I previously wrote about simple rituals and social engineering rituals, and how they can be used to improve your ability to attain goals. All rituals essentially do the same — they are like “enhancements” to your approach to help keep you on track, motivated, and committed to achieving progress.

Gamification is a different animal. It combines four aspects of gameplay:

1. It tries to harness a sense of fun, just like playing games;
2. It adds some form of rules and structure (skipping is fun, but not really a game; if you have some sort of rules that say what is allowed or not, and likely some corresponding structure to the approach, you move from just playing around to some form of game);
3. It adds some thought as to game mechanics, which ties back to what is allowed and what is not…you do things in a specific way to play the game, types of moves, or behaviour, that help you advance in your goal; and,
4. It usually adds some sort of measure of success through a point system or achieving a specific state for the game.

Many people want to insist that there has to be a clear goal and a competitive element, but there are just as many cooperative games as goals that have multiple possible positive outcomes, I don’t believe it always has to be competitive and/or linear. Regardless, the intent is for the ritual to lead to both a change in behaviour and an increase in participation towards the goal.

The Seinfeld example from my previous posts is a simple form of gamification. Instead of just trying to do the individual activity and focusing on doing it once (writing some jokes that day), the goal changed to see how long of a daily streak you can create. Because it is so tied to the original activity, though, and doesn’t particularly change it, I left it listed as a Tier 1 tool, even though it included gamification. The next ones are a bit more complicated.

Tier 3: Participation and completion rituals

The performance ritual is familiar to anyone who has ever played just about any video game. It is the “high score” function. Playing Galaxians with wave after wave of invading aliens could be a tad too repetitive, even with the increase in speed and difficulty. So, game designers added a “high score” option so you would know if you did better than your last run. I still remember the time I was playing Pitfall on an Atari over the course of a weekend, and I managed to make it through the full 20-minute run without dying, and squashing the previous high score by a factor of about 15. I was in the zone. And as soon as I finished? I wanted to go again and see if I could get higher.

More sophisticated or elevated versions exist in competitive sports. The most common is the concept of your “personal best”. It’s not about beating others, not about coming in first, not setting a world record, that’s a different tool. Instead, it is just the idea that you are constantly striving to improve, and regardless of any other metric out there in your sport, the “personal best” is a way to add a performance ritual to your attempt. Are you going to beat Michael Phelps in a swimming race? Probably not. Nor any other Olympian. But you can always set a goal and try to beat your previous times. The “evaluation” against your own performance adds impetus to the activity — you’re not just swimming to get exercise, you’re not just swimming to get a good time, you’re swimming to put up your best time ever. Anything else beyond that — winning, beating others — is beyond your control. So you “settle” for celebrating what IS in your control — your personal best as your “goal”.

By contrast, completion rituals are about simply completing the task. Even though something is labelled a participation trophy, for example, it is awarded for completing the task (aka participating in this case), not on how you did. The act of completion is enough. I know, lots of people hate “participation trophies” as they fundamentally misunderstand what they are, partly because some of the people who make them are idiots and do huge trophies instead of reflecting what they really represent — souvenirs of participation. If you are in school, and they hand out ribbons for various sports, you will get a ribbon (say for baseball) because you were on the team and played. It doesn’t matter if the team won, or if you were any good. You were part of the team, so you get a ribbon. If you win trophies too, great, but regardless, everyone who participated used to get a ribbon, all the way back to the 50s. Participation awards are not new.

Marathons give medals to everyone who finishes. Now, you paid for it with your registration fee. Say, $15, which included a few dollars for a cheap metal souvenir that says “Ottawa Race Weekend, 20xx” and the date. EVERYONE who finishes gets one. I walked a 5K, and so I got a little medal. Lots of events use souvenir coins or pins. I didn’t attend the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Annual Conference this past year, but I paid my registration fees to support them running it and thought I might watch a session or two (I didn’t). But because I was “part” of it, they sent me a nice little pin as a participation / souvenir / completion reward.

Apps go crazy for this now. Have you completed a level? Here’s a badge. Have you connected your social media accounts? Here’s another badge! I play a computer solitaire game on my phone, and it has rewards for doing regular games, event games, daily games, and daily challenges. And if you do it regularly, you can get a special badge even if you’re not doing well. All of them are really completion badges in disguise, looking like a performance metric. But the only real metric is that you finished. Yet apps add them and people compete for them, not to brag to others, but to measure their own progress.

There IS a pseudo version that is quite popular around the world, with the various virtual fitness challenges like the Conqueror Challenges, Pacer Challenges, etc. However, they are missing two of the three components of the normal certification ritual.

For example, I did the Giza Pyramid Conqueror Challenge.

• It is a 46 mile / 75 km route that was designed by the “external” Conqueror Challenge company, so element 1 is met.
• Element 2 — a performance metric — is virtually non-existent. While it looks at first blush that you have to cover 46 miles in daily increments to get it, everyone interprets the process differently. Some people decide that they will ONLY count walking they do specifically for the challenge. So they walk in their neighbourhood, get 2 miles and update the app to say they did 2 miles. When they get to 46, they “earn” the badge. Someone else could decide they are counting ALL the steps they take in a day, even if it was around their house and they never did any actual dedicated extra walking. Doesn’t seem quite the same challenge, does it? So if you were already walking 2 km a day through doing chores, and you continue to do 2 km a day, where was the “challenge”? Equally, others might decide that they are going to use their rowing machine, but since they don’t have a mileage indicator on their rowing machine, they’ll decide that 5 minutes of rowing equals a mile. If you point out that professional standards would put the distance closer to only a bit more than a kilometre in 5 minutes, they don’t care, they’re going to record a mile. Others will use it to count distance tied to how many pages they read in a book — no, I’m not kidding. And there are people online who can’t understand when they run 26 miles over the course of six months and claim that they “ran a marathon”, actual marathoners are kind of offended. There is no real standard, nor even the requirement to do the work to earn it at all…some people have said online that they forgot to log stuff for a while, so they went in and recorded a bunch of distances just so they could get their medal, whether they did them or not…they just put in enough fake distances to trigger the medal.
• And when the person has self-reported to the app that they “did the work” to “earn the badge”, the company will ship you the medal you paid for in your registration fees. There is no one to say, “hey, wait a minute…did you REALLY do 180 miles in 3 days?”. There’s no confirmation, it’s just you telling them “Okay, ship it to me now.”

Now, before you think this process is useless, it’s not. It motivates a LOT of people. But while some people want to pretend there’s rigour attached, that you’re meeting some sort of standard, you’re not. It’s just a completion souvenir.

Tier 4: Certification and combination rituals

The next jump in the “progress continuum” is about certification rituals in one of two forms — a validation of completion by an external organization OR a validation of completion through a test. They are both quite similar as they include three components:

1. A process is established by an external group;
2. There are specific steps or performance metrics to “earn” the reward; and,
3. The external group reviews to see if you made the grade.

For certifications based on “validation of completion“, the best-known ones of all time are Boy Scout badges. The Boy Scouts (as the external organization) have set the specific steps that need to be completed in order to earn a specific merit badge. For example, to get the merit badge for space exploration (https://www.scouting.org/merit-badges/space-exploration/), you have to do eight separate things, all with individual details that you have to address:

• Explain the purpose of space exploration;
• Design a collector’s card of your favourite space pioneer;
• Build, launch, and recover a model rocket;
• Discuss and demonstrate four specific space and rocket topics;
• Do two of three things about robotic and planetary missions;
• Describe the purpose, operation, and components of a space vehicle or the International Space Station;
• Design an inhabited base;
• Discuss two possible careers in space exploration;

Your counsellor or troop leader will evaluate you to see if you did all the steps and confirm it in writing to the Boy Scouts organization so you can get your badge. An external org, a process, and external confirmation of your completion. You can’t just submit it yourself to say you did it; your troop leader or someone in your troop has to confirm you did it.

As an adult, there are still examples of validation of completion, often through adult hobby clubs. For example, I’m a member of several astronomy clubs, and most have some form of an “observing” challenge. For almost all of them, you have to do a combination of several things…for example, you often have to be a member of the organization for it to count; you have to register your intent in advance to say, “I’m going to do this challenge”; you then have to follow the list of steps the organization requires, although they can often be done in any order and with frequent flexibility, such that you’re doing five of seven steps or two of three targets within a step; and when you’re done, you often must “submit” evidence that you did everything that someone in the organization attests or validates. Only then will you get your completion badge / certificate / pin / medal.

By contrast, fitness programs are often good examples of a “validation by test”. In Canada, it was the Canada Fitness Award Program; in the U.S., it was the President’s Challenge. This isn’t to certify you as some professional, nor a licensing requirement for something, it is just a measure of your performance. It is an external performance standard that you can use for your “personal best”, perhaps, although instead of you setting the standard, an external organization has set it. In Canada, you got a bronze, silver or gold for individual athletic tests, but if you ranked high enough in a certain number of them, you could earn an award of excellence.

You may wonder why I’m spending so much time and space on this tier of rituals or why it is so high in the rankings. These types of rituals are somewhat unique. You are not just using your OWN goal-setting nor your OWN judgement as to what constitutes meeting the goal; an outside agency or professional has said, “Here is the standard.” Again, it looks like the previous ones with various targets, steps to follow and complete, and added an accountability ritual on standards. You literally can’t check the box until someone else says you can check it. That is a pretty big step to add to your efforts and raises the level of commitment required.

The last type of ritual, combination, is a bit softer than the previous two. It is often used where there is no standard for what you want to do / accomplish. I include it in this section as a creative tool, one that creates gamification where none presently exists, and adds side quests together. Let’s look, for example, as to what it means to be a “writer”.

The simplest definition of being a writer is to write. If you sit in your seat, and write, you’re a writer. That’s it, that’s all. That meets the definition of a writer.

Now, add in some publishing snobbery, people will quickly say, “Well, yeah, but is it any good? Is it gibberish? Would anyone read it? Would anyone BUY it?”. And so some people will say the standard is that you have to have sold something. Which means all the 1000s of would-be writers who have not broken into the publishing world yet are not writers until some gatekeeper says they are a writer. Hmm…not a lot of people like that standard. So they start creating their own definition of what makes them a writer. Perhaps this includes some of the following:

• Writing at least 500 words a day (or some other total);
• Attending writers workshops, conferences, author groups;
• Finishing a book / short story / article;
• Submitting it somewhere;
• Getting rejected;
• Getting accepted;
• Self-publishing through Amazon;
• Their first sale;
• Their 101st sale (to eliminate just friends, don’t you know);
• etc.

Of the nine above, perhaps they really like the idea of combining finishing it, self-publishing, and having their first sale. Even if it was their mom who bought a copy. If they take those three, they may often then say, “Okay, if I do these three things, I can call myself a writer”.

If you want to see how subjective this can be, I’ve written published reports for the Government where I was the primary author. Does that make me a writer? Or perhaps an editor of other people’s input?

I have over 2 million words in blog form, does that make me a writer?

I have written a guide to HR competitions in multiple forms, people use it, read it online, but it isn’t “formally published” or even formatted completely as a book. Am I a writer?

My guide has been downloaded well over 5000 times, which would technically make it a best-seller by Canadian standards. Does that make me a writer?

I intend to format it as a book, may eventually sell it online; will self-publication make me a writer?

I’m not trying to debate my status, I’m pointing out that if MY goal is to be a writer, then it is my goal and my definition that matters to my goal-setting. What do I mean when I say “I want to be a writer”. There’s no official standard out there, so I might combine four or five things, or ten, or only three and say, “That’s my standard”.

That combination of smaller goals into a larger goal is a ritual, whereby the individual goals are “raised” up to be more important, part of a larger task, driving me to take something small like “writing 500 words” and making it part of a much bigger goal. Driving all the combined elements to work together, giving a synergy that individually they might not have.

Tier 5: Reward rituals

The final tier is amongst the easiest to understand and one of the hardest to do well. A reward ritual is based on the recognition that self-satisfaction in achieving a goal may be insufficient motivation to do something. So, instead, we add a reward to the end. For example, if I write 500 words this morning, I will reward myself with a cup of hot cocoa this afternoon. Or if I can lose 25 pounds, I will reward myself with that nice dress I want.

Seems simple enough, right? If I ring the Pavlovian bell the right way, I’ll get my doggie treat. Activity completed, reward earned.

Unfortunately, it is not that easy. There are issues to monitor. For example, if your goal is to lose weight, you don’t want your reward to be a sugar binge. And yet many people do exactly that…they tie their goal of some form of deprivation of something they enjoy to letting themself have it if they deprive themselves of it. If you could eat a sugar cookie any day, then what’s the motivation? Particularly if you were eating them previously. You’re creating a false “deficit” to give yourself a “false reward”.

Equally, you have to ensure that the goal and the reward are relatively proportional. If you write 500 words one day, you shouldn’t reward yourself with a new car. Nor can you give yourself a raisin. It’s not the same scale. You COULD perhaps write every day for a year and reward yourself with a nice rental for a weekend trip. Or a raisin scone on Fridays when normally you settle for a plain one.

And finally, you don’t want the reward to be something that doesn’t actually motivate you. If you don’t care about clothes, a new dress doesn’t motivate you. If you’re not a gearhead, a special car rental or new car might mean nothing. If you don’t really care about raisin scones, then a raisin scone isn’t a motivating factor.

In an ideal world, the reward should be a) new, aka not something you already do; b) significant enough that doing it means something to you, not a quick throwaway item; c) not so significant that it requires too long of effort to earn it; and d) reinforces the actual goal being measured. For example, if you are banging away on a desktop computer, and what you really want is a laptop so you can work outside, well, maybe showing yourself you can meet your goals on your desktop is your way to “earn” the laptop after six months. Or you’re into kayaking, and there is a high-end version you would like because it would be more maneuverable in rapids…maybe if you show yourself that you’re able to go kayaking three times a week, the “reward” of the new kayak is justified by your commitment to and investment in kayaking.

Often though, it is combinatorial in nature too. So, again, going back to the writing, what if instead of writing, your goal was to pursue creative outlets in your life. Writing, painting, knitting, and singing, perhaps. While individually they might be relatively small investments and sub-goals, together they may make for a larger “combined” goal. And you measure THAT goal.

I hesitate to consider this a separate goal for something, as it isn’t really a separate ritual, more a modification to this last one, but you CAN give yourself a point system to measure your progress over time. For example, suppose your four goals are:

• Write more;
• Attend a painting class;
• Complete a specific knitting project as a gift; and,
• Join and attend a choir.

That is very hard to measure progress on regularly. On the other hand, you could say, “I want to write more” but you give yourself one point every week you write more than 3x that week of at least 500 words each time. For the painting class and choir, perhaps you get one point for each outing. For the knitting project, maybe it’s a set of three mittens for your nieces, and you are going to give yourself 10 points every time you finish a pair. After 12 weeks, let’s say you have 5 points for writing, 8 points for painting, 2 points for choir, and 1 point for mittens. So 16 points in total. And you are waiting until you earn 30 points before you take a pottery class. If you feel that any of the sub-pieces are dragging you down, you can always focus on other things in the “mix”. And you’ve essentially gamified the whole set. It’s not a tickbox, you’re trying to combine like things together to motivate you to be more creative. If you really are interested in taking a pottery class sometime, this may be a great way to motivate yourself a cross a broad area, and add a series of “granular shading” to your reward system.

When my son was old enough to put his contact lenses in himself, we set him up with a simple reward system. Up until then, Andrea or I had to insert or take out his lenses early on, or Andrea later, or Jacob could remove them on his own for a while. But insertion is a different level of self-care. Most kids needing contacts learn between 5 and 9 years old, and Jacob was in the middle. He got new lenses, a bit different style and easier to handle, and so it was time.

We set up the goal that it was to TRY and put in the lenses. If he tried, he got one point. If he got it in one eye, he got two points. And if he got it in both eyes, he got three points. When he got to 100 points, aka the 30 day approach to creating a habit, he could have a reward. He chose a Vegas Golden Knights t-shirt. It worked perfectly. There were no days that he didn’t try, the points motivated him, he always wanted his point. And only 2/30 tries where he only got one lens in, the rest were both eyes. It wasn’t easy for him, he struggled some days, but the goal was to try and to learn how to do it himself. And he nailed it. Recently, we’ve created something similar with all his appointments and activities that he has to do, even when they’re not fun on their own. We added a tracking ritual combining points for each activity and daily “tier” points depending on how well he does…so he gets 10 points for certain things, 25 for others, etc., and at the end of the day, if he gets 125-150 points, he gets 1 reward point; 150-175 in a day gets him 2 reward points; and 175+ gets him 3 reward points. When he gets to 150 reward points, he can get himself a specific pre-negotiated reward. This is way more work than his lenses, and takes longer, so it wasn’t a small reward either, it was about $200 in the end. His journey continues, and as he earns his rewards, it feels almost like those tickets you can earn at arcades to buy something later.

That’s it, that’s all I have for the various rituals. I’ll do one more “summary” post and then apply the techniques to my most difficult goals.