Habitica is a game that combines daily life habits and RPG elements in order to level up “yourself”. This description was taken directly from their twitch directory and gives the perfect summary of what this game is about. The inspiration for this blog post came through my recent thought process of combining gaming and health, a trend that I believe will increasingly be seen in the self improvement landscape. Habitica essentially allows users to create their own personal lists of habits, daily actions, and to do’s in order to track and translate their IRL progress into the virtual world of Habitica.
As a gamer who struggles with obesity and depression, I am perhaps one of their primary target users to get and use their program. In my personal life, I have seen the degradation of my basic human responsibilities and so I am using this opportunity to re-build a solid foundation and become a more functioning human in the real world. What gets me excited about Habitica is that it provides the very much needed dopamine hit that other RPG games give, but this time the progression is entirely dependent on my real world activities.
For example, as I write this blog post I am also live streaming the process I have gone through to research and create my Habitica profile. One of my habits that I want to keep is to stream daily and so not only do I have the habit of streaming that I can check off on their program as complete, but also the daily task of streaming as well. When I check them off as accomplished, my virtual avatar in Habitica gains experience, gold, and sometimes loot to increase the power of my character. This is very exciting for me and many others in this world who do not have the encouragement to change their lives from other people around them. Instead, the fact that Habitica is recognizing the real world work we are doing in the form of progression in a game is what I believe to be the secret sauce to personal change.
NOTE: Habitica is a game that relies on you to be honest with yourself. You can easily just lie about doing anything that you put on your lists just to level up but the only person you would be hurting is yourself, quite literally. This game is for people who really want to change their lives, not just play a game to level up and cheat.
In addition to positive reinforcement for your habits through the leveling process and loot process, the game takes an interesting approach and actually includes negative reinforcement objectives for those individuals who respond better to that form of change induction. For instance, if I don’t go to the gym today, I have set up my habit to have both a positive outcome and a negative outcome. When you click the negative outcome (meaning you did not do what you said you were going to do), it actually takes HP off of your avatar in the Habitica game. I have yet to experience what would happen if my HP bar goes to 0, but I would imagine it would not be in my best interest to find out.
Habitica has a entire system of rewarding its players with the currency that they accumulate in game. There is a marketplace as well as a reward section that you can spend your coin in to increase the statistics of your character through itemization. I view this as another essential piece to gamifying a persons habits through rewarding them for their hard work in the real world. There is indeed a premium currency in the game for those who care to support Habitica financially while at the same time getting some pretty nice perks as well.
There are a lot of other bonus features as well in Habitica that I will simply list out as bullet points so that you can get an idea of how rich the game world is and how you can continually progress your real world habits to engage in a game that has longevity (for as long as you live):
- Raise pets into mounts
- Create or join guilds
- Chat with other members in the tavern
- Party with other members to fight bosses
- Class selection and quests at higher levels
- Support groups for specific habits
- Community based challenges
- Robust help section
As I wrap up this blog post, I can’t help but feel excited for what I will do when I am finished. Not only will I be able to check off the daily blog post action as completed, but I am now excited to head out and go to the gym so that I can continually level up my in game character within the wonderful world of Habitica. I know this is only day 1 and I know there is a hard road ahead. Not every day will be a great day for achieving my goals. But if I stick with this for the long term and I remain honest with myself, I believe this will be a fun way to transform my life for the better. Thank you Habitica for your efforts in gamifying peoples lives and inspiring people to change.
P.S. I plan to revisit Habitica again once I have spent enough time working on my habits to provide an update on how it is going. Feel free to catch me live on twitch and ask me yourself.