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.
Any project or activity, and any habit representing or comprising it, can be turned into fun games. The best candidates are those you procrastinate about but want to pursue. You can also turn the behaviors you want to avoid or do less often into fun games, by limiting the rewards you give yourself for them and increasing the rewards for activities you procrastinate over.
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To find out more, read Gameful Habits: How to Turn Your Daily Practices into Fun Games (a standalone book and Book 7 in the “Gameful Life” series).
Here is the link to it on Amazon.com, where you can read the description and read the free sample:
Habits are both visible and invisible threads, sometimes representing and always connecting the projects, activities, tasks, challenges, or anything else we want to master or tackle. — Gameful Habits
Since habits are always present in our lives and (often) minds, I decided to do the following. I invite you to participate actively in the launch of this book. It will be a standalone book in a collection (series) of books I call “Gameful Life.”
You will get:
A review (i.e., free) copy of the book in e-format of your choice (you can choose between epub, mobi, or pdf) as soon as the book is published or even a little earlier (as soon as I submit it to the online shops).
I’ll need your help with (depending on your preference, one or both of) the following:
Spread the word about the book on social media and/or other places (e.g., your blog or per e-mail) by using the marketing materials (visuals and quotes) I will prepare and share with you. You can also post thoughts of your own.
An honest review of the book on Amazon, other online stores online, and/or Goodreads.
Join now:
The book will be published within the coming two, three weeks. I will self-publish it without using a pre-order scheme. So, it will be available as soon as the retailers verify it and make it available for purchase.
Since the publishing date is only two, three, or maybe even less than two weeks away (I only need to make one more read-through), there might be only two handfuls of days (or even less) to join the team. Therefore, don’t wait, join, and learn how to have fun while turning habits into fun games.
Here is the description of the book:
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Description of the Gameful Habits
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:
Seeing yourself, the world around you, and your thought processes non-judgmentally, as an anthropologist would do;
Identifying your dreams and goals, and taking action, one small and effortless step at a time, the kaizen way;
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.
Join here:
To join, please send me an e-mail to vib@optimistwriter.com using the Subject line: “I want to join the Gameful Habits Launch Team” and let me know which e-mail address I should add to the team’s mailing list. Please note that I will also add your e-mail address to my general mailing list (Optimist Writer mailing list). You can unsubscribe from either or both at any time.
The previous article (chapter) I wrote about turning writing and publishing on Medium into fun games was about enjoying the breaks in publishing there, such as during the holiday season. I referred to those breaks as cooldown phases, well-known in sports and games.
In that story, I recommended not worrying if you notice yourself watching your stats and earnings. In fact, I even mentioned that it might be fun and enlightening, especially during a cooldown phase.
But at the end of the article, I also recommended looking less at the stats and earnings during an active phase, that is, while writing and publishing on Medium.
There is another important aspect to the stats and earnings:
If you connect your goals to the numbers in your stats and Medium Partner Program earnings, you will not really be turning your time on Medium into fun games. Instead, you will be chasing a fantasy, a Fata Morgana.
Here is why.
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The next step
If you want to find out more about gaining the feeling of success and fun while blogging on Medium and also how to persevere writing and publishing on Medium in fun and gameful ways, then I invite you to read Gameful Blogging on Medium.com. To look at the book and buy it on Amazon, click on its title above or this image below:
If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.
One article that served as the last chapter in the book was celebratory as well. It was article number 200 I published on Medium since starting writing and publishing there on April 30, 2020.
You can read it here (it is a free link, meaning that you don’t have to be a Medium subscriber to be able to read it):
Here is the ninth blog post in a series featuring videos on YouTube, where I read a paragraph from one of my motivational books and use it as a prompt to speak freely.
This idea was inspired by the free-writing exercise well-known among writers. I used dice and timer to turn this free-speaking exercise into fun games. I hope you enjoy watching them and maybe trying out this gameful approach for yourself and tasks you want or need to tackle today.
Some questions for contemplation: What are your experiences with writing your truth and taking care of people so that no-one sees your writing as libel? What balancing acts have you done in your writing? And how did this creative discomfort feel for you?
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The next step
I hope you enjoyed watching this little creativity game.
Since we all need a little cheering up from time to time, I invite you to read Cheerleading for Writers and discover what it can do for you. To look at the book and buy it on Amazon, click on its title above or this image below:
If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.
Alternatively, you can subscribe to my page, Optimist Writer, on ko-fi for $5 a month, and besides supporting what I do, you will also get access to all my motivational books, which I share there once a month or each time a book is out. Right now, you can get access to eight of my books there — one upon subscription or one-time support and seven in the posts solely for subscribers. Cheerleading for Writers will appear later this year or sooner upon explicit request from the subscribers.
I wish you a beautiful, creative, cheerful, and also gameful day!
