Before I get into the not-quite-a-review of HabitRPG, I need to define some terms.

The first is ‘RPG,’ or role-playing game. That’s the type of game where you play a role in which your character gains levels and completes tasks and what have you. Normally if the game involves killing a dragon, it’s an RPG.

The second is ‘Gamification.’ This is the idea that if a task is arduous or hard to be motivated for or something you have to do, it can seem less so if a game is made of it, just like Principal Skinner advised. Have a boring task to do? Then give yourself a reward, or points, or something when you do it. The idea of gamification has been around for a long, long time, and when actual games began to introduce the idea of achievements, managers tried to work those in as well.

Those very brief intros bring me to the point of this post. I have discovered a website called ‘HabitRPG,’ in which the ordinary, everyday, perhaps less-than-fun or motivation-requiring tasks you have to do are turned into a RPG.

It has limited graphics very representative of the pixely old-school 8-bit style as you can see in the screen below, yet that lends to its charm. Your character is in the upper left, and you have some basic options to make it look like you, and you add tasks that need to be completed. They could be habits you’d like to form, daily tasks that need to be carried out, or one-off events that you can’t forget. True to RPG tropes, completing these tasks earns some experience for your character and some loot, which can be used to purchase rewards you set for yourself – such as watch an episode of a TV show or eat a Big Mac – or they can be used to purchase upgrades for your character. You know it would look good with a rainbow wig. You can even acquire multiple pets and mounts, and sell or buy at the market.

HabitRPG screen

If you don’t do the tasks you’ve set out for yourself, they will become darker and darker red until you lose some experience and have to start the task over. If you regularly perform well on the task it becomes green and you get additional rewards and experience, level up, improve your character and weapons and even fight some monsters.

The point of it all is to give yourself a reward or two for completing the mundane or difficult tasks of your day, provide motivation for doing the tasks, and give yourself a framework in which to complete them. It can be a very effective in that way. You can check in at the inn if you won’t be able to meet your normal quotas and there is a robust community – for example, if you want to start running a mile a day, you would add that to your habits or dailies and form a party or even a guild with other like-minded players. Then, by completing the task your party can gain experience and even take on a boss monster that might take weeks to defeat (through daily running), but skip days and the whole party will be weaker. It’s a neat implementation of responsibility. There are mounts you can buy, and subscribing for a fee grants some additional features, but none I found added to or took away from the overall experience in any significant way.

I’ve been using it for a little bit and it has helped. It lets you think about tasks in a different way than you might normally, and motivates and encourages you to complete them. The developers appear to make improvements and introduce new elements at a brisk pace, which always keeps the experience new. Finally, it has a companion app for iPhone and Android so you can check things off gain experience no matter where or you are or when you complete your tasks. Now there’s no excuse for not doing what you’ve set out for yourself.