Category Archives: Self-Gamification

Self-gamification is the application of game design elements to one’s own life.
Self-gamification is a self-help approach showing you how to be playful and gameful.
In self-gamification, you are both the designer AND the player of your games.

Self-Management Is About Self-Support, Not Manipulation

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(Image courtesy of the author; taken in January 2020 by the author’s then 5-year old daughter)

Successful leadership embraces management skills. But any successful manager is a successful self-manager.

And these successful managers and self-managers know that the best leadership and management is not about control and never about manipulation. It is focused on support. This also applies to self-management.

There are many aspects to management both when we manage teams, projects, or ourselves. We can use many different tools and techniques.

But any of those tools or techniques would not bear any fruit if you don’t concentrate on support for your team, project, and yourself.

The best way to support anyone— and you will know it from when you supported your children or younger siblings and friends when they were upset or needed to accomplish something and resisted it — is to turn the activity at hand into a fun game or play.

That includes management of any kind.

Here is an utterly simple tool to ignite the “idea-generating machine” in your head to approach management tasks — be it for the team, project, the whole company, or yourself — gamefully. Ask yourself the following question:

“If this [challenge, project, task, activity, chore] was a game, how would I approach it as its designer or player?”

Awareness and permitting yourself to be gameful and playful is all it takes to shift your focus from stressed and overwhelmed to supportive and creative.

I wish you joy with it!

If you want to level up in turning your management skills to gameful and playful, and with that save your company, team, project, family, and yourself the costs of seriousness and drama, then read my book Gameful Project Management: Self-Gamification Based Awareness Booster for Your Project Management Success (from “Gameful Life” series)

To discuss the possibility of one to one or small team coaching, contact me here:

E-mail: vib@optimistwriter.com

How to Save Yourself Costs of Drama and Gain Resourcefulness Instead

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(Image by the author)

Our days are full of ups and downs. And those downs are often dramatic. Some a little more, others less.

Can we bypass those dramas?

Yes, there are possibilities. My favorite is turning life into fun games.

You don’t have only resourcefulness and fun in the process, but mastery in designing your life as if you were the best game designer for your most important player, yourself.

How can you do it?

With a gameplay loop of just three steps:

  1. Become aware of where and how you are, where you want to head, which would be the smallest, most effortless, most affordable, and the most fun step to take in that direction.
  2. Take that step.
  3. Celebrate it and record your score.

Repeat.

It is that simple.

The same process applies to designing your self-motivational games because turning your life into games is a game in itself.

You can start this practice right now, right this moment, where you are. You don’t need to be different than you are right now. And you don’t need much time to do that.

So, what is your next project, activity, task “game” you want to play? Don’t forget to identify the mini- or micro-game in it.

Enjoy!

***

The next step

If you would like to take this a step further, then here’s is what I can offer you:

  • Eight books of various lengths and on various aspects of turning life into fun games
  • An online video course
  • One to one or a small team coaching

Go to the Self-Gamification page to make your choice and take a look at further resources.

What is the Setup for Your Real-Life Games?

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Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

(An excerpt. Read the full article on Medium)

Definition of a setup

So, we have a great goal in the Self-Gamification game. Now, it’s time to think of a setup defining the frames, in which the Self-Gamification game player in you can reach the goal of making your project feel like a brilliant game for the project game player part of you.

Before looking at the setup of the Self-Gamification game, let’s find out what the word “setup” means in general and in games.

In general, a setup is:

“the way in which things are organized or arranged.” — Cambridge Dictionary

In video games, it would be the hardware and the software you need to set up to play a specific game.

In a board or a card game, these would be one or more boards, decks of cards, dice, figurines, and possibly others.

The description of how to lay out the tools you have so that you can start playing the game also belongs to the setup.

The setup in the Self-Gamification game

So what is the setup in the Self-Gamification game?

Hm, that is a tricky question.

Once, I wrote a little book, 5 Minute Perseverance Game, and I wrote it before I had heard about gamification. I structured this book as a description of a board game. Like most board game descriptions, it has a section called “Setup.” It’s short in the book, so I quote it in full length here, and I also add the title and the beginning of the subsequent section called the “Flow of Play and Rules.”

“Setup

You put yourself in front of what your project demands to be carried out. That could mean a notebook and a pen or a computer for a writer, a guitar and sheet music for an aspiring musician, or a dictionary and exercise book for a language learner and so on.

Then you sit, stand, lie down, or take whatever other starting position you need to work on your project. And…

Flow of Play and Rules

You play.

Well… you work on your project. “

— Victoria Ichizli-Bartels, 5 Minute Perseverance Game

Thus, anything you need for the project would be a part of your setup also in the Self-Gamification game.

But this is not all.

Anything you are aware of about your project game player (yourself), especially at the moment of turning that specific project into a fun game (or a set of games), is a part of your setup.

(Continue reading on Medium)

More on Turning Life into Fun Games

Books

“Gameful Life” Series

Gameful Project Management
Self-Gamification Based Awareness Booster for Your Project Management Success
(Book 1)

Gameful Healing
Almost a Memoir; Not Quite a Parable
(Book 2)

Gameful Isolation
Making the Best of a Crisis, the Self-Gamification Way
(Book 3)

Standalone Books

The Who, What, When, Where, Why &
How of Turning Life into Fun Games
A Compressed Version of the Self-Gamification Happiness Formula

Self-Gamification Happiness Formula
How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games

5 Minute Perseverance Game
Play Daily for a Month and Become the Ultimate Procrastination Breaker

Online Course

Motivate Yourself by Turning Your Life Into Fun Games
Practice Self-Gamification, a Unique Self-Help Approach Uniting Anthropology, Kaizen, and Gamification
(on Udemy)

The Goal of Turning One’s Life into Fun Games

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Image by the author

(An excerpt. Read the full article on Medium)

An acronym: SG = Self-Gamification

The goal, the mission, and the win-state of the SG game

Thus, let’s define the goal of the SG game and find out what is your mission in this game.

The ultimate goal in the SG game is to make your reality engaging, entertaining, and fun.

You choose a target (which can be a challenge, a project, or activity) and take on a mission to turn this target into a fun, self-motivational game, which is enticing for the player (yourself) to engage and enjoy.

You could say, the SG game is mostly a game designer’s game. You play the role of the self-motivational game designer. But also that of your first player testing your games.

The win-state in the SG game is the state of flow.

“There is virtually nothing as engaging as this state of working at the very limits of your ability — or what both game designers and psychologists call ‘flow.’ When you are in a state of flow, you want to stay there: both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken

So, you, as a designer of your self-motivational games, are on a quest to design (or re-design) your challenges, projects, and activities. And do that in such a creative way that it facilitates the player (yourself) to enter the state of flow willingly and effortlessly, whatever the challenge, project, or activity game might be, and whatever the player (yes, yourself) might think of it.

(Continue reading on Medium)

More on Turning Life into Fun Games

Books

“Gameful Life” Series

Gameful Project Management
Self-Gamification Based Awareness Booster for Your Project Management Success
(Book 1)

Gameful Healing
Almost a Memoir; Not Quite a Parable
(Book 2)

Gameful Isolation
Making the Best of a Crisis, the Self-Gamification Way
(Book 3)

Standalone Books

The Who, What, When, Where, Why &
How of Turning Life into Fun Games
A Compressed Version of the Self-Gamification Happiness Formula

Self-Gamification Happiness Formula
How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games

5 Minute Perseverance Game
Play Daily for a Month and Become the Ultimate Procrastination Breaker

Online Course

Motivate Yourself by Turning Your Life Into Fun Games
Practice Self-Gamification, a Unique Self-Help Approach Uniting Anthropology, Kaizen, and Gamification
(on Udemy)

How to Conquer the Information Overload Gamefully

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Image by the author

(An excerpt. Read the full article on Medium)

The challenge

In the internet interconnected world, the information becomes a much too easily accessible good.

There is even a well-known term for that — the information overload.

“Information overload (also known as infobesity, infoxication, information anxiety, and information explosion) is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about that issue. Generally, the term is associated with the excessive quantity of daily information.” — Wikipedia

Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of the world is online for big chunks of the day (especially during the working hours), there is even more information every day. Those of us, who don’t work on the “front line” during the pandemic, can express our generosity mostly online nowadays. So there are valuable short and long bits of information in all possible digital formats. These come from official sources, press, entertainment industry, our families, friends, bosses, employees, colleagues, communities we joined, and social media we frequent. But there are also libraries giving free access to books, films, and more, museums, zoos, culture centers, and theaters offering online tours and performances, and so many more.

The workdays for all of us have become a fusion of our work and personal lives.

The oncoming information, especially the one about the COVID-19 situation, lockdowns, and reopening, affects both our work and personal lives, and it has never been more challenging to draw a line between them.

The main effect of that multidimensional information overload is a profound confusion and a feeling of being lost.

How can we handle all this overflow of the information, especially when we start a workday?

The gameful solution

A perspective change is often the best solution in confusing situations.

How can we view the information flow differently?

I discovered that the gameful approach to life provides effortless and joyful resourcefulness in all areas of our lives and most circumstances, including times of crisis.

While writing the Book 1 of the “Gameful Life” series, Gameful Project Management, I have discovered that what I was creating with my non-fiction books and articles on Self-Gamification, were not the ideas to replace the well-establisher others. Instead, I was creating “awareness boosters.”

Even the subtitle of the Gameful Project Management book has the phrase in it: Self-Gamification Based Awareness Booster for Your Project Management Success.

To find out what an awareness booster is and how information coming upon us can become such a booster, we need first to identify what awareness boosters are. Let’s start with awareness.

(Continue reading on Medium)