Gamification of Life

Your life is already a game. You just didn’t realise you could design the rules.

Look around. You get reward points when you shop at certain stores. Coffee shop loyalty cards. Fitness apps counting your steps and giving you badges. Credit cards offering cashback and airmiles. Your work probably has performance targets with bonuses attached. Even your kids have star charts. Perhaps if you’re into fitness you’ve got apps tracking everything from your steps, your water intake, your heart rate variability and your sleep pattern.

Modern life is already gamified. But here’s the thing most people miss: all those games were designed by someone else, for someone else’s benefit. The supermarket’s loyalty scheme isn’t designed to make your life better. It’s designed to make you spend more money in their shop. The fitness app doesn’t really care whether you’re healthy. It cares whether you keep opening the app, buying their watch, or paying that subscription.

They’re Already Playing You

Gamification is the application of game design elements to a non-game context. Progress bars, points, levels, rewards, competition, achievement badges. The things that make games compelling, applied to real life.

Marketers, supermarkets, credit card companies, coffee shops and advertisers are already gamifying your life for their benefit. They’re designing games where they win and you lose. You earn points by spending money. You chase status by accumulating things you don’t need. You compete in races toward goals that weren’t even yours to begin with. And the really clever part is that you don’t even notice you’re playing. You just think you’re shopping.

My kids grew up with star charts that rewarded good behaviour, then, as they got older, their main gamified interest became collecting Snapchat streaks, the number of days of unbroken communication with their friends. Life’s changed a bit since I was their age, but my cub scout badges, my athletics badges and my 200-metre swimming badge were proudly worn and a major motivation back then too. At work, the practice gets rewarded by the government for hitting quality healthcare targets. In my personal life, my watch counts my daily steps and gives me a little firework display when I hit my goal.

The point is that gamification isn’t new. It’s everywhere, and it’s been shaping your behaviour for years. The only question is whether you’re going to keep playing games other people designed for their benefit, or whether you’re going to start designing your own.

Why Games Work

Games work because they tap into fundamental human psychology. Jane McGonigal’s research on games suggests they give us several things human beings crave but often struggle to find in everyday life.

First, a sense of progress. Games show you exactly how far you’ve come and how far you’ve got to go. That progress bar filling up isn’t just visual decoration. It’s dopamine. Your brain rewards you for making progress, even if the progress is entirely artificial. Think about how satisfying it feels to tick something off a list. That’s gamification at its simplest, and your brain doesn’t care whether the task was important or trivial. The tick gives you the hit.

Second, clear rules and feedback. In a game, you know what you’re supposed to do and whether you’re doing it well. Life rarely gives you that clarity. You’re often working towards vague goals with no scoreboard and no one telling you whether you’re winning or losing. That ambiguity is exhausting. Games eliminate it.

Third, a sense of mastery. Games start easy and get progressively harder. They push you just beyond your current ability, which is exactly the sweet spot that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified as the state of flow. Not so easy that you’re bored. Not so hard that you’re overwhelmed. Just difficult enough to keep you completely absorbed.

Fourth, social connection. Competition, cooperation, shared achievement. Games connect you to other people in ways that feel meaningful, even when you’re just accumulating virtual points. The reason your kids are obsessed with their Snapchat streaks isn’t the emoji. It’s the connection.

Now look at your new situation and ask yourself how many of those four things you’re currently experiencing. If the answer is none, or close to none, it’s no wonder you’re struggling to stay motivated. You’re trying to play a game with no progress bar, no rules, no levels, and no one watching. That’s not a game. That’s just suffering.

Design Your Own Game

The simplest and most powerful thing you can do is decide on the game, set the rules, and start keeping score.

I do this myself. I set myself targets every day. Writing 350 words a day for a whole month gets you 10,000 words. Do that continuously for six months and you’ve got a book on your hands. The trick is to reward yourself every day for the achievement and to set a bigger reward for each month of sustained effort. Two hours of writing qualifies for a cup of coffee and two chocolate digestives. That’s my rule. I don’t break it.

Here’s how to gamify your new situation. Break your goal into levels. Level one might be surviving the first week without panicking. Level two might be establishing a daily routine. Level three might be hitting your first meaningful milestone. Level four might be the point where you stop feeling like a fraud and start feeling like you belong. Each level needs a reward. Small rewards for small wins. Bigger rewards for bigger achievements.

The rewards matter more than you think. Research by Deci and Ryan on self-determination theory shows that a combination of intrinsic motivation, doing something because it matters to you, and well-placed external rewards creates the strongest sustained motivation. You need both. The internal drive to keep going and the external treat that says “well done, you’ve earned this.”

The Rules of Your Game

Every game has rules, and the beautiful thing about your game is that you get to write them. You can bend them. You can even break them. Remember, it’s your game.

But here’s what games teach us. When you commit to rules, you hold yourself to them. And when you involve others, the accountability multiplies. My kids will absolutely hold me to it if I say I’m going to achieve something. Getting others to play your game brings a bit of healthy competition into the mix, and there’s nothing like competition to focus the mind.

I promised my daughter I’d run a marathon with her last year. She got injured. I could have made an excuse, but I didn’t. I ran it anyway, largely to show her what keeping a promise looks like, even when it hurts, and after over 30 years in medicine, the last 25 as a GP, I’ve told enough patients that accountability matters to know I’d better practise what I preach. I got up on a cold October morning, drove to Oxford in the dark, and ran 26 miles in the rain. I went off a bit fast and finished in 3 hours 46. Accountability matters. So does sticking to your plan.

There’s nothing better than winning. Or for some people, there’s nothing better than seeing someone else lose, which isn’t quite the same thing but is actually quite motivating in its own way. Set a target at work that involves outperforming others, and watch the eyes light up. We’re wired for competition. You might as well use it.

The most effective gamification tends to include three elements, drawn from Deci and Ryan’s own work on motivation. Autonomy, meaning you choose the game. Competence, meaning the challenge matches your ability. And relatedness, meaning other people are involved. Games that tick all three of these boxes are almost impossible to put down. Games that miss all three are called chores.

The Skills You Don’t Realise You’re Building

Games teach you more than you think. Watch any family playing cards together and you’ll see cheating, bargaining, planning, arguing, cunning, bluffing, and excuses, all in a short hour or two of furious play. Those aren’t just game skills. Those are life skills.

When you gamify your new situation, you’re not just making it more fun. You’re practising the skills you need to succeed. Strategic thinking. Problem solving. Dealing with setbacks. Managing risk. Negotiating with yourself about when to push harder and when to rest. Competing against your own previous best.

I also see gamification as something that drives creativity and forces you to think outside the box. When you’re playing a game, you look for angles. You look for shortcuts. You look for the clever move that nobody else has spotted. That’s exactly the mindset you need in a new situation, where the obvious approach isn’t always the best one and the person who thinks differently has the advantage.

Gamification in Practice

I gamify my running. I watch my steps daily. I write and eat chocolate digestives. I gamify my life for the better.

What’s your version of that? What would make the process of navigating your new situation feel less like a grind and more like a challenge you’re determined to win? You don’t have to love running. You just have to find the thing that makes keeping score feel exciting instead of exhausting. Maybe it’s a bet with a friend. Maybe it’s a spreadsheet with targets that turn green when you hit them. Maybe it’s a jar you drop a pound coin into every time you do the hard thing, and when the jar’s full you treat yourself to something you’ve wanted for months.

Whatever works for you, that’s the game you need to play.

Start Playing

Take a look at what you need to do in your life, at work, and in this new situation. Think about how you can gamify it. Set yourself rewards. Bring in competition. Get others to hold you to the rules. Decide the role you’re going to play. Zone out and get absorbed in it. Practise your skills. Set a strategy. Take yourself to the next level.

I write lists. I reward myself when all the tasks are ticked. Sometimes those rewards are small; sometimes they’re substantial if I hit a major goal or milestone. The least I do every day is tick off the one thing I absolutely need to get done that day. Everything else falls into place around it.

Gamification is already a massive part of your life. The supermarkets, the apps, the credit card companies and the social media platforms have been playing you for years. They’ve been keeping score, and the score has been in their favour.

Perhaps it’s time you started playing by your own rules. Time you invented your own game. Time you started keeping score in a game that actually benefits you instead of someone else.

Start playing your game. What’s the reward? Who else is playing?

As they say, game on.

Further reading

• McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality Is Broken. Penguin Press.
• Deci, E.L. & Ryan, R.M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. Plenum Press.
• Deterding, S. et al. (2011). From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness. Proceedings of MindTrek 2011.
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
• Lally, P. et al. (2010). How are habits formed. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.