In the app Habitica, a gamified habit forming app, there is a well designed game mechanic that helps form habits at a customized pace.

Like any habit tracker, you add habits and to-dos to a list. Checking them off daily (or whatever interval) will create a habit chain (Seinfeld habit chain #zt) called a Streak. This is like every other app.

What's unique in Habitica is the introduction of a Health bar and an Experience bar.

The Experience is tied to leveling up the avatar, like most other games. Every time you complete a task, you are given some Experience points for that activity. As your level increases, the amount of experience points required to achieve the next level increases. This means you are awarded with level-ups at the beginning of the process, and you have to work harder for levels as you are more established in the system. This is fairly standard game mechanics fare.

The Health bar is where the magic lies. In this particular case, anytime you fail to check off a daily habit (or similar) you are docked HP rather than losing XP. Which is nice in that you are losing something that is meant to decrease anyway - it's accepted that you can lose health points in games. But in addition to only losing a secondary stat, the amount of HP you have is always at a maximum of 50 points. Even when you level up, this max HP does not increase.

The best way to refill your HP is to level up, which means that it becomes more and more important to actually follow your posted habits as the game progresses and you gain levels. Eventually you will hit a point where you either get good at your habits (so not to die) or you remove habits from your list (so not to be accountable to them).

Either is a solid option for keeping you focused on the optimal number of habits to be juggling and developing at any one time. Add a few in the beginning until you've mastered them. Then add some more, and master them. Then add some more (Mario and new game mechanics).

This is a perfect example of the system itself incentivizing the desired behavior for an audience that may not necessarily already be good at that specific behavior. The default no-nonsense strategy is to master a few habits at a time. Brilliant.

Citations

• Souls mechanic in Dark Souls dark souls mechanics
• Not all rewards are bad hyper light drifter safety dance
• Aggressive gameplay earns big rewards
• Habitica's mechanic for habit growth

#gamedesign #toolong