Evolving Cyborgs

A better gamified habit tracker

See Code

My Role

Owner, designer and sole creator of a personal project

The Problem

I've always enjoyed playing video games but the older I get, the more frustrating it feels to only be able to affect the digital world. I wanted to find a way that I could still feel like I'm playing a game, but do it in the physical world. In my searching for a solution to this problem, I began to learn about gamified habit trackers.

What is a gamified habit tracker?

Gamified habit trackers are a genre of app in which elements from video games (such as experience, levels, acheievements and character stats) are used to provide additional motivation to the user to help them complete real world tasks.

Why existing apps didn't work

I couldn't find any apps out there which worked for me. I kept running into one of the following problems:

Giving rewards and punishments is one of the most effective known ways of creating behaviour change as it causes positive and negative associations with a specific behaviour. But if you are not careful with your timing of feedback, you can easily cause counterproductive situations. I found many apps were not careful with this feedback.

For example, they would punish the user (usually by losing health, gold, or experience) when something like a habit was not completed. The issue here is that this punishment was applied the next time a user would log in. This made it easy to avoid the punishment simply by avoiding using the app.

The Solution

I decided that the only way of solving these problems is if I made an application myself. This project is what originally encouraged me to learn web development