Yearly Archives: 2016

Gaming with Depression: Habitica/HabitRPG

JUDGMENT TIME, DEKARANGER.

Judgment

No, wait, we’re talking about something entirely different today. I saw one of my friends over at Hirez post a link to Habitica.com today, where you turn your life into an RPG. The idea is that you reward yourself for completing tasks, gaining exp, gold, items, fighting monsters with your friends, things of this nature. It relies on you to be honest with yourself, and them when you click that you have done one of your daily habits, or tasks you’ve sat out to do. They recommend you start light, with only a few tasks a day so you don’t get overwhelmed and stressed about it, and I tried it. There’s stuff you can buy with “gems” to make yourself look cooler, but that’s not the issue I have. Now you have to log on daily, several times a day to add tasks, click that you’ve completed them, and gain the rewards you so richly deserve. The idea is to help you organize your life with RPG-like rewards, to motivate people who love gaming and RPGs. I love the concept, I do. For someone who is fairly well-adjusted, it’s gangbusters. It will potentially help their lives become more manageable.

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But what about people with anxiety, depression, things of this nature? The first thought I had was “This is okay. I like this. I’m customizing a character and it’s really kind of neat.” but that thought steadily changed in just an hour or so. “What happens if I fail and don’t get this done?” I can’t help but judge and find myself lacking. Now I have to log on here several times a day in addition to all the other crap I do and admit to myself that I failed a task or succeeded. One of my co-workers/bosses and I were talking about it, and how they let it run their life. Every small failure was judged harshly, creating self-doubt, more stress, more panic. I can absolutely see that and it’s unfortunate. It’s a fantastic idea! I highly recommend people give it a whirl and see if it’s for them. I can’t handle it, but that’s no reason other folks can’t.

Do you guys have any games or game-like ideas that help you stay on task and rewarded, without it becoming a chore, or bribery? I’d love to hear about it!

Can’t you see I’m busy here? What do we do all day?

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It’s hard work being in the gaming/gaming press industries! I think it might be time to give you guys a bit of a sneak peek into what it is we do all day. Not just anyone can do this sort of work, but fortunately, we practice day-in and day-out to make sure all of our skills are honed to their full potential. The most important thing is the portal where we do all of our work. You can find that right here. There are lots of practice tools here that we use to make sure nobody sees that we’re being lazy our bosses see the true limits of our dedication and productivity.  But we do this for you guys: It’s a labor of love. Personally, my favorite is Crash Planning! When we attend an event, convention or expo, the scheduling is such a nightmare! Two to four days of planning meetings and running around, desperately trying to not be late? That doesn’t happen overnight. No, that isn’t a puzzle game, you’re just seeing things. Quit being so paranoid.

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The Breakdown’s another key on this website. With Breakdown you learn to efficiently get letters written, where to bold, italicize, and the correct order of certain bits of text within your letter. You don’t want to try and thrust a greeting halfway through do you? That simply doesn’t work! It shows you don’t care. And it’s not at all like Breakout, the hit game from the 80s. As you can see, anytime I press my space bar, that little round cursor goes away. Graphs are incredibly important too, which is why the next step is Leadership, that oh so elusive trait. Going through graphs of the efficiency of our workforce is key, and virtually everyone in the office space needs to know about it. We use a unique mouse cursor that looks like a spaceship. While you might think it is, I assure you that’s how we move from Quarter to Quarter safely. Last, but certainly not least is the Cost Cutter exercise. Running a website is expensive, and sometimes we have to find ways to cut corners or costs a bit. This particular exercise involves seeing trends in items that we have a glut of and getting rid of them. If there are matching color-coded items next to each other, it’s a hint that they have to go.

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And that’s it! That’s a day in the life of a game journalist! It’s not all playing Skyrim and World of Warcraft. Most of the day we do real, honest, hard work. Just to bring you guys what you crave.