How Gamification can help you Get out of Bed by “Killing” Time
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Wake Up Gamification
Gamification doesn’t always need to about Saving the World.
Tired of waking up every morning? Is getting out of bed a drag? A Japanese company decided to add some Gamification into the process and make waking up Epic and Fun!
They call it the Gun O’Clock. A Gun that is only designed to shoot a clock.
I found this thanks to the cool blog Geekologie. The idea is simple: you set your alarm on Gun O’Clock the night before, and at the designated time in the morning, on top of the usual PiPiPiPi sound (or any custom sound that you can record), a bull-eye target will come up and the “user” will need to grab a gun and shoot at the target 5 times in order to get it to quiet down.
Here’s a video of how it works (“Iz Coool!”):
Gun O’Clock: 1
Bed: 0
“Iz Coool!”
Tackling the “Waking Up” Industry with Gamification
The “Waking Up” Industry, or…Alarm Clocks, has been in a constant battle in finding out the best way to get people out of bed happily and vigorously.
There are “intelligent” products like the YCombinator Startup WakeMate (which is no longer operation…with an interesting story) and the Zeo (which I personally use and love – highly recommended) that measures your sleeping patterns, detects REM/Quality sleep, and wakes you up when you finished your full cycle (sometimes sleeping 8 minutes more would get you to become more tired as it interrupts you in the middle of a quality sleep cycle).
There are “stealth wake” products like the Lark, which is designed to wake up one person quietly, without interrupting his/her partner. This is great for people on Polyphasic Sleep Schedules.
Then there are “Gamification” products that make you play a little game in order to wake up. Another example is Clocky, which is an alarm clock on wheels and you need to catch the little pest before you can turn it off. There’s even a Helicopter Alarm Clock that shoots out a propellor in the air and you need to find it and put it back into the clock to turn it off.
Of course, none of that feels as epic as grabbing a gun and shooting your alarm clock with a shotgun noise until it tells you that you are excellent.
“Iz Coool!”
Share Your Wake-Up Gamification Concepts
Any other Gamification concepts that wake you up in the morning? Please share below.
Related Reading