Can you remember yourself one year ago, in January 2020? What your thoughts and worries were about? You might have heard peripherally about an outbreak of an illness in China, but most people outside of the epicenters were busy worrying about their own daily ups and downs. I remember, I did.

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The long crisis

Then in March, the whole world was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. We all started with a state of shock, then slowly trying to find our way through it.

In the first month of the lockdowns everywhere, many thought that this trouble would not go for so long.

The editor and the cover designer for my books, Alice Jago, had an idea for me to write a piece called “Gameful Isolation” to show how my gameful approach to life could help in a time of crisis. She suggested writing a blog post so that it could go out quickly. But as I started jotting down what to write in it, I realized it should be a book, a small one, but still a book.

Alice and I worked on another book at that time, but we thought that the lockdown might end soon, so we made the Gameful Isolation our highest priority. Within less than four weeks from the idea, the book was written, revised multiple times, and published. And along with it, I had a series of videos for each of the chapters of the book, which I made available on YouTube and which you can also see here.

In summer 2020, with the situation getting a little better many might have had an impression that the crisis would soon be over. But here we are, a year after the pandemic started, and many of the countries are still in lockdown. So my little book Gameful Isolation is still relevant, and probably will always be, because we can’t avoid crises. They come in various shapes quite often. We might perceive even small challenges as big crises if we are upset and unhappy.

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Your gameful and playful self is resourceful

The main message of Gameful Isolation is tapping into our gameful and playful powers. I discovered that one of the main advantages of turning life into games is resourcefulness.

When we are in a tight space in a game, we don’t despair long but act quickly. We look around, assess the situation, and look for a small bit of solution with what we have at hand. Immediately after this quick assessment, we act. We don’t analyze our actions too long. We engage fully, and what is fun for us often acts as our compass in games.

I discovered that the same possibility is also open to us in real-life and tough times of a crisis. Asking myself the following question helps enormously:

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

You might notice me sharing this question often because it has a fantastic potential to help us set the drama of the moment aside and tap into the resourcefulness, in which we tap so easily when playing games.

The next big help in a crisis is to take time and appreciate every step in our days with gameful rewards — points, badges, cool titles for the levels we set for ourselves in our self-motivational games, and so much more.

***

How Gameful Isolation can help you

Here are these and other topics you can find in this little book with its e-book format being of a price of a coffee, and which can help in so many ways during our busy days full of homeschooling, work, household, and so much more:

• How to motivate ourselves effortlessly in gameful and playful ways.
• What tools we have when we are gameful and playful.
• Many real-life role-playing games we play every day and which, if played deliberately, can help us on the way.
• How to see our resistance to how our life unfolds non-judgmentally.
• How to acknowledge and even appreciate our fears.
• The uniqueness of each person’s situation.
• How we can discover that what we experienced until now prepared us for the crisis we are in and tap into our resourcefulness.
• Why and how to play real-life situations as if they were games, and what is the “gameplay loop” of turning life into fun games “game.”
• How to gamefully and playfully, and most of all kindly, appreciate what we do, regardless of how we think of the value of what we do or manage through the day.
• How to never give up turning life into fun games regardless of the circumstances.

To take a look at Gameful Isolation and buy it on Amazon, either click on its title throughout this post or click on this image below:

To find the links to the book on other online stores and view the videos mentioned above, check out the book’s page on this website here.

I wish you a beautiful and gameful day in any circumstance!

— Victoria