have invested a lot of your time to customize something to your own liking, or a system has constantly been learning about your preferences and molding into something that is uniquely yours, you generally will start to feel more ownership towards it.
Owning things help improve life. A collection of knives eases the preparation of food. A set of books encodes knowledge to be learned.
But we also like collecting things for the sake of collecting. Whether friends on Facebook or a freedom from work in number of hours.
I want to in this article investigate and explore the range of ownership and possession as it relates to improving our lifestyle design and Lifestyle Gamification.
I believe that people are by nature creative beings, and we yearn to learn, imagine, invent, and partake in creative processes where the journey in of itself brings happiness.
Empowerment is an important word here. Someone can have innate creative traits or sensibilities or tendencies, but if those are not actively rewarded, or worse, blockaded, those talents cannot be further developed.
In this article, we’ll continue the series on Lifestyle Gamification. I’ll give a refresher on CD3 and why it’s important.
I’ll then explore how it can be used in lifestyle gamification scenarios.
Then I’ll share what I do to inject CD3 into my life.
If you need a refresher on CD3 itself outside the context of Lifestyle Gamification, Yu-kai also shared more here: http://yukaichou.com/gamification-study/8-core-drives-gamification-3-empowerment-creativity-feedback/
This is the Core Drive where people are driven by a sense of growth towards a goal and accomplishing it.
He also uses an example from the early days of social media to describe how bells and whistles weren’t working as people expected. Points, badges, and leaderboards were the vanity metrics of online publishing:
What most people didn’t recognize then was that social media is much deeper than simply possessing and posting on profile accounts. That’s just the outer shell of its influence and impact. We now know today that great social media campaigns focus on how to create value for the audience by sharing information that is insightful and engaging; has a personal voice; engages and sincerely interacts with each potential customer; and much, much more.
In essence, the beauty of social media was in how you designed and implemented a campaign, not in the bells and whistles you’ve used. It was the informal and formal dialogue you had with your community that ultimately taps into the platform’s unique possibilities.
There’s quite a bit more to consider, especially when considering how to use CD2 in a lifestyle design, but first let’s look at what not to do from a real-life example…my own.
This series is written by Erik van Mechelen, based on the Octalysis framework by Yu-kai Chou.
Gamification in your life
Yes, gamification can be used to improve your lifestyle.
You’re probably already doing it. If you’re a parent helping your child with homework, you’re helping your son or daughter be the best they can be because you believe in education to change their life.
Gamification, depending on how you define it, is essentially positive psychology combined with game design. Throw in a bit of behavioral science, motivation, and design and you have a working definition of gamification.
Yu-kai likes to call this human-focused design (not to be confused with IDEO’s human-centered design).
This contrasts function-focused design (this chair is for sitting, nothing else).
Because human motivation is complex and complicated, we need to account for the various drives that play into it. Why do we want to move towards something better? Or away from something worse? Because we want what’s best for our life. Isn’t it as simple as that?
Simply stated, perhaps. But creating a life is what we are all doing and aim to do each moment of our day. How well you execute or live within the framework and models you’ve constructed (whether internally or externally) give you some experience on the spectrum from suffering to satisfaction.
In Yu-kai’s Octalysis framework, there are 8 Core Drives (and one hidden Core Drive) to behavior. If none of the drives are present, there is no behavior.
In this series, I’ll take each of the Core Drives one at a time to give you a detailed look at how each contributes to lifestyle and how you can apply more or less of each into your lifestyle design to improve your life satisfaction.
