HabitRPG: Gamify Your Life – Because IRL Is Boring.
You know that sense of accomplishment you feel when you complete a quest in-game? That little ding!, the XP, and most importantly, when you level up? In real life, keeping track of all your to-dos, daily/weekly goals, and random tasks is pretty mundane.
Wouldn’t it be rad if someone came up with a way to keep track of your IRL lists, but added a bit of flair to make it feel like your own personal RPG?
BAM. HabitRPG.
Still in the very, very new stages (Reddit broke the site the other day when it was first released), HabitRPG, a new habit tracker app, takes the tasks you want to (and don’t want to) complete, and turns them into an RPG-style game in your browser, involving experience points, health points, rewards, and leveling up.
Like any game, if you lose all your health – you die. if you gain enough XP, you make it to the next level and your health is restored! You can also eventually earn gold by completing tasks, which can be used to purchase health potions and weapons (you know, in case you need a decent crossbow next time you do the laundry.)
Sound fun?
Here’s the tutorial straight from the HabitRPG Website:
Achieve goals and Level up
As you accomplish goals, you level up. If you fail your goals, you lose hit points. Lose all your HP and you die.
Habits
Habits are goals that you constantly track. For some habits, it only makes sense to gain points (like “1h Productive Work”). For others, it only makes sense to lose points (like “Eat Junk Food”). For the rest, both + and – make sense (“Take The Stairs”, stairs = gain, elevator = lose).
Dailies
Dailies are goals that you want to complete once a day. At the end of each day, non-completed Dailies dock you points. If you are doing well, they turn green and are less valuable (experience, gold) and less damaging (HP). This means you can ease up on them for a bit. But if you are doing poorly, they turn red. The worse you do, the more valuable (exp, gold) and more damaging (HP) these goals become. This encourages you to focus on your shortcomings, the reds.
Todos
Todos are one-off goals which need to be completed eventually. Non-completed Todos won’t hurt you, but they will become more valuable over time. This will encourage you to wrap up stale Todos.
Rewards
As you complete goals, you earn gold to buy rewards. Buy them liberally – rewards are integral in forming good habits. But only buy if you have enough gold – you lose HP otherwise.
Item Store
After you’ve played for a while, you unlock the Item Store under the rewards column. You can now buy weapons, armor, potions, etc. Armor decreases HP loss (by an increasing amount with each upgrade). Weapons increase experience gain. Potions recover 15 HP.
Creator Tyler Renelle might be in for much more than he anticipated if the site’s early success is any indication. If you want to donate to help him improve the project and release an mobile version, check out his Kickstarter.
I can check off my daily GP post task now. 😉
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