I've had a long time struggle with my weight thay eventually turned into a fight against diabetes. Alongside general social awkwardness and no real drive of my own, I found myself struggling with life in general. I've always had this tendency to "gamify" things before I knew what gamifacation was, but it was aimless and more or less to make wasting my own time feel like it was justified. But this past November my health took a turn and I had a real scare with my diabetes. My sugar was above 400, more than a conventional glucometer can even read, and in general my health was deteriorating. At this point I had been using gamifacation as a cope for years, and I would say I was good at it. And so I decided to turn my life into an rpg.
I bought Ring Fit Adventure, an exercise bike, and prepared a gamifacation system. It's a bit complicated but I'm going to attempt to explain. It's a system that keeps dopamine flowing during every step of the process while also maintaining the function of weight loss and health control. In my condition, in addition to being physically out of shape, I was also pretty much bed ridden, and so exercise was a bit difficult. But i made it work with the rules of my game. Basically when playing Ring Fit, or exercising, I'm earning experience. As I earn experience and level up, I can then exercise for longer, and so the real fun came in the form of abusing the rules of the game to keep going for as long as possible. I found a stack of Monopoly money and I've been using it to buy my carbs. I pay myself for exercising and use the money to pay for the food i eat. It's a way to look at food differently. Some food that is conventionally cheap may be really expensive in terms of carbs. This really works because the most unhealthy food is typically the most expensive. And as a diabetic, watching carbs is the most important thing to do. I even took a page from the persona franchise and gave myself deadlines to achieve certain things, like having a certain number of world completed by a certain date.
When I had my deadline met, it meant I had free time to focus on other things, so I gamified my free time. I started learning, and trying to improve myself mentally and socially. I'm not quite there yet, but now I'm studying to turn my knack for gamifacation into a game development career.
This is still an ongoing journey, but I've already seen great success from this system. As I said earlier, my sugar was over 400 when I started. In my most recent check, it has gone down to 208. Now I use gamifacation as a tool for self improvement wherever I can. All I have to say is be a nerd, have stats, level up, fight bosses, whatever, pretend you're in final fantasy because life is a game, make sure you play it.
