Real Life Games

Trying out Fitocracy this week. I'm a proponent of gamification. In just two days Fitocracy has motivated me to do more crunches than probably I have done in the collective rest of my life. I don't know that I have ever done a crunch before yesterday. It has always seemed like a good idea, but not good enough to until the promise of points was added to sweeten the deal. Not just points, but levels.

The levels add so much to the game of Fitocracy that I believe it makes the difference between a niche fad and a engine for cultural change. Adding levels to the game does two very important things to the idea of the game. Firstly, it shifts the competition from being high score centric to an RPG. Without levels, the game is just about high scores and highs cores allow there to be only one winner. By making the game an RPG it allows people to compete with themselves. It allows us to leave our flabby, unmotivated body, and inhabit the role of a body who has goals and knows how to reach those goals and motivate itself along that path. We are inhabiting a role within a game and it lends drama and purpose to all the otherwise insignificant small steps we need to get there.

The other thing levels do to the game, is it perpetuates a lie. And it does it beautifully. The lie is that if you stop working at your fitness for a day, a week, a month, a year, all the work you'd done will be there waiting for you to pick up where you left off. Even if you gain weight, you never lose points. It promotes lifetime fitness by saving your progress indefinitely. The body that Fitocracy players inhabit that I mentioned earlier, it is a static body, just like any character in an RPG.

The reason this is so important to the Fitocracy system is because there are two kinds of Fitocracy players. There are the kinds of players who are like the games creators. The players who don't need the motivation, the ones who were playing it anyway. The ones who powerlift and want to sculpt their bodies.The ones who can realistically aim for the high score of such a huge game. The other type of player is like me, who just wants to do a little bit to look good and improve their health. The casual Fitocracy player who needs the motivation inherent in the system to get into shape.

These casual fitness players need not only to be able to compete with themselves, but they need to be able to let fitness slide away at times of their life and be able to pick it up easily again. Coming back to fitness once you've let it fall off is perhaps the highest barrier in fitness. The levels make Fitocracy accessible to a fantastically more diverse player base. Not to say that Fitocracy doesn't do a lot to encourage consistency, experimentation and proper fitness practices, but its the little things that make the system accessible to people who can't treat the game like a boot camp that makes it, as I said before, an engine for societal change. I can' wait to see Fitocracy leave beta, and I hope it catches on and sweeps the nation.