The game of life

Better than Sims [agendabeijing.com] – This interview with Kwestr game creator Frank Yu contains a vision for the future, when things like Kwestr will help us connect “online life” with “actual life.” Kwestr aims to gamify life to facilitate this. I started up on Kwestr beta to give it a try. It feels a little silly at this stage, like a cartoonish, aspirational to-do list. Kind of nice that you can break goals into the steps you need to achieve the goal or kwest. I’m not sure this kind of stuff begs to be shared and socialized. I can vaguely imagine sharing a kwest with friends to compete to achieve it. It hardly feels game-ish though at this stage. I didn’t see a way to add rewards or prizes. Badges? Hm. Yawn. I’m sure they’re working on that aspect of the game. At this point, it comes across more like another means to try to motivate myself to be a better person, which I would probably ignore and feel guilty about. I didn’t pick up on a competitive vibe at all (then again I didn’t connect with anyone on it). Thinking bigger, though, when I consider his goal to partner with brands to provide on-location Kwestr integrated experiences, and this thing might have some spark! Sounds a lot like what foursquare and etc aim to achieve as well (and they’ve done a remarkable job of making it competitive – for instance, don’t even try to be Mayor of Portigal Consulting, or we will bring it). In any case, this iteration has a honey-badger as a mascot. OK, it’s just a regular-badger. Which they admit looks like a raccoon.

“We can make anything into a role-playing game experience, whether it’s going to a party with your friends, going to a museum, or going on a trip. We can make any kind of event into an RPG experience. You can bring your friends into it by challenging them to be part of your kwest. Once you’ve completed your kwest you receive a badge. The kwest can be anything from “Lose Weight,” “Be a Vegetarian for a Day,” “Learn Chinese,” or it can be fun stuff like “Have a Beer on Fridays.” We have kwests already built into the site, but you can also create your own…I want to help people accomplish their goals and their dreams. I want to help people break down their goals into steps, stay motivated, and help them follow up. For instance, buying a house is hard. How do you do it? We can help people break it down into steps and stay motivated along the way. Also, allowing these kinds of journeys to be shared with other people opens up potential for others to help support you.”

Speaking of the game of life, just for fun here’s a commercial from the olden times for the Game of Life, by Milton Bradley who, according to this ad, makes the best games in the world. That’s how we used to think about gamifying life!

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