Ask HN: What video game elements do you wish you could use to motivate you IRL?

[jaredcollett]

For example :

- earning rewards for doing actions - earning bonus rewards for teaming up with others in groups or guilds - getting 'gratz' from your friends when you reach a new level - climbing a leaderboard - customizing your character with look, outfit and gear - bravely going into new territory with the risk of dying and losing time, gear and progress - grouping up w/ other players to defeat a dungeon - grouping up w/ your guild to defeat a raid - dueling other players or groups for bit loot and glory

Any ideas on how you would like to see things like this brought to real life?

Say 'earning a reward for doing an action' could be using an app to record that action and the app rewarding you with a small amount of in-app currency that you can use for other things?

[Arkdy]

Habitica already exists which tries to use video game leveling and such to help you develop better habits.

And I've been thinking about something similar that's specifically focused on budgeting. The premise is this:

1. Your bank account is represented as a treasure cave with piles of gold instead of stacks of cash.

2. Saving involves moving gold from the floor to treasure chests. This means that breaking into your savings would mean breaking into a virtual treasure chest, which would have a similar emotional weight to smashing a physical piggy bank.*

3. You have a virtual pet guarding it and recording your spending habits takes the form of talking to your pet at the end of the day.

* An alternate version is if saving means feeding a pet until it grows big enough to send it out into the world. This means that saving is more rewarding since you see a creature grow up, but I'm not sure how to make taking from your savings not be as harsh as killing a friend.

If this is directly integrated into an official bank's online banking then it creates a form of lock-in wherein switching banks also means abandoning your pet.

[drakonka]

I am making a snail simulation and have toyed with the idea of making a personal feature available to myself only which would let me use my real money to take care of my snails, buy supplies, etc because the currency in the simulation is already the same as my daily real world currency. Only obviously instead of really buying snail jars and race entries or breeding rights the money you spend would go into a savings account.

I thought about this when my cat was very sick. I would (and did) spend any amount on veterinarians, surgeries, medicines, and special food to make him better and take care of him. I figured, what if that kind of emotional connection could be transferred to virtual pets on a much, much smaller scale? I'm already pretty attached to my snails, and on a personal level it might work.

This is a really half-baked idea - for example, the amount of real life money I can spend would not be the amount of money in my actual bank account, but the amount of money I have in the world itself (since other users can't be at an advantage or disadvantage when using purely virtual currency against my real life currency). Also, snails are not expensive - I wouldn't exactly be dropping large chunks of cash into savings buying snail jars.

Anyway...it was just a random thought I had about gamifying my saving habits a bit.

[jpindar]

People do get attached to animals in open-sim type virtual worlds and spend real life money to buy them food (necessary to keep them alive). The people who sell the pets and food make a good profit, probably second only to virtual world landlords.

[cdnsteve]

Cutting my grass is like dungeon grinding. It's painful and the gear I want never seems to drop, ever. I'm starting to think up using opencv with a raspberry pi attached because this is where autonomous vehicles should be. Low speed, replacing mind numbing tasks nobody wants to do... It's like honey I shrunk the kids but one level up.

Runs off to start coding

[jaredcollett]

Go get 'em!

[timfrietas]

I'd gladly accept small amounts of cryptocurrency to take pictures of stuff IRL to help train ML/CV algorithms or populate Google Maps.

I was in a Lyft and the drivers use Waze which has the option for them to take a picture of the address if they don't have one yet. But they're not well incentivized to do it.

Just pair this idea with a Pokemon Go/Ingress mechanic or game where I get a tiny bit of Ether or ${cryptocurrency} you've ICO'ed on and I would be more interested.

Mechanical Turk pays shit money, but if your fake money could grow into much more value over time and I am rewarded for being an early adopter then I am potentially more interested.

[Arkdy]

A pet peeve of mine is that there are a bunch of punishments around driving, but almost no rewards for being a safe/model driver.

The only thing I can think of is those insurance companies that offer trackers that rate your driving, and maybe Waze might want to look into a leader-board or something, but I'm worried about the government somehow using Waze data to give me speeding tickets.

[DanBC]

What I'd really like is to pay a small amount of money for something like "Flo", but with messages I design.

See the video here: http://www.health.org.uk/flo

[jaredcollett]

very cool I had not heard of Flow, are you sure there's not a service that offers the same thing w/ customizable messages?

[s2th4d]

Gotta go all the way back to Super Mario Bros. Power ups, extra lives, quick lightning mode, and shooting fireballs at your enemies.

[jaredcollett]

Haha, yep, pretty solid rewards

[wdiamond]

IRL you can't link objective complete to rewards automatically, it requires human eval. which is too expensive.

[jaredcollett]

Not necessarily, you could trust the accuracy of an activity tracker like fitbit, garmin, etc. Or the user could submit photo/video proof voted on by users. I think the more difficult side of the problem is consistently providing a reward that is valuable to he user.

[twobyfour]

Save points, to make it easier to take big risks.