Earning Points

Two days ago, I blogged about how I prefer games' challenges over life's challenges, but two weeks ago, I blogged about how life and its challenges can be viewed as some kind of game. So I wonder, how can I "gamify" life to make its challenges more fun to face?

The concept of "gamification" already exists, and it's accomplished mostly through applying point scores and win conditions to various tasks and challenges. By performing tasks well, the "players" earn "points," which can eventually lead to rewards, either real or imaginary. All I really have to do to "gamify" life is to give myself "points" for doing things well. I don't even have to figure out exactly how many points I earn, so long as better performance leads to more points and worse performance leads to fewer points. Granted, I will always get at least a few points for trying.

I gamified my life tonight by challenging myself to fit as many dishes as possible into the dishwasher efficiently, and I scored a great deal of points by managing to fit in every item except for the two biggest, which I washed by hand.

I wonder if "earning points" is really going to be enough to get me to start enjoying life's challenges. I suppose the only way to find out is to try it out for a while and see how it goes.