HabitRpg: A habit building app that treats your life like a game | Hacker News Reader

HabitRpg: A habit building app that treats your life like a game

habitrpg.com

174 pointstellarin49 comments

This interface paradigm has, I believe, become known as gamification; an example from another domain, language learning, would be Duolingo[0].

Engaging as such applications are with their stimulus of powerful primordial triggers, they all too often transport not just a game's gratifying aspects into the problem domain (todo lists, in this case), but also the gaming mindset, resulting in terribly linear interfaces and data structures.

I do believe that even a serious todo list application, or, as it were, language learning platform, would benefit from similiarly engaging elements, effective by virtue of our cerebral heritage.

Nevertheless, I have yet to see a successful marriage.

A gamified Emacs Org-mode[1], perhaps?

[0] An ingenious platform that ostensibly allows anyone to learn a language by doing bite-sized exercises and translating sentences, while effectively training the proprietary Duolingo translation engine. See http://duolingo.com

[1] http://orgmode.org/

My first response to the article title was "I've already gamified my habits - I use org-mode". Trying to check off as many yellows (and reds!) every day as possible, not-breaking-the-chain by continuing the green line. It's sad, but it does give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

Of course, to each his own; many can't understand how anyone could stand to play nethack, which is about the level of "gamification" of org-mode currently.

https://github.com/ryjm/habitrpg.el

Gamification, as I've encountered it, isn't really tied to a particular interface style or paradigm. It's more about using social status, rewards, positioning, perception of progress, rank, etc to motivate individuals to accomplish goals. The wikipedia page isn't too bad on that front [1]. I usually simplify it and say it's all just banana stickers. My wife teaches ballet for a living and has a few classes with little kids. She has the classic end-of-class stickers of good listeners, and a progress sticker board. At work, we have patches you can get from members of management for doing something exemplary and pins for obtaining certain certifications or mile stones. Efficacy of either implementation aside, they're both just gamification. Same thing with a lot of medals and such in the military. Of course, some things come with monetary rewards, which is motivating in it's own right. Then there are online badges, karma, etc. etc.

I think you could use elements of gamification individually, but I think a lot of the strongest motivation comes from the social context, competition, etc. That said, you can definitely use psychological tricks that are basically gamification for the individual, as was mentioned in another comment, like building streaks, or publicizing your progress, etc.

Anyhow, two things: 1. I'm no expert in formal gamification, in so far as that exists. I just brought it up because my bosses get super hung up on the idea of an interface that looks like a game, instead of the idea that you're shaping behavior by creating rewards and social context. Just adding my experience here 2. I could be totally misreading what you mean by an interface paradigm 3. I really don't like the word gamification, even though I ended up using it all the time when I was developing training/progress plans and materials :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification

Looks like it's missing a bunch of retention hooks to bring users back to continually engage and check int. Whether it's email reminders, notifications etc. I created an account 2 weeks ago, only remembered about HabitRPG now after checking out HN.

I'll second RazvanPanda, this has been lifechanging for me. I tend to have a lot of trouble with ADLs (activities of daily living) and this really helps me keep on top of them. Trivial example: I've been consistently flossing nightly for a month and a half now.

I highly recommend this, it changed my life, well, at least one of the three lives I still have left http://i.imgur.com/XN6z8US.png

It's also open source and available on github https://github.com/HabitRPG

The girlfriend and I have been trying it out the last week or so, it's a pretty good way to keep the flat tidy it seems.

I find the UX not quite there.

For example, it doesn't let me stay logged in (no remember me). So, every time I want to check off something I have to bring up the login modal and login (which for some reason doesn't always work with lastpass). Why not include a remember me?

Also, there is no way (I know of) to go back in time and check a box. I just started using it, and I forget at night to check that I did get my coding done. There's no way to go back to yesterday's date and check it. So, I keep missing points.

One thing you could do is have your day roll over at, say, noon; and then you can check in the next day instead (at the cost of having to remember what you did before noon today, until afternoon). I agree, it's not perfect.

Time travel is a tricky issue, because if you're in a party and taking part in a quest, your missed dailies hurt your party members. So if you go back and say "actually I did that thing", ideally it needs to restore health to them, after some of them might have died, etc.

So I too have been bitten by this, but I think there some merit in forcing you to make a habit of being in daily touch with your lists. I think you're less likely to cheat if you can't go back to rewrite history.

Gamification of boring daily activities is the future in my opinion.

Check this out (ignore the ending and story, it's kind of dark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJKwHAvR4uI

It's like Pivotal Tracker except you get gold rather than points and you track your life rather than just projects. ;)

Ads are super annoying. Probably the wrong way to monetize something like this. Maybe even make a micro payment as part of the system. Lose X - lose real money. Want to cheat to get your prize? Pay real money.

You could setup Trello to do something like this. Maybe tap into the API to create a report or something. More flexibility, less cuteness.

The Android version is going to need a lot of polish. The menu is jittery and the wrong icons are used. Also the whole app lacks touch feed back so there is no way of telling if you are pressing a button or not until afterwards. Finally, a few idioms like long pressing to edit items and such remain unimplemented which atl east made me confused.

I have had zero luck with the android app, but the webapp is perfectly playable from chrome-on-android

I wonder if the apps are open source. I'm sure they could use a PR if so!

There's a third party app ("Habit AndroRPG") which is considerably better.

I would go for this if the Dailies and Todos tied into my ticket systems and email somehow -- maybe make it a social button "Send task to HabitRPG"? Email could be sending it to an email (username@habitrpg.com?) like a lot of ticketing systems support.

And is there an app?

Yes there is an app, it is simple enough to allow you to tick off tasks, not much else.

There is an API, and I did see integrations with other to-do systems start to pop up.

http://habitrpg.wikia.co/wiki/App_and_Extension_Integrations

I was quite excited to see a discussion about tying in with Trello.

Code is on guthub.

Correct link: http://habitrpg.wikia.com/wiki/App_and_Extension_Integration...

the above link should be for wikia.com it seems.

Chore Wars did this a long time ago.

http://www.chorewars.com/

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/20

Looks interesting. I accidentally closed the tutorial. Is there any way to start it again?

Also, the ads look crummy when the window is too narrow, but not narrow enough to get to the next media query breakpoint: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2efgq76l4ojip16/Screenshot%202014-...

Yes you can restart the tutorial.

Settings->Site->Show Tour

I started this last week, set up some stuff, and then promptly forgot about it :(

I was looking for a todo app last week and stumbled on this one too.

Tried it for 2 days and the first problem I had was that using this at work kind of makes you feel stupid and since that is the main feature of the app I dropped it for which is my top contender for the moment Trello. (tried 2Do, Any.do, Asana, RTM, Wunderlist, Todoist, Toodledo, Todoist, Astrid and some others)

I am still not sure if Trello is what I am looking for but it's working OK so far with some added integration with Pipethru(they work good with Jira) and Zapier(Trello integration), tried IFTTT but they don't seen to like trello.

Workflowy

I use Workflowy everyday to take notes, organize thoughts etc. But I doubt it's a good enough contender for maintaining a to-do list.

Defeat Ask has been around for a bit. Doesn't really look like it's catching on. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/defeat-task/id674002993?mt=8

By far my fav gasified task list is Carrot to do. Love the story, slick interface. Uber geeky yet awesome. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/carrot-to-do/id591840203?mt=...

Amazing and Flawed. In it's current form it's psychologically flawed and broken but the main UI is elegant. There's no reason to purchase armor and swords and level up because there's no battle. There's no battle because there's no story. There's no game. There's no meaning. The mind immediately recognizes it all as a trick.

I'd personally keep the look and UI but get rid of the RPG elements and re-balance the game by using pure reward, punishment, and retention (punishment for not coming back daily).

This is awesome, I'm really looking forward to digging into this. I have a similar app at https://metamorf.us, which gamifies social interactions to improve social skills. Metamorfus is wicked young and has a long way to go, but the goal is to have it as engaging and cool as HabitRPG.

I like the idea of metamorf.us a lot, but it seems to me to be solely focused on social anxiety. Do you have plans to expand out of that?

What other ideas did you have in mind?

The "do challenges to improve" concept is pretty widely applicable. So far social anxiety is our focus as the whole team that made metamorfus suffers from it.

We do have visions of making sister sites based on the metamorfus codebase for professional development, the honey badger movement, no more mr. nice guy movement, etc. That would be a long ways off (if ever), as metamorfus itself is at MVP quality at best right now and is just a side project for us.

Lift[1] has some interesting ideas for using social interactions to achieve non-social goals. Their blog is worth a read.

https://lift.do/

Thanks, I had not heard of Lift!

I don't think social anxiety is a bad focus at all. I personally suffered from a lot of social anxiety 10 years ago.

My personal focus right now are more like social finesse, being slightly more fun at parties, handling difficult social situations (Calling in debts, interpersonal arguements, close relationships with difficult people, etc)

If you keep up with the social anxiety focus, I'd really like to see some kind of roadmap for success - Examples of what people using the service or similar approaches have accomplished. My understanding of social anxiety is that there's varying degrees of accomplishment for the same effort that people put in - some people are always going to feel awkward.

I haven't heard of those last two movements personally. Have you thought about how your site relates to the PUA movement? I've noticed some similarities. I don't mean that in the I'm currently raising pitchforks way. I think there was some concern within that community about how to help men with social anxiety that got drowned out with all of the fuzzy tophatted snake oil salesman and face-tattooed guys that want you to murder your step kids.

Thanks for the feedback!

Ah ok, in that case yes we do hope to expand into those areas you mentioned. Our overall goal with Metamorfus is to become a really good resource on getting better at socializing, regardless of your background or goals. We definitely recognize a website can only do so much and people will respond differently.

We are still building the core of the site and bootstrapping. But we hope to eventually team up with therapists and relationship/communication experts to help provide content and guidance for people. So if you decide to take on a "go to a party" challenge, we hope to also provide tips, advice, and steps you can take to help make going to a party more successful, and cater that advice to your needs and skill level. One member of the team is a therapist who specializes in anxiety, and so we already have a good start on that.

I think the PUA gets a bad rap. Yes it has its problems, but at its core it always felt like a positive thing to me. I don't mind getting compared to it. We will definitely strive to keep metamorfus gender neutral and not make anyone feel uncomfortable though.

Honey badger is the "don't give a f movement" (http://www.reddit.com/r/howtonotgiveafuck/), their overall goal is to flat out not care about anything at all. Which has its pros and cons, of course. But so far metamorfus has responded well with that community, many of metamorfus's current members joined from htngaf communities. And No More Mr Nice Guy is this book -- http://www.amazon.com/No-More-Mr-Nice-Guy/dp/0762415339 -- there are in person communities around the country that follow the book, and the book itself contains many challenges and exercises, so a Metamorfus-type site could potentially become an online NMMNG community.

and btw, if you come back to the site you should find it much faster now. It was embarrassing how slow it was, we found and fixed the bottleneck :)

Around the ~20 minute mark below, video is a few years old but its upbeat and you can listen in the background. Relevant and a good laugh. http://www.g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-th...

It's cool, but I'll be really glad when this retro-pixelation fad goes away. It makes me sad that we have great things like SVG accessible now but so many people seem fixated on making games with early '90s 16-bit graphics.

I don't think it's a fad. It's just an artistic style at this point. There are a lot of instances where I think it can look better than SVG, but to each his own.

Nostalgia isn't a fad. It's a human emotion.

This is a really great web app and it helped me a lot on dealing with coping daily tasks and procrastination. Sadly, their android version was broken and unusuable, so I uninstalled it and just kept using the web version.

Great idea, I'm not into games but it makes it more fun to make habits. thanks so much for creating this.

I love what you're trying to do but find it confusing to learn how to use it.

I'm not really sure how this game works. What prevents players from cheating by lying about their real-world activities to prevent loss of game progress?

Nothing, but then what is the purpose? You're only cheating yourself, and if you just want to play an RPG there are much better options...

You're 5 years too late. Gamification is old now.

And time invalidates this how? Databases are old, better stop using them? I've been in the gamification space since before we had that term. It went through a typical hype cycle a couple of years ago but it's just now starting to click with businesses and consumers.

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