All posts by vica

My First Reality Game – 5 Minute Perseverance Game

Image by the author

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The 5 Minute Perseverance Game was my first real-life game or real-life activity turned into a game. Or the first gamified activity, or the first reality game. What name this game type should be doesn’t matter. Its effect does. This game has changed my life and might, in some ways, even have saved it.

Today, over a decade after playing this game’s “prototype,” I gamify my life and help others turn their lives into fun games, or, in other words, approach their lives gamefully. But it wasn’t planned. It happened more or less by itself.

***

Being inspired to play a writing game

The very first part of my life that I gamified — even before I knew what gamification meant — was writing.

Being an avid reader, I started to wonder if I could write something interesting, too. I started diving into books and blogs about the craft of writing, and I found out what many aspiring writers hear when they begin their adventure: that writing is a difficult job. I would certainly agree with that. Undoubtedly, writing a book was not a one-day assignment. It took weeks, months, or even years.

That is why, at first, I decided to write short pieces and share them on my blog.

But there was a story inside me that wanted to be told. One that couldn’t be told in just a short blog post. It needed an entire book. And being dear to my heart — it was the story of my late father trying to locate the family he lost during World War II — the story kept reminding me that I needed to tell it.

So, like many people before me, I realized I wanted to write that book with my whole heart. And like so many others too, I felt I didn’t have the time to do it.

What was I to do?

I started writing it in the summer of 2013 without putting any pressure on myself to finish it. I would test how writing felt and see where it might lead.

I wrote a few chapters and then shared them with a friend and my niece. They loved what they read. But then I stopped writing the story. Reasons for it were plenty and all the typical culprits. Full-time job, a family with a small child, voluntary work, the story being too sad, and my telling of the story too slow, thinking it wasn’t good enough, etc.

Joining a writing course with my dear friend and best-selling author Menna van Praag in early 2014 helped to boost my energy for writing again. Every month for about a year, I sent her three pages of the story and then got her feedback both in written form and on the phone during a one-hour telephone seminar together with her other students.

Just a few months into the course, particularly between the monthly phone calls, my writing energy would ebb again. My fellow students and I complained to Menna that we couldn’t find the time to write, so Menna suggested playing a game. She proposed that each of us write for just a few minutes a day for a month and share our experiences in the Facebook group created by one of the students.

It was a fantastic experience. We cheered each other through the process, and my writing just flew. Sometimes, I only wrote for five minutes or less, but still, it progressed. In the subsequent months, I forgot about the game, but I continued to write.

***

Sharing the writing game with others

In 2015, even with two small children, I managed to finish my first book: revising it, having it professionally edited, and then publishing it. Doing all of it in small steps between taking care of my family, maintaining a household, and blogging.

At the end of that year, I published another book. Shortly before that, I joined a writers’ club in Aalborg, Denmark, where I live. At that time, I was already working on several writing projects in parallel, continuing voluntary work in a technical community, moving to a new house with my family, and starting a business. At some point, my fellow writers in the writers’ club asked me how I pursued so many projects in parallel, along with taking care of a business and a family with two small children.

As I contemplated how to summarize and explain how I did it, I recalled the game Menna introduced. So, I suggested that my friends give it a go. I organized a Facebook group called “Procrastination Breakers Club,” where we played this game with rounds going on for one month.

The rules of the game were straightforward. We had to introduce the project we wanted to take into the game. It didn’t have to be writing; it could be learning a language, practicing a musical instrument, planning a big event, such as a wedding, working out, renovating a house, or anything else that we wanted or had to do but didn’t think we had time for. Then, we had to pursue the project for at least five minutes daily. If we did it, we earned a point. If we didn’t, we lost the point to our procrastinating selves. And if we persevered for less than five minutes, we got half a point, with the other half going to the procrastinating part of ourselves.

At the end of the month, we counted up our points, and if it was a writing project, we also counted the words we had written.

That first round of the game I moderated for the Procrastination Breakers’ Club was one of the most significant revelations in my life as a writer. In that month, I wrote more than six thousand words by writing for five minutes a day, sometimes more (but never longer than twenty minutes) and sometimes less. Six thousand! If I continued to write the book at the same pace, I would have a complete manuscript within a year. By writing for only five minutes a day!

Many traditionally published authors sign contracts with publishers where they commit to writing one book a year. So, by writing in small chunks daily, I could write a manuscript a year and manage such terms, too.

That was one of the most beautiful discoveries for me as a writer.

I didn’t proceed with that book but finished writing and published several other books of various lengths that year and the years after.

And another marvelous thing happened. During one of the rounds of our game, a writer friend wrote me a personal message on Facebook. She told me that a sentence I often like quoting, which I mentioned at the writers’ panel we both attended, helped her break her writer’s block. She was late sending a book manuscript to her publisher, and it seemed unlikely that she would manage to finish it. The sentence she referred to was: “You can’t edit an empty page.”

“You can’t edit a blank page.” — Nora Roberts

I was delighted when she shared this experience with me, and I invited her to play the game with us. She accepted the invitation.

She commented on our group’s page that the game was helping her, and she expressed her surprise with much color and enthusiasm. Sometime later, she posted a message with multiple exclamation marks announcing that she had finished the manuscript and sent it to her publisher.

This author’s name is Sasha Christensen, and she is an award-winning Young Adult fantasy author in Denmark. She allowed me to quote her and even suggested that I put the cover of her book (the one she’d been struggling to finish) on my website. Before sending the picture, she wrote, “This [book] is the one you helped break my block on, btw ;).”

Seeing the effect the game could have and how much fun it was, I dedicated a little book to it, which I named 5 Minute Perseverance Game: Play Daily for a Month and Become the Ultimate Procrastination Breaker. The board game I received from my husband as a Christmas gift the previous year inspired me to structure this book as if it were the description of such a game. Writing this little book was a unique and fun experience in itself. In March 2021, I published the second (5-Year) edition of this book to celebrate the path that writing this little book and continuing to turn my life into fun games had taken me down.

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Effects of the game

Bit by bit, I extended the 5 Minute Perseverance Game to other areas of my life and soon observed myself developing and practicing the following three skill sets:

  • Observing myself non-judgmentally (as an anthropologist would);
  • Identifying and making small and effortless steps; and
  • Applying game design elements to take and appreciate the small steps in a fun way.

I have been and am still using these three skill sets together. I might be the first to claim that these skills are mutually supportive and can result in fantastic synergy when applied together.

Besides developing these vital skill sets, I noticed the following effects of the 5 Minute Perseverance Game. Among others, those who played it:

  • Developed habits they aspired to.
  • They broke undesired habits by focusing on positive actions in the 5 Minute Perseverance Game.
  • They overcame their procrastination without trying to get rid of or break it, with almost no effort, and made progress in a project of their choosing, one small step at a time.
  • They jumpstarted a lengthy engagement in a project by playing it for five minutes and being boosted by the resulting motivating effect to do more.
  • They stopped judging others, themselves, or specific parts of themselves (be they ambitious or procrastinating) and instead learned to embrace and appreciate various parts of themselves and others.
  • And they became curious about what else is possible to approach gamefully.

***

How to play the 5 Minute Perseverance Game

The game itself is very simple. You work on the project you want to persevere with for five minutes every day over one month, week, or another period. Only the actual work on that specific project or activity counts. If you manage the five minutes, then you get one point; if not, then the procrastinating part of you gets one. If you play this game for a little bit less than five minutes, then both the ambitious and procrastinating parts of you get half a point. At the end of the month, week, etc., you total the points and determine which of you has won that round of your 5 Minute Perseverance Game.

Let’s split this game description into the main game components as defined by Jane McGonigal in her best-selling book Reality is Broken:

“What defines a game are the goal, the rules, the feedback system, and voluntary participation. Everything else is an effort to reinforce and enhance these four core components.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken [1]

Goal:

“The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It focuses their attention and continually orients their participation throughout the game. The goal provides players with a sense of purpose.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken [2]

To win a point or the whole round of the 5 Minute Perseverance Game, you need to align your goals with the ambitious part of you. So, if you have a project you want to succeed with and take into the game, then doing something to reach that goal is your mission in this game.

Rules: 

“The rules place limitations on how players can achieve the goal. By removing or limiting the obvious ways of getting to the goal, the rules push players to explore previous uncharted possibility spaces. They unleash creativity and foster strategic thinking.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken [3]

  1. Prepare what you need for this project you took into the 5 Minute Perseverance Game.
  2. Work for five minutes (or any other period; see the game variants below in “Voluntary participation”).
  3. Record your point.
  4. Collect your project gadgets and put them away until you play again.
Feedback system:

“The feedback system tells players how close they are to achieving the goal. It can take the form of points, levels, a score, or a progress bar. Or, in its most basic form, the feedback system can be as simple as the players’ knowledge of an objective outcome: ‘The game is over when . . .’ Real-time feedback serves as a promise to the players that the goal is definitely achievable, and it provides motivation to keep playing.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken [4]

There are two feedback systems in this game. One is the points you or the procrastinating part of you earn, and another is the progress you make in the project you take into this game. Here is an example for a writer if the game round were a week long:

Project: My next brilliant novel
Time to persevere each day to earn one full point: 5 minutes

Day Perseverance Procrastination Progress in the project
1 1 0 189 words
2 0 1 0
3 0.5 0.5 54 words
4 1 0 222 words
5 0 1 0
6 0 1 0
7 1 0 267 words
Total for a week: 3.5 3.5 732 words
The winner: x x

Note: If this writer continues writing at this pace for the rest of the year, she will have 732*52=38,064 words in total. That is a reasonable amount for a non-fiction book or a novella. Quite impressive for earning only half of the possible points and writing only 5 minutes a day, don’t you think? Imagine what she can achieve by making a point on most days every week or increasing the time from 5 minutes to 6 the following month, then to 7, etc.

Voluntary participation:

“Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback. Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together. And the freedom to enter or leave the game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken [5]

Your will to engage in this game will ebb and flow depending on your disposition, the time you have been engaged in it, and many other factors. The power and the miracle of approaching life gamefully are that you can adjust the design of your self-motivational games so that you are eager to engage in whatever you turn into or perceive as a game you design, develop, and play. And you can tune those designs as you go. You can also add some design elements to make you take a break so that you don’t become overwhelmed or addicted to it while trying to escape something else you committed to do.

The rules above defined each step of this game as five minutes long, hence its name: the 5 Minute Perseverance Game.

When I first wrote about this game, I recommended not making the time for each move any less than five minutes. My initial argument for this length was that we need some challenge, however brief. And five minutes, I wrote, were long enough to manage something and short enough to put some pressure on you to actually do the work and do it quickly.

But that was before I learned about kaizen and had an epiphany about why I couldn’t persevere in some activities for five minutes. Reducing my step to a duration of one minute or even less became more meaningful.

Here is a tool to determine the length of step appropriate for you in any project or activity in which you want to persevere:

“Even small signs that you are resisting the small step — that you are having to push yourself to do the step — are an indication that the step is too big[.]” — Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life [6]

Five minutes can seem too long for some activities, while a few seconds would be just right. It all depends on how our brains perceive the task at hand. Even a few minutes can seem too immense to accomplish. Breaking down the step further is often the best answer because it becomes effortless, and you can take that step without additional internal or external pressure.

If you have difficulty deciding on the duration of your next step in this game, here is another suggestion.

I made it in my parable Gameful Writing: Seven People, Seven Stories, Seven Lessons Learned (Book 4 in the “Gameful Life” series). It was inspired by an interview I did with my dear friend and writer Naz Ahsun for her podcast, The Inspired Writer Podcast. I had the honor of appearing on the first episode to discuss turning life into fun games. In the second half of the interview, Naz had the idea of rolling dice to figure out how many sentences to write next (timestamp for the quote: 00:16:10 – 00:16:30).

Here is what I — or one of the characters in the book — suggested to my (their) fellow writers. You can use this approach for any project you take into your X Minute Perseverance Game, where X can be determined as follows:

Take a dice (or more than one, if you want to write for longer), or open a dice app online and roll the dice. You can also decide to ignore one or other of the small numbers and roll again. Or total all the points after rolling three times, or add those on the multiple dice if you play (yes, this is part of the game, too!) with more than one at a time. It is your choice. But when you have rolled the number of times you decided (you could also determine this number with a roll of the dice, just once, I would say 😉 ), set your timer to this time and play.

Here is another idea: You can choose the number you roll based on how many sentences you must write in this round. Choose whatever feels best (or most fun) for you. The only mistake you can make is not giving it a try. I am super glad that I did.

***

There are many other ways to adjust the design of this game and create new ones. Many of my self-motivational games, or as I also call them, reality games, have the 5 Minute Perseverance Game or one of its versions at its core. And I am pretty sure it will stay that way. If you start approaching your life gamefully and don’t know where to start, I recommend you try this simple game and take it from there. Complex frameworks and designs might overwhelm you, but a simple design like this one will show you what wonders are achievable with awareness, little progress at a time, and a gameful attitude.

***

References:

[1] McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (p. 27). Random House. Kindle Edition.

[2] McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (p. 27). Random House. Kindle Edition.

[3] McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (p. 27). Random House. Kindle Edition.

[4] McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (p. 27). Random House. Kindle Edition.

[5] McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (p. 27). Random House. Kindle Edition.

[6] [Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way (p. 173). Workman Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.]

 

***

You can read more about this game here:

5 Minute Perseverance Game
2nd (5-Year) Edition, Published in March 2021

⇒ Click to buy on Amazon ⇐
⇒ Click to buy elsewhere⇐

Is there something you would like to do but feel you don’t have enough time or strength of will to achieve? Is there a book you want to write, an instrument you want to play, a language you want to learn, or something completely different that you’ve wanted to accomplish for as long as you can remember?

If you really and seriously want to succeed in this dream project of yours, then play a game. Not a serious game. But a fun 5 Minute Perseverance Game. This short, personal and humorous game will help you melt your procrastination and win any challenge you face.

So, don’t wait any longer. Read this book and invite your procrastination to a round of the 5 Minute Perseverance Game. This little book has helped many turn a procrastinated project into a fun and engaging game.

This 5-year Edition offers even more. The text has been edited and enriched, several tactical variants added, and you will find a scoresheet for the game you play with your procrastinating self.

In addition, most numbered chapters and sections offer links and short introductions to articles on the art of turning life into fun games. Together these articles have become the 5 Minute Perseverance Game “Wiki.” With this additional knowledge, you can transform this little game into a series of fun self-motivational games you can play and develop further every day.

Sharing My Self-Motivational Games

I love approaching life gamefully! One of the reasons?

It is because, when I am not motivated and resist engaging in an activity I want to pursue, I don’t berate myself, or at least not long, but instead treat myself as a game designer would his or her best and most trusted game-tester. If the gamer does not engage, something is wrong with the game.

What does it have to do with the topic of this post? The following.

It’s been some time since I blogged here. (See my previous blog post and how fantastically it connects to the introduction and motivation for this one and the project it introduces, even if I haven’t planned that explicitly.) I tried to come back and do it again, but the practice remained sporadic. I blogged on Medium more regularly, with breaks in between. When I looked at the longer stretches with more writing and engagement on my part as a blogger on either of the platforms, I saw that it was when I was blogging a book or sharing excerpts of one or the other I wrote.

I love reading and writing books. Books feel like epic adventure games with many fun levels made of parts, chapters, and paragraphs.

And as luck might have it, I am working on two books on self-gamification right now. So, I decided to move one of the book projects from Medium to here.

It is about my various self-motivational games, or, as I also call them, “My Reality Game Collection.” I wrote and published an article on Medium with this title, which will serve as an introduction to the book or collection of books, where I will share various projects, activities, practices, and others, approaching them as if they were games I design, develop, and play.

Here is this article to start this fun project of sharing my reality game collection with you to get inspiration on how you can approach your reality with fun, joy, and success.

Originally published on Medium by Victoria Ichizli-Bartels in Gameful Life (5 min read),
Oct 23, 2024. To read on Medium, follow this link.


My Reality Game Collection

And how I design, develop, and play my life.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

For over a decade now, I’ve been approaching parts or the whole of my life as if they were games I design (or co-design), develop, and play.

I’ve played many self-motivational games over the years. Self-motivational games are projects, activities, and practices that I approach as if they were games, which, in my opinion, they are since anything in life has the same core components games do.


I discovered that in anything you approach gamefully, motivation becomes a readily available by-product, including its most coveted by game and gamification designers type, intrinsic motivation.

Alone, the inability of many life gamers and myself to give up living gamefully and instead be creative and resourceful with everything we are up to attract curiosity from those who hear about this opportunity.

I am often asked about different self-motivational games I play, both those I play now and those I played in the past, which I either don’t play anymore or play once in a while.

At some point, I realized I had a whole collection of self-motivational games.

Well, my life is such a collection of self-motivational games since these games are nothing other than what I take on in my life’s journey.

That’s how I started thinking of my current self-motivational game collection, especially the scores I record in my little book, Vica’s Points and Badges Game Book. Vica is short for Victoria. This little book reflects a big part of my reality game collection.

Photo by the author, Victoria Ichizli-Bartels (aka Vica)

If I use my first name for this real-life game collection, it would be Victoria’s Reality Game Collection, abbreviated VRGC. When I shared this abbreviation with gamers in my family, my son said that VRGC should stand for Virtual Reality Game Console. Upon an online search, I found this acronym to mean “Voucher Register & General Control,” and used rarely. It is attributed to the use in the following category: “Military and Government.” But I must say, I like the acronym VRGC to stand for “Victoria’s Reality Game Collection.” However, I must admit that MRGC for My Reality Game Collection sounds great, too. And YRGC, Your Reality Game Collection, must be fantastic, too, since it is yours alone, and you have the power to design, develop, and play it.


Game designers and players learn from other game designers and players. They look over their shoulders and get inspired. I get inspired by gamers in my life and by books and articles on game design, psychology, and other intriguing topics. As a life gamer, I enjoy sharing my games and their designs and frameworks.

Here is a summary of my game collection.

I play:

  • Awareness games
  • Ambition games
  • Health and well-being games
  • Habits games
  • Learning and growth games
  • Perseverance games
  • Relaxation games
  • and many others.

Many of these games can be attributed to more than one type.

I also play games based on the game elements or mechanics that drive them:

  • Booster games
  • Gemstone games
  • Streak games
  • Counter games
  • and others.

I also play briefly some of my self-motivational games without recording any points.


The way I reward myself in these games differs, too.

For example, in the Awareness Booster Game (ABG) and Exploring Emotions Game (EEG), I observe the world around and inside me and get inspired and awed by the epiphanies I make on the way. I also observe and explore emotions, especially those I get confused by, and acknowledge my participation in these games daily. So, I never lose in these two games; their score reflects all the days since starting to acknowledge my participation in them daily and recall what observations and epiphanies I made.

In others, like Super Sleeper Game, I have multiple scores to record my progress, reward myself when I get enough sleep or punish myself in small ways for sleeping less or precisely seven hours. This epic game is one of those I continually develop to keep myself motivated to get enough sleep. This game helped me to go from over forty hours of deficit reached within half a year to almost 380 hours in plus gathered in almost four years (over forty-five hours on average per each half a year) since playing this game. And all these numbers reflect the improved health I experience due to getting enough sleep and taking better care of myself.

There are also many other designs in between the above two.

You can see the earlier design of the Super Sleeper Game in my book Gameful Habits (see below its description and where you can purchase it).

In the photograph below, you can see the recent recordings of my games, including the Super Sleeper Game with its points, coins, and gemstones abbreviated as T for tourmaline, R for ruby, D for diamond, N for nephrite jade, and O for obsidian or opal, Awareness Booster Game (ABG), Exploring Emotions Game (EEG), and other games and game elements.

Photo by the author, Victoria Ichizli-Bartels

Why do I do all that and approach my life gamefully as if it were a collection of games I design, develop, and play? There are many, many reasons. Here are two main ones:

  1. The activities I enjoy and want to succeed with become even more fun and fantastic to experience. And I reward myself for any progress I make in them.
  2. Those I commit to but sometimes think I don’t enjoy become those I discover I can enjoy, either by adding fun game elements, watching my progress with them, and getting closer to their goals, or by discovering something new and fun that I was unaware of before that.

Thank you!

I hope you enjoyed reading this article. I enjoyed the writing game for it, which is part of my Ambition Project Games (APG), visible in my little score book shown above.

I will be off to another game from My Reality Game Collection (MRGC) in a minute. How does YRGC — Your Reality Game Collection — look like? Feel free to share this with me through the channel where you discovered this post.


Standalone, Book 7, Gameful Life Series

Gameful Habits:
How to Turn Your Daily Practices Into Fun and Exciting Games

⇒ Click to buy on Amazon ⇐
⇒ Click to buy elsewhere⇐

Turn your daily practices into fun and exciting games.

Many people struggle to motivate themselves to start the day, work on a project, or maintain a healthy or otherwise beneficial habit. They consider many of their daily routines to be a necessary chore that they will never enjoy.

The pioneer of Self-Gamification — a unique approach to turning life into fun games — Victoria Ichizli-Bartels, has discovered another way for herself, and offers this possibility to others by sharing her experiences.

In this unconventional book on habits, Victoria shares the Super Sleeper game she created to ensure she got enough sleep, and how this success was extrapolated to the other habits and daily practices she wanted to develop.

Read Gameful Habits, and you will learn the three skill sets required to succeed in your self-motivational games, i.e. any habits, projects, challenges, tasks, or other activities turned into fun games. These skill sets are:

  1. Seeing yourself, the world around you, and your thought processes non-judgmentally, as an anthropologist would do;
  2. Identifying your dreams and goals, and taking action, one small and effortless step at a time, the kaizen way;
  3. Applying gamification; that is, seeing and treating whatever you are up to like a game, and learning to appreciate every step on the way with gameful rewards.

These skill sets, which you can easily put into practice immediately — along with the awareness that when you turn your life into fun games, you are both the player and the designer of these games — will help you turn happiness into a lifestyle, and health and other beneficial practices into exciting games that you can’t wait to design, play, and continue developing.


You can check out my articles on Medium by following this link.

Some of Our Ideas Might Be Nothing Else Than Misconceptions

Photo by Andrea Davis on Unsplash

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It can be enlightening to revise our thoughts and ideas occasionally. We can discover some interesting misconceptions when we look closely and without judgment.

I discovered such a misconception for myself regarding blogging and newsletter marketing, which are essential for all entrepreneurs. I had this idea that I didn’t like doing either. In general. And that it was always that way. That I did it because I thought I had to.

But recently, I became aware that it was not the case. There were many times when I enjoyed doing both — blogging and writing newsletters. And indeed, there were times when I didn’t. But the latter didn’t mean I hated doing them in general, as I thought for quite some time.

The actual reason for my reluctance turned out to be that I didn’t enjoy what I thought I should have been writing. Not blogging in general, but the things I decided I had to blog about or write about in the newsletters.

So, a couple of days ago, I realized what I wanted to do. I wanted to write something new on Medium and here on my blog. I wanted to experiment with different topics and be gameful and playful with them.

As I became aware of that, I realized that having short little projects for blogging on Medium and my website and writing newsletters will satisfy the so-called “shiny object syndrome.”

The New York Times and USA Today best-selling and self-publishing author Joanna Penn addresses the “shiny object syndrome” in her acclaimed book How To Write Non-Fiction: Turn Your Knowledge Into Words. This syndrome essentially describes being distracted from, and therefore procrastinating about the project you want or need to pursue by other things that pique your curiosity.

So, by exploring something new in my blog posts, say twice a month (once for Medium and once for my blog here), I would give myself a breather from the long book projects where I play the perseverance game, and with that satisfy my curiosity for something new and “shiny.”

Another author I gladly learn from is Rachel Aaron. In her brilliant book 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love, among many other great things, she said the following (the emphasis is done as in the original):

If you are not enjoying your writing,
you’re doing it wrong.

“A book is not a battle, nor is it a conquest. A book is a story, and telling it should be an enjoyable exercise.” —

Rachel Aaron, 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love

A blog is not a battle either, and I am glad I took the time to remind myself to enjoy the blogging exercise and write about it.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, too.

I wish you joy with your writing or any other endeavor!

Because

“[W]e can only bring joy with what we love and enjoy doing.”

This quote is from a parable, Gameful Writing, which I wrote on turning writing (and life) into fun games.

I invite you to check it out:

Image by the author

Check out or buy the book here:

Gameful Writing on Amazon.com
Gameful Writing on other online bookstores

 

P.S.

If you want unlimited access to all Medium articles (including mine), I invite you to become a Medium member (subscriber). Medium is an excellent place for both writers and readers. Please note that I will receive a portion of your membership fee if you subscribe using this link. That will be a fantastic support for my work.

P.P.S.

If you want to follow me outside Medium, join my mailing list here.

Blogging Here Again

Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash

***

It’s been some time since I blogged here. I started blogging in April 2013. You can read my first-ever blog post here. So, it was over ten years ago. I didn’t stop blogging altogether after my last post was published here on October 12, 2021, but I did it on Medium.

My blogging on Medium also slowed because I love spending my creative time writing books. But I am not stopping to blog entirely. There is something that keeps me here. I guess this is the possibility to connect with you, dear reader, and let you know what is happening in my writing life and life-gaming.

On Medium and for some time, I have been sharing excerpts from my books. Here and from now on, I will share various of my self-motivational games with you and my thoughts on turning life into fun games. Some new material might find its way into my books or to Medium, and some won’t. I will let myself explore and find out.

The frequency of the blogs will be relaxed and sporadic. My guess is about once a month or once every two months. Our lives are busy, and I don’t want to bombard you with too many blog posts.

And now, I will have a little game called “coffee break” and then return to my other real-life games. I wish you a wonderful summer!

But wait! Before you go, I have a little something for you, and it is an excerpt from my latest book on living gamefully called Self-Help and Self-Care Games.

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Our lives are never static and always evolve, often in surprising and unexpected ways, even if we often try to label them with one word or phrase.

A single recipe for self-help and self-care can never satisfy our needs in the long run.
Drawing parallels with and inspiration from games can help here.

Successful online games get regular updates and new features. Or maybe some older and forgotten features, but reinvented and shown in a new light. Even board games get extensions, expansions, and new releases. Some card games carry blank cards for the players to create their own extensions.

One of the reasons lies in the following wisdom:

[T]he destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.” — Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design

This awareness is fantastic, isn’t it? Both the understanding that there are many perfect ways to do the same thing and the realization that games or gamified systems (such as apps for maintaining healthy habits and others) or all those self-care, self-help, and self-love recipes are not a one-off solution for all our troubles and a one-time pill to regain our happiness. They are the stepping stones on our way to identifying what is fun and joyful for us at any given moment.

Here is a follow-up thought from the same book by Raph Koster:

“Many games, of course, seem to become more fun as you learn more about them. This has a lot to do with the nature of the challenge presented in those games; they tend to present problems of a certain complexity level that reveals more subtleties the deeper in you go.” — ibid.

Many successful games (such as chess) are multidimensional and have a deeper, changing nature.

Our lives have this changing nature. We usually resist it, but seeing and treating anything in our lives as games can show us how fun they can actually be.

And if we have learned everything from a real-life game (or at least think so), we can either add fun elements to its design to keep ourselves engaged until the end of the game or until we achieve a specific goal or level, or leave that game and go on to another. And if we want, we can come back to it later.

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Review of Gameful Habits in Ludogogy Magazine

I am thrilled to share with you the editorial review of my book Gameful Habits. This review was written and published by Sarah Le-Fevre in the online magazine Ludogogy.

It is a fantastic review because it distills the ideas behind the book brilliantly.

I am also grateful that Sarah highlighted my message that anyone can turn their lives and habits into fun games, also those who never thought of diving into game design or psychology. Games are a great source of inspiration, and they are present everywhere around us. When approached with awareness and incrementally, they can empower us immensely and boost our resourcefulness, productivity, motivation, drive, and experience of joy and fun without trying to force the outcome in any way.

I invite you to read the review and see what Gameful Habits is about. I will be happy to answer any questions about the book and the topics it covers.

https://www.ludogogy.co.uk/review-of-gameful-habits