Gamification Experiments

[holland]

This isn't much of an art project, but I guess others are fine here. Any kind of creative or tech stuff.

I'm constantly gamifying things to try and make life a bit easier. I'll share some of those in the posts here.

[holland]

Table of Contents

CPS Finance Game

[holland]

Lately, I've been playing a finance game where the end-game goal is to increase your cents-per-second earned (averaged over your 24/7) to 1CPS. That sounds small, but it would actually be $865/day, or $315k a year. About enough to buy a small house and live for a year even if you don't maintain that CPS.

In the interim, we're working with finance machines generating in the 1/1000ths of a cent lol.

I previously tried a version of an incremental finance game like this where you had to increase your daily earnings by $1 each day of play. But it had some major issues:

• The progression was too difficult. Creating a reliable recurring income source takes time. Lowering the amount of money you expect to earn off it doesn't lower the amount of time it takes, unless you're someone who's willing to put out slop.
  
  
• It couldn't accommodate fluctuations. An income source may earn you $10 today and $0 the next and $2 the day after... Or $10 one week and $0 the next. By basing progression on actual earnings in such a short time-scale, rather than averaged earnings in the long run, you would end up stuck or kicked back levels even when doing all the right things.
  
  
• The economy and systems I built around it were dependent on too many assumptions, in terms of how long tasks should take to complete or how much they should earn. The reality is that you can't completely control those factors. So it ended up feeling arbitrary.
  
  
• There wasn't a good source of "game feel." This is hard to achieve in gamification anyway, but you need something providing those instant moment-to-moment motivators. Tactile feedback rewarding you for good actions and warning you of bad ones. The trackers and economy and map systems that I built took too much time and maintenance to count as instant feedback.

bleh.

Something I'm doing with the new game to suppport game feel is by tracking the actual averages on a live spreadsheet.

It averages out the earnings as CPS since the launch date (when I started providing the service, or filled out the grant request, or launched the product, or whatever) + the hours of preproduction that lead up to that.

I keep this running in the background of my phone. Whenever I click into it, I see it jump from the CPS it was the last time I opened it to the updated CPS. In seeing how those averages are lowering over time, I'm inspired to do more maintenance on existing projects or put something out faster etc.

And when I get to update it with new earnings and see the numbers go up, it's a very nice feeling.

I also have a snapshot tracker that's updated weekly and monthly with the current average CPS. So I can see how the numbers have improved over time. Whereas the spreadsheet is more micro-motivating, the tracker is more macro-motivating and gives a sense of direction and progression.

Inbetween those two levels, I have my action picker. This divides up the actions I could take, putting each element of the decision into its own column:

• What resource am I willing to pay right now? Like money, time, credibility..?
• What resource am I trying to create? Like a new asset, a new tool, a platform, a conversation..? (These are restricted to a single category. Like I can't draw and code within the same asset action.)
• What is the purpose of this resource? Like to reduce the cost of something, increase the size or value of something, create something new, launch something, nurture something..?
• What am I targeting for that action? Like an income machine, an audience, my credibility..?
• What will this outcome cost to maintain? Like time, money, energy...

For example, I've been meaning to share some educational essays on substack, and I wanted to have a paid option with cool daily prompts and stuff to support it and the forum. But each asset I add to the paid version also increases the time it takes to maintain it (and produce the initial run). Despite it not yet earning anything / not having proven itself.

I can eventually reduce that by investing some time into creating a tool that simplifies some of the assets I want to include, like taking my word prompts from a spreadsheet into a text image without me having to open an image editor. But doing that before it even launches means fighting with a lower and lower CPS via excess preproduction time.

Without language like this to clarify my ideas, I previously went on a spiral following all the consequences and improvements and everything I could do with the project, only to burn out and not get any of it done.

The point of the action picker is that it forces me to deal with the matter in one direction at a time. You pick one option from each column to describe your action, and then you go do it.

If you want to do more than that, you can do it with the next action. Erase the line (it's in a dry erase envelope), draw a new one, and perform that action.

It really forces you to focus-in on just one thing with one motive. Which is hard for me to do as someone that's constantly looking between the lines at how everything is influencing everything else.

I'm still experimenting with this version, so I don't have pretty templates or graphics to share.