Try These 3 Things to Gamify Your Writing
People love playing games.
Good games give you meaningful feedbacks, make you motivated, let you take the initiative to reach your goals, and also provide joyful communication between players.
Writing should also be like this.
As writers, we want to be motivated to reach our goals, we want to get meaningful feedbacks from readers, and we also want to communicate by writing.
Games are fantastic sources of inspiration for us. Let’s take a look at what we can learn from games, to become a better writer.
1. Level design
Small actions lead to big results.
Level systems motivate you to take small actions. In the game, you have a small line of level texts floating above the avatar. In reality, you simply need to record what you have done.
Let’s say your goal is to write 20 stories on Medium, and you put a mark on your notebook every time you publish one.
This is not a good strategy.
Why? There is too much randomness in it: sometimes it takes 10 minutes to write a short story, sometimes it takes 2 weeks, sometimes it takes forever.
Instead, setting up a daily count is always a good strategy.
A better level system is, for example, to write 30 minutes every day, and record them.
It also works for other goals you have:
Bad: record every time you lose 1 kg weight.
Good: record every day when you have done 20 minutes of exercise.
Bad: record when you finished reading 1 book.
Good: record every day when you have done 30 minutes’ reading.
2. Randomized your reward
Reward is something that you do need to randomize. Think about the equipment that is randomly dropped in the game, recall your anticipations and your heartbeat speeding up facing the unknown rewards. Reward randomization is magical.
Set a threshold for yourself, every time you have achieved something, roll a dice to decide your score, accumulate them, reward yourself once you are over the threshold.
The reward can be anything that you want: a small present, a delicious meal, a book. You name it.
The magic is that there is always something you can anticipate for. This anticipation is often even more pleasurable than your work itself.
3. Compare to your past self
In the game, sometimes you take again the low-level challenges. Dominating them give you a huge sense of accomplishment. You see how you grow up along the way, and you are eager to continue.
It also works for writing. Take a look at your past stories, just focus on how much you have improved. Facing those deficiencies in the past, you know you are able to become better and better at writing. Such confidence is the most beautiful thing you can have.
It is also fun to look at who you were in the past. Old photos are memorable. Old works remind you about dots along your life journey. By connect the dots looking backwards, you are more willing to face the unknown future.
Peer pressure is everywhere. You can find tons of successful writers on Medium. It is self-inflicted to always compare yourself with them. Just compare yourself with who you were yesterday.
These 3 ideas makes writing easy and fun. Apply them to gamify your writing process!
- Design a good “level-up” system to guide you towards your goal.
- Randomize your reward to get the positive anticipation.
- Compare to your past self, not to others.
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