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WILL KEEPING SCORE OF ABSOLUTELY EV­ERY­THING MAKE YOU A BETTER PER­SON? AN EXPERI­MENT IN SELF-IMPROVE­MENT

The experi­ment began at 11 a.m. in my bed­room in Brooklyn. I bought an app from the iTunes store called EpicWin, a fanta­sy-themed game designed to improve users lives by motivating them to accomplish re­al-world goals with virtual-world rewards. Before starting the game, I had to pick and customize an avatar that would rep­resent me in the dig­ital landscape of EpicWin. I chose a cadav­er­ous warrior named Calcium Facebone. He held a blunt mal­let in one hand. “Add new task,” the screen read. Since I was planning to write a story about my expe­ri­ence, I typed in “Start article.” A surge of om­inous mu­sic rat­tled from the iPhone speakers, and Calcium Facebone appeared on a rum­pled map on the screen. Miles trav­eled: 0.

I had gotten the idea for the experi­ment a few months ago, when I became inter­ested in a trend called “gam­ification.” To gam­ify some­thing is to integrate videogame me­chan­ics—such as scor­ing, mis­sions and lev­el-ending “boss” battles—into re­al-life sit­uations. Gam­ification has become increas­ingly popular as our use of smart­phones and our col­lective desire to re­main connected at ev­ery mo­ment have grown. For now, it is primarily a mar­keting tool used by busi­nesses to shape consumer behav­ior. Google awards badges to reg­ular users of Google News; on­line mar­ketplaces such as Gilt Groupe and Zappos dish out perks to their frequent customers; Kobo, a compa­ny that produces e-readers and e-books, lets consumers unlock achieve­ment awards for plowing through a certain number of pages. M2 Research, an an­alyt­ics firm in Enc­initas, California, es­ti­mates that the gam­ification mar­ket in 2011 was worth about $100 million. By 2016, it could reach as high as $2.8 billion.

Fu­eled by such growth, gam­ification is be­ginning to expand be­yond commercial applications. “I foresee games that tackle glob­al-scale prob­lems like cli­mate change and poverty,” game devel­op­er Jane McGo­ni­gal writes in her book Re­ality Is Bro­ken. “I foresee games that aug­ment our most essential human capa­bilities—to be happy, resilient, cre­ative—and empower us to change the world in meaningful ways.”

If, as the theo­ry holds, ev­ery­thing in life could be a game, I wondered what would hap­pen if it re­ally were. So I decided to construct an experi­ment. Over the course of sev­en days, I would score and tally differ­ent as­pects of my life. I would sign up for ev­ery mobile or Web-based gam­ification app that I could find. Where there were no apps, I would cre­ate my own games. And I would discover if the points I earned correlated to an actual improve­ment in my well-be­ing.

To help design my gam­i­fied life, I enlisted Nick Fortugno and Margaret Wallace, the co-founders of Playmat­ics, a New York game-devel­op­ment firm. Togeth­er we cre­ated a plan for the week, part of which I would be spending in Durham, North Car­olina, vis­iting my fiancée, Katie. We re­solved to exam­ine the results at the end of the week.

EpicWin was my first chance to score some points. I sat down at my com­put­er and opened a Word doc­u­ment. The screen was very white. I wrote a few words, and then a few more. Af­ter 20 minutes, I returned to the app and confirmed that I had started my article, completing my first quest. Calcium Facebone tottered 40 miles forward across the map, picking up 110 gold coins along the way. Sol­id numbers, certainly, 40 and 110, and I felt a small but undeniable sense of accomplish­ment looking at them on the screen. But I couldnt help but wonder what they meant out­side of the game, so I called Gabe Zichermann, co-au­thor of the book Game-Based Mar­keting.

“That number is not just a number,” he said. “That number is pro­viding feedback. Feedback is whats intoxicating.” Ten years ago, such feedback was very lim­ited. These days, we get it in ev­ery­thing we do—friends on Facebook “like” our posts, Twitter users re-tweet our tweets, oth­er users rank the rel­evance of our Yelp reviews.

“That cycle of chal­lenge and achieve­ment causes the brain to secrete dopam­ine and oth­er chem­icals and cre­ates a pos­itive re­inforce­ment loop,” Zichermann added. “Which is to say, you want to do it again and again and again.” I stared down at Calcium Facebone. There was no doubt that I felt compelled to log an­oth­er task.

On the flight to Durham the next morning, I began com­piling the early results. Perched in the third row, cocktail napkin on my knee, I tab­ulated my scores from EpicWin and the gam­ification site Chore Wars, where I had cre­ated a pro­file the evening before. Chore Wars, like EpicWin, takes its design cues from the world of role-playing games—the player chooses an avatar and, by completing certain errands in the re­al world, obtains points. I had decided to use Chore Wars to gam­ify three house­hold tasks: wash­ing the dishes, taking out the recycling, and paying my bills. In the name of consis­tency, I chose a vam­pire avatar, whose pale skin re­m­inded me of Calcium Facebone. Before leav­ing for the airport that morning, I scrubbed a plate from the night before and hauled a trash bag to the curb. Togeth­er the chores were worth 70 expe­ri­ence points and 19 pieces of gold. I wasnt sure what the exchange rate with my gold coins from EpicWin was, but the feedback felt good.

On the long taxi to the gate, I turned on my iPhone and opened an­oth­er app that I had downloaded the pre­vi­ous night, Foursquare. Us­ing the free app, gamers “check in” at restaurants, stores and public spaces to earn points and badges. Foursquare had determined my location in dis­turb­ing detail, down to the gate number. I clicked through the check-in screen and, with a few fin­ger taps, racked up a string of points as well as a Newbie badge. It felt good. The app was re­markably easy. Unlike Chore Wars or EpicWin, both of which require lengthy, detailed updates, Foursquare updates it­self with location data. To play, users need only press a button.

As Kevin Slavin, a game designer and consultant, explained to me, in the fu­ture, the best gam­ification apps will prob­a­bly be the most un­obtrusive, the most organ­ically integrated into our phys­ical lives. Where­as conventional videogames im­merse you in a manufac­tured expe­ri­ence, a good gam­ification app should keep you centered in the re­al world while subtly applying var­ious game me­chan­ics. Slavin suggested as a rough ana­log the air-con­dition­ing con­trols on a modern car. “A car designer would want the dials to be some­thing you only partly think about, because if its diffi­cult, youll stop think­ing about driv­ing. In a way, youre trying to make it invis­ible.”

Af­ter getting off the plane, I met Katie downstairs, where I im­me­diately checked in at the airport coffee shop. “Five points!” I said. “How thrilling,” she said. We drove to get a sandwich. I checked in at the restaurant. We stopped by Tar­get to pick up a few things, and before walking through the sliding doors, I again checked in. We drove to Katies house, and I checked in there too. I began to imag­ine the world as a dig­itized quilt of inter­connected landmarks. Points were all around. Ev­erywhere I went, I held my smart­phone in front of me like a brightly glowing compass. Foursquare had chal­lenged me to col­lect 50 points in a week. I beat that before the end of the day.

Dur­ing my vis­it to Playmat­ics, Fortugno and Wallace had suggested that even my love life could be subject to gam­ification. Plenty of dating sites use gam­ification el­e­ments—OkCu­pid, for in­stance, keeps a tally of how many people view your pro­file, and rewards you with more po­tential matches as you answer more questions about your­self. But since Im en­gaged, the Playmat­ics team helped me design a game better suit­ed to my relation­ship status. The interface was an index card.

“Build a Better Fiancé” would take place over two days, or lev­els. I would “win” by racking up 10 points on the first day and 15 on the sec­ond; fail to reach the goal, and I would have to start the lev­el over. I could earn points for logging achieve­ments in five cat­egories, all of them devised by Katie: compli­ments, cleaning up, public displays of af­fection, interacting with her fam­ily and friends, and antic­ipating what she would want before she wanted it. I would gam­ify my­self into a stronger and more inti­mate relation­ship. For the purpose of record­ing my score, I gave Katie the index card, which she was to carry ev­erywhere she went.

Lev­el One went poorly. I took a shower and left the floor littered with shampoo and body-wash bot­tles (it looked, Katie said, “as if you were having a yard sale in there”). I was planning on surpris­ing her by vol­unteering to walk the dog, but I was still busy updating my Chore Wars progress when she headed out the door, pooch in tow. “Mi­nus one point!” she said. Fortunately, I had designed the game with no mi­nuses.

I would discover if the points I earned in the games correlated to an actual improve­ment in my well-be­ing.

That night, we went out to dinner. At the restaurant I checked in us­ing Foursquare and then clicked over to my mobile brows­er to play Chore Wars. I had cleaned the dishes that day, and I received some gold points and a lev­el up. But, I reasoned, those dishes should also count to­ward my goal in the Better Fiancé game. “Fine,” Katie said. “One point.” I leaned across the table and kissed her cheek, earning me an­oth­er point.

But when we returned home, I took a look at the index card and re­alized that I was still three points short of my goal. I thought about pulling out a last-minute romantic ges­ture, but what I re­ally wanted to do was sit in bed and watch Netflix. “Fail,” Katie said af­ter she had tallied my score for her­self. “Luckily, you have more lives.”

The next phase of the experi­ment was to determine if gam­ification could improve my health, so the next morning Katie and I went to a sporting-goods store in Durham to buy equip­ment for Nike+, a fitness-tracking system in which runners mon­itor and gam­ify their dai­ly workouts. The Nike+ appa­ratus is simple. A small accelerom­e­ter, slotted in the sole of a Nike shoe, transmits speed and dis­tance data to an iPod, a Nike watch or a rub­ber bracelet con­tain­ing a USB drive.

I opted for a pair of Air Max shoes ($90) and the bracelet, called the SportBand ($59). Once my run was fin­ished, the sales clerk explained, I could snap the USB drive off the SportBand and upload the data from my run to my laptop. That data, in turn, would help me set weekly and monthly goals, com­pete against millions of oth­er Nike+ users, and isolate my “prob­lem ar­eas.” I had no short­age of those. I run badly, and usu­ally in a great deal of pain. And yet here, in the soft rub­ber of the SportBand, was a simple promise: With a lit­tle time, my reg­ular death marches might become some­thing I would actually enjoy.

Back at home, I calibrated my stride, set a couple of initial goals—I wanted to run 15 miles in the next three days, and I wanted to break nine-minute miles—and cre­ated my avatar, which this time I designed to look like my­self. I gave him blond hair, dressed him in a white sweatshirt, and put a very small SportBand on his wrist.

I ran out the front door and through the gates at the foot of the trail (five points on Foursquare, plus a bonus for my first trail vis­it). The run it­self was full of the usu­al pangs of self-pity and breath­lessness. It seemed to last for days. But lat­er, when I brought up the data on my laptop, I was surprised to find that I had somehow man­aged to run one of the five miles in six minutes and 49 sec­onds (it was downhill). I felt as if I had completed a partic­ularly tricky sequence in a videogame. Even though it was only my first run, it was as though I had beat­en the boss and was now watch­ing the cred­its cascade across the screen.

That whole week, I had not been sleeping partic­ularly well. Fortugno and Wallace had suggested that improving my sleeping habits, too, could be a part of the experi­ment. Since no custom-built sleep gam­ification apps existed, I decided to try SuperBetter, an adven­ture-themed game cre­ated by Jane McGo­ni­gal, that can be customized to help users accomplish their individual goals.

The premise of SuperBetter, accord­ing to its website, was to increase my “person­al resilience,” in this case by clearly de­lin­eating my objective and out­lin­ing an in­centive-laden path to hours of blissful sleep. I set a reasonable-sounding goal of six hours a night, named my “bad guys” (such as work and stress), and chose a few “power-ups” (hot tea, videogames and bourbon). I was then giv­en a se­ries of “mis­sions,” the first of which in­volved sleeping a full sev­en hours. That night, I would record the number of power-ups I was us­ing, and the next morning, I would log the number of hours I slept. The more active I stayed in the game, the more my resilience score would go up. If I man­aged to sleep enough, I would earn additional points, unlock achieve­ment badges, and lev­el-up to the next mis­sion: to sleep some more.

In the meantime, I took an­oth­er jog, best­ing the times Id set the day before. When I got home, I showered, careful to place all the shampoo bot­tles back in the caddy, and dashed upstairs to take out the recycling and let the dog out the backdoor, all before Katie had said a word. “Four points,” she smiled. I gave her a hug. “You look beautiful,” I said. “Two points,” she said.

That evening, we checked in at a movie the­ater that was running a special in­centive program for Foursquare users—those who had checked in at the the­ater three sep­a­rate times earned a free bag of popcorn. Earli­er in the day, I had spo­ken with Brian Wong, a young entrepreneur in California who helps corporations use their prod­ucts as rewards in game apps, about these kinds of promotions. “People are nat­urally goal-driv­en,” Wong said. “If theyre just aiming for a bunch of points, it might not mat­ter much. But if theyre aiming for re­al things, re­al rewards, thats some­thing differ­ent al­togeth­er.”

Alas, I had checked into this partic­ular the­ater only once, so I had to pay for the popcorn out of pocket. I also bought the drinks and can­dy, howev­er, held open the doors, and switched seats with Katie when she had trou­ble see­ing the screen. By the time the movie was over, the Building a Better Fiancé index card read 20 points. I had beat­en the lev­el.

As we got ready for bed—I logged my hot tea and bourbon power-ups on SuperBetter—I told Katie that she looked especially lovely tonight, in those red sweatpants. “Now I feel like youre just do­ing it for the points,” she said.

A setback. I spend more than an hour a day on av­erage playing actual videogames. But how to gam­ify an activ­ity that is already a game? Rather than do­ing the sensible thing and excluding videogames or, con­versely, incorporating my extant scores into the larg­er experi­ment, I made the (ul­ti­mately unfortunate) deci­sion to go meta. Fortugno had an approach: Since Im the type of gamer who plays from start to fin­ish as quickly as pos­sible, he suggested that I in­stead become a “col­lector,” the type who pursues ev­ery hidden treasure or trophy. That way Id not only increase my score dramat­ically but also become a better gamer—and therefore a happi­er, better-adjusted per­son.

On my way home from the airport in New York, the first thing I did was buy a new videogame, Batman: Arkham City. It included a gauge, running from 0 to 100, that charts the per­cent­age of the world that a player uncovers. Getting the gauge to 100 requires completing sev­eral side-quests, including the hunt for hun­dreds of Riddler tro­phies, which sit in shad­ows and air vents and, in one case, on top of a chimney, hun­dreds of feet above the choppy wa­ters of Arkham Bay.

I spent almost as much time en­tering my scores as I had do­ing the tasks the applications purported to track.

I played for six hours straight, swoop­ing across the shad­owed city at a lunat­ic pace. I uncovered a small bag of tro­phies and man­aged to beat the bosses at the end of a couple of lev­els. But playing as a col­lector was pretty unfulfill­ing, and it didnt seem to make me a better player. At 2:30 in the morning I turned off the Xbox, wired, frus­trated and red-eyed. The gauge was only up to 3 per­cent. Meanwhile, my story was com­ing along sluggishly, the dishes were still dirty, and Id forgotten to call Katie.

I woke up at 9:30 and logged my six hours of sleep on SuperBetter, which awarded me with a lev­el up. I did the dishes, did some writing, and entered my information on Chore Wars and EpicWin. It occurred to me then that I had spent almost as much time en­tering my var­ious scores as I had do­ing the tasks the applications purported to track.

In the af­ter­noon, I went for a quick run and then showered, folding my tow­el and keeping the bath­room clean. At around 3, I com­piled my scores from the var­ious gam­ification platforms. On my iPhone, I opened up Foursquare, and on my iPod Touch I booted up EpicWin. I plugged my Nike+ USB drive into the com­put­er and opened two more tabs for SuperBetter and Chore Wars. Last, I dug up the points from the Build a Better Fiancé game, which I had entered a day earli­er into a Word doc­u­ment. Lines of information rolled across the screens—numbers, fig­ures, gold coins, expe­ri­ence points, badges and tro­phies, gauges and power-ups—none of them a per­fect match with the oth­er, all of them purporting to quanti­fy some part of my gam­i­fied exis­tence.

I re­membered that Wong had pre­dicted the cre­ation, in the not-so-dis­tant fu­ture, of a uni­fied database, where all the scores from all the gam­ification applications would be col­lected and rolled into one big number that would rep­resent the grand total of our achieve­ments in busi­ness, fitness, love, and so on.

I wondered whether gam­ification would re­ally go that far. I thought back to what crit­ics of the trend such as game designer Ian Bogost had told me, that it is lit­tle more than a crass point-based mar­keting ploy. Af­ter a week, I knew what my score was, but I still had no idea what all the points added up to.

With the experi­ment over, I could still sense, under the fa­mil­iar rhythms of my dai­ly rou­tine, a trace of the games that had dom­inated my life for the pre­vi­ous week. I washed the dishes and took out the recycling. I left Foursquare on my phone—I had grown fond of it—and when I ran that af­ter­noon, I was wearing my SportBand. But I also played Arkham City the way I re­ally wanted to, crush­ing the bosses with well-placed punches and leav­ing the byzan­tine side-quests alone. And I did not open EpicWin, Chore Wars or SuperBetter.

I did faintly miss, as Gabe Zichermann had pre­dicted, the expe­ri­ence points and gold earned on Chore Wars and EpicWin; those numbers were, af­ter all, re­al ev­idence of my newfound diligence. But I also enjoyed be­ing able to talk to my fiancée with­out worrying about my score. Even though I was, despite the howl­ing protestations of Calcium Facebone, go­ing to be late with this article, I sat at my desk, and I re­membered that I also enjoyed writing. I enjoyed do­ing things because they needed do­ing, and not because I needed to lev­el-up.

I called Slavin and asked him to imag­ine how gam­ification might evolve over next few years. He pre­dicted that gam­ification as a buzzword would eventually lose its lus­ter. “The idea that gam­ification requires certification programs and specialists and OR­eilly books—that is go­ing to fade away,” he said. “Still, there are re­al things, val­uable things” we could take from gam­ification and incorporate into the design of, say, Facebook, or a new fitness gad­get. In the com­ing years, he said, e-commerce sites will prob­a­bly con­tinue to incorporate var­ious as­pects of gam­ification, from VIP points to tan­gible prizes. Our social networks, too, are likely to become even more gam­i­fied, with users com­peting for rewards, badges and, of course, the approval, in the form of a small upheld thumb, of our peers.

That af­ter­noon, I rang up Fortugno to report on my progress. I told him my total score—3,494—which I had com­piled a few hours before. He asked me how I had gotten it, and I explained that it had been a mat­ter of simple math. It was just a crude amalgam of var­ious scores racked up on the var­ious applications, along with my Arkham Asylum per­cent­age. He laugh­ed. “Hey,” he said, “its a big number. You should be proud.”