A mini-guide on how to Questify Your Life
Have you wanted to use gamification to build new habits, explore your world, or help your community but didn’t know how to start? This might help.
Originally published on December 16, 2024 on Substack.
I was scrolling a gamification forum when I saw this post:
Creating a Personal Game
Alright y’all. I have a question. For Christmas this year I wanted to go the extra mile for my little brother, he’s 15 and he’s a huge gamer.
I see so much potential in his life and I want to challenge him to do hard things as he goes through high school and enters adulting. I would have killed for something like this growing up, and I think it would be awesome to connect with him more in this way.
I want to create some sort of game for him that we can create check points and a level up system as we focus in on his Mind, heart, and body. I don’t want to overcomplicate it, but I’m curious what y’all would do.”
I have been playing my life as a game for many years now. It’s very effective for me. With the help of gamification and positive psychology (plus many other resources), I have been able to maintain my mental health recovery, manage my disability symptoms, start public speaking on my journey, finish my undergraduate degree, get into law school, become a licensed attorney, and build a business.
Yes, sometimes, I “overcomplicate” my process, so the above post inspired me to try to boil it down—simplify it for a new player.
So, if I was coaching someone at the beginning of their gamification journey I would keep the following in mind.
Welcome to a mini-guide on how to Questify Your Life
Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash
You determine when your backstory ends and your journey begins
First, I would give the person permission.
Permission to play. To have fun. To be imperfect. To set a goal and never achieve it.
This permission allows for the freedom to try.
In Dungeons and Dragons, when you roll your 20-sided die and it falls upon a 1, that is a Natural 1. It’s a critical failure. The more often you roll your dice, the more often you will fail, it is simply part of the game. The same logic works for successes too.
So, by reframing failure as an opportunity for story and growth, we can come to see that the real failure is never rolling the dice and trying in the first place.
Everything is a practiced skill. Like in many games the more you do, the more experience you get and the better you are. That is the same in real life. Even if you are not good at something right away, the more you learn about it and practice, the better you will become.
Almost everything is about the journey, not the destination—Establish the boundaries of your journey “map”
I think of the journey like a map. Similar to Skyrim’s, or any open-world game, there is a map. At the beginning of the game, we only explored a bit of the map, but as we play the game we see and learn more.
When exploring your journey your map becomes a mixture of places, people, and experiences that are available to you now and at a later time. Some of these will not be unlocked right away.
Even if your game is focused on getting to the next “destination,” (like completing a quest or quest objective), the experience you have while getting you to that destination is the journey.
To help myself on my journey, I created my “Journey Principles.”
- There is almost no right or wrong way to do a quest. The doing part is the most important
- Change is inevitable
- There is hardly ever an option of going back, but you can move forward
- Failure is a part of the process and so is success
- Don’t go at it alone
- You are allowed to rewrite or restart a quest
- You do not have to finish all started quests. Knowing when to unpin a quest and move on to the next time is an important skill.
- Many of the most mundane quests are worth going on, all of your quests do not need to be impressive or extravagant
- All quests are equal (most of the time)
- Keep an eye out for the comparison trap— your quest is unique to you
- You can not do all of the things you want to do all at once—slow and consistent is the way to build mastery
- Your quests will change as you do
For me, it was a fun journal quest (a goal to answer a specific prompt in my journal) to consider what I wanted my journey principles to be.
These will continue to evolve as I do.
At the bottom of my first Substack, from years ago, I made a “Values Quest.” That quest is still worth checking out at the beginning of most people’s personal gamification journeys, but to keep it simple, I won’t include the full thing here.
Evaluate your current character
Once you have taken some time to establish some information about your journey and how you want it to feel. The next step would be to look at yourself as a playable character (PC).
We are all the main characters of our lives. (We are not, however, the “chosen one”).
For me, I think of the customization of my PC in four categories. Aesthetics, Acceptance, Simple But Not Easy, and Personas.
For simplicity’s sake, though, I will not be going through those categories here. Rather, I will aim to answer the asked question. The OP asked to “focus in on his mind, heart, and body.”
To focus on “mind, heart, and body” I would frame the PC experience as follows:
Mana: The closest thing we have to magic in this world is our mental capabilities and intention. So, I like to think of my mental skills and energy as my “mana.”
Health Points (HP): The physical energy we have day-to-day can be looked at as HP. If you are sick your HP is likely low. If you’ve been working out regularly and getting enough sleep, your HP may be higher than normal. It can be helpful to know where your HP is during the day and fun ways to use it on quests.
Purpose/Drive: How do you follow your heart? What are you drawn to? What do you want to do with your limited time on this earth? Who do you want to help? Living a life with purpose and intention is simple but not easy. It’s worth exploring through small quests to identify a tentative purpose. This isn’t permanent, rather it is just a starting place.
So, taking time to talk about, journal, or think about how you are doing in each of those categories is a good start in establishing where your character is.
A quest for you: Character visualization
Quest Purpose:
To take the time to dream, visualize, and creatively explore potential paths for what your character could be.
Objectives:
The objectives of this quest are going to look different for everybody. Below are suggested ways to customize it to make it work for you.
For some, this is going to feel silly. If that is you, I recommend looking into research regarding visualizations and athletes. I do not have a specific resource for you on this, rather it’s worth a Google search about it, so you can find resources you trust and care about.
Visualization meditation:
Take some time to use your imagination to play through an ideal foreseeable future.
What do you look like? What does it take to get to the look?
How do you feel?
How do you respond when stressed?
Play through a montage in your imagination about what a day in your life looks like. What do you do? What do you prioritize?
It may be helpful to write out 2-3 objectives to get you 1% closer to the person this month. This can be a good way to establish what your next quest could be.
Journal quest:
Take some time to write out the answers to the following questions (or whichever feels right to you):
- Who do you want to be, even for a little while? What is it about that person that draws you to wanting that?
- What do you wear? How do you move?
- What do you do during the most mundane parts of your day?
- Who do you help? What change in the world do you work towards?
Vision board:
For somebody like me who has a limited visual imagination, I like to use Pinterest and/or my scrapbook to make a vision board about what I want my character to look like.
Suggested Reward:
A small item you could wear or an event that you could go to temporarily practice being the person you imagined.
Take time to land in the current moment and play a simple game
First, a definition so we are on the same page. For me, a game and a quest are different.
Most quests include games, but not all games are quests.
A quest is a search for something. It is the curiosity that brings movement on your journey.
A game is adding a challenge and a reward to something to make it more fun.
For example, one of my current quests is to build a speaking business that focuses on disability, neurodiversity, and mental health topics.
I often play “dice games” when I am working on objectives connected to that quest. I make a list of my objectives and then number them. I roll a die. Whatever number the die falls on is the objective I work on. The challenge of this game changes, but most often I add a timed element. Like I get points for every 30 minutes I spend on a task I rolled within my work day. Those points then go towards my total Reward Points and I can use them to “buy” rewards later.
I suggest trying something like this to explore bringing game mechanics into your life.
Start by establishing what type of games you like and practice using game tropes in your quests.
The Original Poster (OP) said that his brother is 15 and is a huge gamer.
What are his favorite games? The way to go about this whole idea would be a bit different depending on if his favorite game was Call Of Duty vs. Dungeons & Dragons.
What is it about those games that he likes? Competition? Teamwork? Cozy organization (like Animal Crossing)?
Start small and explore together.
Set up a larger quest
Next, set up a larger quest.
What are you searching for and what would success look like for that? Some examples could be getting into a specific college program, building a better fitness routine, finding a place to volunteer, or reading more books.
To set up a quest:
- What is the question that you are searching for an answer to?
- What are identified objectives that could bring you closer to answering that question?
- What games can you create to make the journey more fun on your path towards the answer?
- What does success look like for you, currently? (Expect that success will not always look like what you imagine)
- What would an ideal reward be for completing this quest?
Reward yourself
I like to use reward points (RP) for my reward system. However, there are many different ways to set up rewards. It’s worth exploring different ways, to see what you do and do not like.
For each quest objective I complete, I get a set amount of RP. The amount of RP depends on the objective.
I like to use a sticker chart to keep track of my RP, but it can also be kept on a Notion page or in a journal.
I then use my RP for rewards on a reward menu I created. It is the same type of system as arcades use. The RP are like arcade tickets and the rewards are arcade prizes.
Rewards are simply a thing given in recognition of successfully accomplishing what you have set out to do. Often they are made up of time, energy, and/or money.
I like to use “levels” per skill rather than for me as a whole. Like my skill level in public speaking is much higher than my skill level in running a business.
But, reward points could be used to unlock levels. Like 50 RP equals a level, or something like that.
An additional thing to consider when it comes to personal games, especially when setting them up for teenagers, is to figure out how to balance external rewards and personal intrinsic motivation (the drive to do something because you enjoy it or find it interesting, rather than because of external rewards or pressures). I have seen too many people try to use gamification to change people’s behaviors, without recognizing that it likely will not be helpful long-term unless the person wants to do it.
Rewards and levels come secondary when the journey itself is enjoyable.
Conclusion: If you were just skimming and want a quick summary, here it is:
- Give yourself permission to play and experiment
- Establish the boundaries of your journey “map”
- Evaluate your current character
- Dream about your future character
- Take time to land in the current moment and play a simple game
- Set up a larger quest
- Reward yourself
Thanks for reading!
