Turn Work Into A Game

I wish I had more time for gaming. There’s a podcast I like called All Elite Arcade, which is hosted by two pro wrestlers who love video games. They talk about pouring hundreds of hours into brand new games. Every. Single. Week. The hosts aren’t college students. They’re working professionals with busy lives. How?!

One advantage wrestlers have getting through Steam backlogs is they have to travel constantly. If you’re regularly taking 8 hour flights to get to arenas in mid-sized cities, that’s a good chunk of your life you can devote to dating all the household appliances in Date Everything. Listening to the show is a kind of wish fulfillment for me. Some people watch videos where an influencer drinks champagne poolside at a luxury hotel. I like hearing someone say they’ve put 20 hours into Monster Train 2 and still have a long way to go. (You would think I’d be into Twitch streaming, but their streams are long and meandering IMO. I’d rather hear a gamer’s concise take after beating a game than watch a streamer struggle to beat a boss for two hours. Again, time is a factor here!)

My daily routine goes something like this. I wake up early. Do my morning stuff: brush teeth, wash face, exercise, breakfast, do chores, get dressed, all while listening to podcasts or an audiobook by a podcast host. Then I sit down to work. I work for eight hours a day with a lunch break, where Amanda and I go outside and get some sun. After work, Amanda and I have dinner, watch around 2 hours of TV together, then get ready for bed. If I get off work before Amanda, I might be able to sneak in a half hour of a game, but because I’m unsure how much time I’ll actually have, I won’t invest too deeply. Usually I play a light puzzle game like Picross. Something I won’t be upset to put down. I recently joined a monthly interactive fiction club, and playing a bit of a relatively short IF game fits well into this space. On the weekends, I might have time to game, but we also have a pretty active social life. We’re often out-of-the-house or out-of-town altogether.

I could create boundaries and zone-off time in my schedule for gaming. Solve the problem in an adult, emotionally mature way.

Or:

What if I could transform my eight hours of work into a game?

Imagine if work felt fun, challenging, and satisfying in a game-like way. Granted, I love my job. I work in video games, lol. Part of my job, at this moment, is to playtest our studio’s upcoming release. I’m very fortunate, I know. But still, I’d like to have it all. I want to give my work day the feeling of a game.

This theoretical productivity game has to go beyond the dopamine rush of a lot of “gamification” products. It wouldn’t be enough for me just to collect points and badges every time I write an email or fix a typo in a spreadsheet. To feel like a game, I need to experience mechanics, progression, and transportation. To break that down, I need to be engaged by the gameplay elements. Even if a todo list powers the game, I want engaging elements on top of checking off todos, like dice rolls or combat. I need to feel progression, like I’m getting better at the game. And I want a game that transports me in some way. I want to feel immersed by the game’s universe.

Recently, I got an email from Habitica saying they were going to delete my account, since I hadn’t played their game in so long. Habitica is the first productivity game I ever played. It was over a decade ago. Habitica is a mobile game where you enter your daily goals, habits, and to-dos. As you cross them off, you level up your cute avatar, who looks like someone out of an SNES-era Final Fantasy game. Your avatar’s stats (Health, XP, Mana) increase as you complete chores and tasks. You collect gold to buy stuff, like new outfits and weapons. I remember maxing out my avatar’s stats and being thrilled! And then, there was nothing else to do. I bought everything I wanted to buy. My character was a walking god, thanks to my uncanny skill at flossing regularly. The prevailing advice on the Habitica Reddit thread was to start over again with a new character, but I didn’t feel any motivation to do that. Hence, the email. Apologies to my Habitica avatar, whose name I have long forgotten, who will soon enter the eternal void of account deletion.

This year, I was very excited for a desktop productivity game called Spirit City – Lo-Fi Sessions. Spirit City languished on my Steam wishlist until a month or two ago, when a Mac version finally became available. I do all my work on a Mac desktop, so a Mac compatibility was a dealbreaker. This game seemed much more feature rich than Habitica: an avatar creator, a to-do list, a habit tracker, a set of timers for focus, a library of low-fi music, atmospheric sounds effects (soothing wind, etc.), and lots of options to customize your cozy virtual workspace. That’s really novel. By crossing things off your to-do list and using the timer, you earn Spirit Credits and XP. The XP tells you what level you are… which is not that significant. The credits allow you to purchase fancier items for your avatar.

The Spiritdex is the most interesting mechanic in the game. It’s the one that sold me on the game. The Spiritdex is a magic book of hints for unlocking spirit creatures, who are adorable, supernatural pets that sleep next to your avatar while they work. You might read a hint like, “This spirit comes out at night when the night birds chirp,” which means you should set the lighting in your workspace to nighttime and put on the bird chirping sounds. After a few hours, a cute little spirit friend appears! Gotta summon ’em all! There are 24 spirits in total, including one of those lil’ guys from Among Us.

Once I found all the spirits, which isn’t that difficult, and made it to level 50, thereby unlocking all the Steam achievements, I quickly lost interest in Spirit City. I plan to return to the tactile satisfaction of my pen and paper to-do list, which I can easily travel with. The game is also memory intensive, so it’s not ideal to have it running while working in Unity. I have a good working environment at home, but if I needed to work in a busy office, a loud coffee shop, or a wacky 1980s dorm room, this virtual office simulator would be nice to have.

During this year’s Zine Quest, I bought a tabletop RPG for productivity called Initiative that looked promising, but I was quickly disappointed. It’s very slickly laid out. The overall presentation feels professional. After reading the rules, it just seems like a pen-and-paper Habitica, but without the adorable pixel art. You write out your to-dos, give yourself XP and gold for completing them, then use the XP to reward yourself. That’s the game loop. I was hoping for more fantasy and adventure from a productivity TTRPG, but I don’t think I paid close enough attention to what I was buying. This is for someone who wants basic gamification with a light RPG flavor.

The game I’m really looking forward to getting this year for Christmas, assuming Amanda… I mean, Santa… backed the Kickstarter on my behalf, is the 2026 Quest Calendar and Quest Planner from Sundial Games. Rather than a productivity tool with gaming elements, this pair of games appear to be imaginative and immersive solo TTRPGs structured as a calendar and day planner respectively. There are character stats, meaningful choices, and monsters to fight, but the games are designed to be played in short daily bursts, rather than long uninterrupted play sessions at a table. Looks very promising!

I’ve thought about the kind of game I’d want to develop in this space. I’m imagining a rogue-like productivity app with endless procedurally generated content, so the player doesn’t quickly burn out on the game. It would live in a little window on your desktop. There’d be a simple premise, like your character is exploring a mega dungeon or an alien planet, with tons of variation in terms of what can happen, all represented by simple graphics. (8-bit pixel art, perhaps?) Exploration, combat, magic: all of it is powered by the to-do list. And crucially, you could assign difficulty levels to individual tasks, so hard tasks give you more XP toward leveling up than easy ones. Surprisingly, I have not seen this feature in any of the productivity games I’ve played (though in most of them, daily habits are worth less than to-do list items).

Will I ever make that game? I dunno. Maybe if I had some gamified motivation…

🎲 Your Turn: Do you use productivity tools? Are you happy with them? What do you think of “gamified” experiences? Do you feel like you have enough time to play games? I want to hear from you! Reply directly to this email, or tell the whole world by hitting the orange button below.