#oneaday Day 607: Ruined by the grindset

I read an interesting post that someone shared from Reddit earlier. You can read the full thing here.

The gist of the post is that the person in question has spent so much time and effort "optimising" their life, tracking everything from their water intake to the amount of time they spend on their morning routine, and have come to the conclusion that none of that has made them in any way happy. In fact, it has made them miserable and incapable of feeling joy in anything; worse, it has made them resent things that should be good, like having a pleasant date with a nice person or consoling a friend after a bad breakup.

I read this with interest because some of it sounded familiar. I've never gotten that deep into "optimising" my life, but over the last few years in particular, I have started to feel like it is undesirable to track everything about your life, record it in an app and obsess over numbers. This is a far cry from how I felt during the birth of the "gamification" craze, nearly 20 years ago.

In fact, I specifically recall being excited about the release of an iOS app called Epic Win, which basically positioned itself as a to-do list with experience points, allowing you to assign every job an XP value and a relevant stat, allowing you to "build a character" according to the things you'd been doing. When I eventually downloaded it, I found that it wasn't quite as fun as I thought it would be, but that didn't stop me from thinking that the "real world XP" thing was a good idea, hence my experimenting with the now-defunct Fitocracy, an app that gave you XP, levels and quests for going to the gym.

Now, about the only thing I track is my daily calorie intake, and that's because I'm specifically trying to lose weight. I'm not obsessing over the number of steps I take in a day, I'm not obsessing over "streaks" on anything except my underpants, I'm not obsessing over hydration. Because, as that Reddit post demonstrates, you can do too much of all that. If you project manage your entire life, then your entire life is going to feel like work. And that is not something that anyone should find desirable.

I mention this because I know on several occasions I have considered whether or not scheduling my days down to an extremely granular level would be beneficial. In some respects I feel like it probably still would be a good idea, as there are lots of things I would like to do but never make the time to do so. But then I feel like if you schedule things too much, you start to get resentful when things don't fit into neat two-hour blocks — because inevitably they won't, much as the Reddit poster discovered. And that's a sure-fire method to end up demotivated and bored with existence.

Much better to try and get yourself into solid habits in a natural-feeling, sustainable way. People have been doing that for thousands of years, so I refuse to believe that 20 years chained to our smartphones has completely removed humanity's capability to function independently without obsessing over statistics that relate to every little thing we do.

This is, in many ways, why I don't obsess over view counts on this blog, MoeGamer or my YouTube channel — it's not fun, and I'm not doing any of those things for a job, so I shouldn't treat them like one.

Your life doesn't need KPIs. I would argue that a lot of jobs don't need KPIs, either, but that's a whole other discussion, I feel…!

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2463: You Can't Win Them All

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"You can't win them all" is one of those platitudes we hear numerous times throughout our lives. In childhood, it's used as a means of attempting to stop the inevitable crying after we lose a game against a sibling or fail to achieve something we really wanted to achieve. And in adulthood, it's used in circumstances ranging from the loss of a job to the end of a relationship.

And yet I feel it's a saying that a lot of people these days seem to have forgotten.

Today I've been playing a game called Delicious! Pretty Girls Mahjong Solitaire which, as I said in my writeup on MoeGamer earlier, is exactly what it sounds like. I've been having a lot of fun with it; mahjong solitaire is one of those simple-but-challenging things that I find enormously addictive, and Delicious! certainly likes to slap you around a bit with its various tile layouts. But that's all part of the fun, as is the case with pretty much any non-free-to-play-garbage puzzle game produced since the dawn of computing: the fact that victory always seems attainable, yet is often just beyond your grasp is what makes these experiences so enjoyable, exciting and addictive.

And yet, glancing at the Steam reviews and discussion pages, the most common complaint people seem to have about the game is that "it's too hard". The timer's too quick. The game gives you too many "unwinnable" layouts. In other words, it doesn't let you win every time. (A similar swathe of criticism was levelled at Frontwing's excellent ecchi puzzler Purino Party.)

"Victory" is something that people the world over seem to think they have become entitled to, with the fact that whenever you're doing anything competitive, the possibility of losing is what makes it competitive in the first place. You see it everywhere: in the Delicious! forums, where players complain that they have to keep trying levels until they get it right; in Final Fantasy XIV, where people vote to abandon a duty after the first party wipe rather than helping newcomers or people who aren't as familiar with the fights; in Overwatch, where someone will rant and rave at their team if they lose, completely ignoring the fact that there's always the possibility that you are, you know, simply outmatched.

It's hard to say exactly where this attitude comes from, but it seems firmly ingrained in society now, and repeatedly reinforced by lots of things that we do, particularly online with the growth of "gamification". "Well done!" everything seems to say, showering you with points, levels and achievements and inevitably begging you to "share" everything on social media. "You used this thing for the thing it was designed to do!"

People often joke about school sports days that don't have winners any more, but I've seen it happen: kids getting "participation trophies" even if they did the bare minimum. I've also seen "Celebration Assemblies", in which children get certificates for everything from getting 100% on a spelling test to — I'm not joking about this — sitting still in their chair for a whole lesson. This continues into adult life, too; at work Christmas parties, there's the inevitable cringeworthy "awards" ceremony, where whatever "lol, so random" douchebag who organised the whole debacle dishes out a series of completely arbitrary awards to ensure that everyone gets recognised for something, even if that thing is "drinking lots of coffee" or "being able to spell".

Failure is what makes experiences like games fun and exciting. If you win every time, you devalue the concept of winning until it is completely meaningless, and nothing feels worthwhile any more, which means you start to crave — or expect — more and more positive reinforcement with every passing day, and get annoyed or upset when your every whim isn't catered to, or things don't go the way you expect them to.

Me, I've had my fair share of failure, but every time I get a TIME'S UP or NO MORE PICK [sic] I just hit the Retry button, give it my best shot and eventually I might actually succeed.

Now, if only it were that easy to pick yourself up and start again after a repeated series of failures in life as well as games.

#oneaday Day 127: You Checked In

Gamification pervades our mobile, Internet-connected society. The concept has been around a lot longer than the buzzword, of course, but it's in recent years that it's really taken off thanks to all manner of applications that while in practice are mostly pointless, somehow manage to be fun. I guess that's part of the point.

Take Foursquare, for example, primarily a service to do two things: to tell people where you are, and to find things that are nearby. But add in points, leaderboards and collectible badges and somehow it becomes an incentive to get out and about and explore places. Same with rival app Gowalla, which has a whole other set of things to collect.

When the whole "check-in" craze first started, it looked like it was primarily going to be a location-based service. But no — services like GetGlue popped up, allowing people to check in to the entertainment they were enjoying as well as discuss it with others and find out new things that they like.

Whatever you think about the applications and their uses themselves, all of them contribute to building up a large, mostly user-generated database of Interesting Things, whether those things are places, pieces of entertainment, beers or whatever else you can check in to these days. Would people take the time to put these collaborative databases together if they didn't feel like they were being "rewarded" for it?

Well, perhaps. Look at Wikipedia — that represents a repository of a considerable amount of human knowledge on topics both important and utterly asinine. There's no experience levels, badges or anything else there, just the contributors' knowledge that they have helped with a worldwide effort to collect humanity's knowledge.

What the "gamification" side of things adds, though, is enough incentive for lazy people to take part. People who write and edit Wikipedia entries are, in all likelihood, interested in their topic enough to be able to write at length about it — not to mention putting up with the seemingly-endless community criticism. Someone who checks into a Foursquare venue and leaves a tip saying "try the beef curry, it's fantastic and only costs four quid on Tuesdays" is helping out other people who may be stopping by the same beef curry-selling establishment and also feels like they're having a bit of fun while doing it.

Perhaps the education sector should take note. There's already an element of gamification in schools, what with marks and grades and so on, but perhaps children would be more engaged with things like reading if there was more of a game-like "incentive" for them to get on with it? Perhaps schools should set up their own GetGlue-style social network to allow kids to check in to what they are doing and earn "rewards" for things like reading books, completing homework and the like.

Okay. You shouldn't need that sort of thing to get kids engaged — but having worked as a teacher, it's clear that something should be done to get kids interested rather than apathetic. Perhaps gamification is the way forward for education?