Gamification is a way to motivate people by adding game elements to activities. A great example is Habitica, which gamifies habits by turning life tasks into an RPG. Players complete daily tasks to gain experience points and buy new equipment to attack monsters.

I have used Habitica for a few years and I really love this concept. However, the numbers become less and less meaningful as my level grows. My avatar is at level 88. I partly earned that from learning, partly from exercising, and mostly from activities I don’t remember because the system don’t keep track of individual record.

Therefore, I want to create my own system to represent my real life. Of course, this game will be much complicated to design play and may defeat the purpose of gamification, which is to motivate myself. Still, I want the numbers to be meaningful. Imagine how intriguing it would be to have the accurate stats that can prove my ability in real life.

I focused on experiences and knowledge because they are easy to quantify and cannot regress even if you slack off for a while, just like you don’t lose the in-game experience points even if you forget the game. I first started my test on my drawing practices. I took pictures for every pages on my sketchbooks and tag them according to what skill I’ve trained when drawing those pages (using a tool called filetags (github)), I wrote code to automatically count the tags and convert them as progress bars on this page (class Painter). I listed all the possible goals I may have as a simple wish list.

However, my current system can’t go beyond skills and knowledge because most other things in life are hard to gamify. Either they don’t grow as a simple straight line, like health, or they are impossible to quantify, like relationships. I’m still finding possible ways to gamify those aspects of my life.