Originally posted by Julio Palacios on September 19, 2019.
While researching for my Assignment 1, I stumbled upon Life Gamification Apps. This is a category of apps that I never used or knew existed. Life gamification is an interesting notion. It makes us reframe our daily tasks, responsibilities and achievements within the scope of a video game.
Similar to a roleplaying game, completing rewarding, life-improving tasks rewards you with Experience Points (XP), the more experience points you gain, the higher you rank, in life. The Level Up Life App breaks down XP into different categories of skill points. They are Strength, Culture, Environment, Charisma, Talent and Intellect. You can gain XP by completing achievements in the following category. Arts and Creativity, Career and Finance, Fitness and Health, Food and Cooking, Fun, Household / DIY, Humanity, Mental, Outdoors, Reading, School and Learning, Social, Travel. According to Patel (2019) Gamification isn’t a gimmick — it works because it triggers powerful emotions. By using game mechanics in a non-game context, gamification makes tasks more fun and engaging
As you can imagine this can be a great way to motivate or initiate self-improvement. Beyond the aspect of self-improvement, I really find it fascinating how these apps manages to blur the lines separating our mobile and real world existence. It seems to bridge real world actions into the digital realm and reward those real world actions with digital rewards/points.
A couple of examples of Life Gamification Apps are
Patel, D. (2019, March 25). Gamify Your Life and Become Massively Successful. Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/329405
I picked this post by Julio for our focus this week on mobile culture because I have a keen interest in gamification and more specifically game-based learning in education. Since learning more about these topics in the MET, I have come to realize that these principles are far more prevalent than I could have ever imagined. I just completed a post on Mindfulness apps and even in those apps are principles of gamification embedded to keep us motivated to go back for more. Ever used any of these apps as they circle how many days of the week you successfully completed a meditation session? How does it feel looking at that one incomplete circle in your week for example? I feel a bit bummed for sure and then tell myself I will do better and beat that “score” of five sessions the following week. Of course, a very popular mobile app that has been extremely successful with their use of gamification to keep users specifically motivated to learn more is Duolingo. Think about the leader-boards, the streaks of successful tasks completed etc. Even digital loyalty programs with banks, insurance companies or the local coffee shop capitalize on how the sense of a game or competition affects human behavior. Once you start looking, you suddenly see the examples pop up everywhere.