Games are virtual. When you turn on the console, a world appears; when you turn it off, no trace remains. Except for the achievements you earned -- which fortify your Gamerscore and self-esteem, blip by blip. The Underachiever tracks the productivity of one gamer playing to catch up to his peers. What do games feel like when they're used for work?
How to Farm Your Life
Perhaps you've heard of EpicWin, an iPhone app that combines a to-do list with a role-playing game. Apple's app store is rammed with productivity tools that aim to make your life easier, but only leave you a few dollars poorer. To-do lists are a major culprit, often being as much work to update and organize as the actual work.
EpicWin got a lot of pre-release hype for its excellent art (designed by Rex Crowle of LittleBigPlanet fame!) and its conceit. It's a to-do list, yes, but one in which your daily tasks double as quests for a hero of your choosing -- like a perky Warrior Priestess or a Treeman Berserker -- who levels up, traverses an endless world map, and occasionally finds loot. Completing a quest earns XP that builds one of five attributes and pushes your hero closer to the next piece of loot. Crucially, you set the reward for each task; you might decide that doing the dishes is a feat of Strength worth 100 XP and that a load of laundry is worth no less than the 300 cap. The idea is that your character grows according to your actual productivity.
This isn't a review of the app, which debuted with at least one debilitating bug and will likely continue to get updated (patched) until it becomes something else entirely. But EpicWin's core conceit -- the mixing of real-life and game-life -- remains.
You can read into this in so many ways. It's a playful idea, to be sure; someone had to do it. But does it mean that, in the digital age, we can no longer motivate ourselves without virtual feedback? Or that games, the medium of our time, have simply become a valid expenditure of time and effort alongside cleaning and cooking? Maybe the message is that we're becoming intimately familiar with the side of us that behaves like a machine. In many ways, we are no different than avatars grinding for experience. What role do we really play? On the other hand, role-playing games are an intentional expression of ourselves. Maybe we should be congratulated for having invented these playful systems by which we can refocus our energies in a postindustrial economy and get back to the serious business of being creative, prolific, and human. We can start with the dishes.
It's hard to know where one stands with a creation like EpicWin, because everything is so thoroughly mixed together, from the meta-narrative to the sense of achievement. For me, EpicWin was both tantalizing and terrifying because my attention span collapses before work and miraculously widens before a game. If the app worked as intended, it would mean an outpouring of productivity, and proof that I am incapable of focusing on anything other than pixels (it can't be a coincidence that all my artwork is made on my laptop). Luckily, the "game" bit in EpicWin turns out to be thin compared to the "productivity" aspect. It's a to-do list with helpful illustrations.
I already had a to-do list when I downloaded EpicWin -- the wonderful Today Todo Pro -- and this colored how I saw the app. The latter is also engineered to motivate, but its encouragements stand firmly on real ground (it displays a pretty picture of a sunny day underneath your to-do list, a cool moon on your overdue tasks, and so on). I've used it effectively to prioritize and strike tasks. My understanding, with the app's help, is that I'm cleaning my desk because I wanted to clean my desk. After I clean my desk, the little red badge on the app icon decreases by one, showing me that I did what I wanted; and maybe that's enough.
EpicWin is more complicated, of course. Maybe I want to clean my desk because I want to see Twerkface (currently a Stumpy Dwarven Miscreant at level 1) increase his Intellect from 0 to 1. Maybe I'm cleaning my desk because Twerkface is standing just feet away from a Warped Paperclip of Holding, and just a little more effort will land that thing in my inventory. Maybe I just like the idea of getting XP. I've played enough Bethesda games to appreciate large numerals. The only difference is that Strength and Stamina stats don't do anything to make basic tasks in real life feel any easier.
Ultimately, I didn't feel drawn to any of these aspects of EpicWin -- partially because I know that Twerkface's journey has no end, and that his loot only takes up space, and that he doesn't have anything to smite; but mostly because I couldn't sync EpicWin with my other to-do app. It was just too much work to recreate my completed tasks in EpicWin just to complete them again for Twerkface's benefit.
Over time, EpicWin became an entirely separate to-do list. It no longer had to contain my important tasks. Free of pretensions about achieving, I put anything and everything onto Twerkface's roster of quests. 50 XP for "Put some new music on iPod." 50 XP for "Arrive at hotel." 50 XP for "Wake up." But I quickly ran out of cheap quests, and anyway, it isn't that fun to game the system. So, in order to maximize Twerkface's experience, I started recording things after I had done them. I realized that I had just packed my bags for a trip, a feat of Stamina clearly worth 100 XP, so I jotted it down. I remembered that I'd written a colleague who had asked for some feedback. I went out for lunch, and found a book that I'd forgotten to buy (Extra Lives by Tom Bissell), and got a new subway card, and came home, and changed my clothes. I essentially farmed my life.
But what I ended up with was pretty neat. EpicWin became a diary, a travelogue, an actual trace of my past two weeks. In resisting the fiction of the game, I became increasingly aware of my own story. It's told as an itemized history with corresponding point values, a summary that somehow carries meaning.
It was a game that reminded me what I had achieved -- and isn't that a sign of the times?
Achievements earned: 30
Points gained: 3,850 XP
Ryan Kuo is an editor at Kill Screen Magazine, and a freelance writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Find him on Xbox Live and Twitter as twerkface. And please don't laugh at his Gamerscore -- he's working on it.
