Back in 1998, a group of us started real life roleplaying as Jedi students. It was a great idea until some people took it too seriously …. or treated the idea as a total joke. But ever since then, I’ve been interested in social media and gamification for self-improvement, as you can see from my past posts on Fitocracy, Nerd Fitness, Zombies, Run!, Mindbloom, and SuperBetter.
A couple of days ago, some friends at Nerd Fitness mentioned that they were using a roleplaying game to track their habit changes: HabitRPG. I’d read about this kickstarter project about a year ago, but I was focused on the beta of (now indefinitely postponed) Rising Heroes and didn’t give the simplified D&D project much thought.
A year later, I am glad that the project was funded – and that friends have brought this back to my attention.
I’ve barely started (my character is a mere level 4), and so many of the features are still to come … such as classes, pets, mounts, and fancy weapons, but what I have seen so far looks fun and definitely motivating. Rather than a long “to do” list of things I should do to improve my health each day, I see a list of challenges and quests … each associated with points and gold. It’s classic D&D (or World of Warcraft for younger audiences) roleplaying applied to daily life.
Check back in a few weeks to see how the experiment is going!