5 ms·

HabitRPG – A free habit-building app that treats your life like a game

70 points by phreeza 12y ago

k__ 12y ago
Advertising FB authentication and then telling me in the Android app how I need to copy big strings from a webpage. Bad UX ;)
phreeza 12y ago
I just thought I would post this here, I am not involved with the project but I have been using it for a while, and I think it is a very nice example of gamification being used for good. I am not even usually into role playing games but I have genuinely managed to get myself excited about levelling up my character and collecting gear.
Aardwolf 12y ago
Looks very interesting! One thing: > If your health drops too low, you die and lose some of the progress you've made. I think when losing some of the progress, I would just give up on the game. Real life would already be negative, so I wouldn't need something negative to happen in the game as well, so the easiest improvement at that point is to stop the game :).
- oneweekwonder 12y ago
  I did not read the article, but a way to counter that is for a motivation boost. Allow the player to make up for it the next day. From a MMORPG pov you would have just got killed and your loot(progress) would have dropped, you now spawn at the nearest town and have a day to get your loot back or lose it. And so maybe in courage you to hit the ground running faster the next day, because you know you are dead.
- toyg 12y ago
  > I think when losing some of the progress, I would just give up on the game. I don't think anybody really dies while he's actually playing, in the sense that you can easily salvage your character at any point by just deleting all tasks. The point of the game is to motivate you into doing chores; a low health bar should give you the motivation to reassess your priorities, get a reality check, and rearrange your tasks so that they can be dealt with more realistically. If you can't do it right away, take a rest in the Tavern and come back later with a better plan and a simpler approach: chuck all the "deep red" items, and start with ONE OR TWO VERY SIMPLE TASKS you can reliably achieve. Once you've got your health back, get more adventurous and start adding hard stuff back in, slowly. In most RPGs, if you can't defeat a monster, there is no point in immolating yourself; it's better to run, hide, grind out easier enemies, and come back when you've leveled up. The real-life equivalent is a honest reality check about what you can and cannot do right away.
krat0sprakhar 12y ago
Chains.cc[0] is another tool which on the same lines of making it easier to build habits. It does not have any gamification elements, but it is still a simple and nice app for tracking habits. Wish they had an Android app though! [0] - https://chains.cc/ https://chains.cc/
- visakanv 12y ago
  They still don't have an Android app? Damnit, I stopped using it because they didn't have one, and that was like, a year ago.
midko 12y ago
I've been using HabitRPG on a daily basis since April and overall I find it useful. Things I like: - by far the thing I like the most is the streak counter on the dailies. It's quite rewarding to see you've done your morning light workout 120+ days in a row -- there's just no chance that you are gonna break that chain just so that you nap 10 more minutes! - low management overhead - I usually spend 1-2 minutes on the website - character gamification: getting random food and pet drops and critical chance for gold rewards; upgrading items with that gold -- all of these are completely useless :) but even so, these things do give you a tiny mental push to do that extra remaining task. Health and Experience points have similar effects -- I've had days where my character was low health and it was getting towards the end of the day (you lose health if you missed some dailies), which made me consider whether I could quickly achieve one of the remaining tasks - distinction between daily tasks that are a 'must' and habits that are 'nice to have' but I don't want to do every day. I don't use the social aspect of it, so I cannot comment on that.
- toyg 12y ago
  Same for me. There is no way that I'm going to break my 96 streak in "cleaning up kitchen after kids breakfast", so my wife can reliably find the kitchen clean every day and I have a routine to start the day productively rather than going through Reddit.
armansu 12y ago
Being Beethoven [0] is another habit building iOS app. The idea is that you adopt daily habits and rituals from the most effective and creative people in the world. At the moment they have Richard Feynman, Lev Landau, Elon Musk, Bruce Lee, Bill Gates, etc. [0] https://itunes.apple.com/app/being-beethoven-adopt-daily/id908987642?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/app/being-beethoven-adopt-daily/id9....
Argorak 12y ago
I am surprised how many of those habit-building apps completely ignore that there is a weekend. I've been using Commit for a while and - because I am a bit lazy in that regard - committed to tracking my time properly every day (instead of as a bunch after 2-3 days). (I usually keep a note around) Now, I obviously don't do that on a weekend, but it still breaks my streak all the time, which makes the streak kind of moot. I have the same issue with GH streaks: I would enjoy if the whole system was more lenient, allowing days off the chore.
- phreeza 12y ago
  HabitRPG allows you to pick weekdays on which your daily activities are active, so the weekend is actually covered. What I do miss is having tasks that are weekly or monthly.
  - Argorak 12y ago
    Huh? I looked around but didn't find that. Thanks!
    - phreeza 12y ago
      Once you create the daily, click the little pen on the right, and the item will expand and show a configuration, with the active days, among others.
- Void_ 12y ago
  Just bought Commit and I'm very disappointed. It's way too oversimplified.
- aymeric 12y ago
  Can you share the url for Commit? I am curious to see what it is...
  - Argorak 12y ago
    https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/commit/id473527073?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/commit/id473527073?mt=8
eponeponepon 12y ago
I can't quite see why this type of thing is so in favour at the moment. I also find it slightly disquieting (although admittedly that's got a lot to do with episode 2 of Black Mirror - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes ). It just seems like an unnecessary abstraction of willpower - if one already doesn't have the willpower to (for example) limit one's drinking, what is a cutesy game going to bring to the table? I mean, what's to stop me adding "smoke five cigs" or "drink an extra beer" to the list of habits in this particular example?
- rprospero 12y ago
  I'll put your question into more concrete terms. I've tried this sort of software before. I didn't cheat at it. However, every time I've tried it, after the first month, I usually have several bright red messages indicating how badly I'm failing at life. I then stop using the app, because it doesn't tell me anything I don't know. The apps all seem to be based on the idea of not breaking the streak. While that's great when you have a streak of successes, it's frustrating when you have a streak of failures.
  - visakanv 12y ago
    If you have a streak of failures, wipe the slate clean and start with something smaller and simpler. For severe cases, it might be necessary to start with something as simple as "brush your teeth 1x a day" and NOTHING else. This can seem ridiculously juvenile, but I wasted years of my life making little progress because I thought small things were too trivial to be worth getting good at.
  - toyg 12y ago
    I have about 15 "deep red" ToDos sitting there at the moment. Over a certain threshold, they don't really affect your character very much (you get wounded mostly by failed Dailies and Habits); but when you finally get around to striking one or two off, the satisfaction is immense. One thing I really like of HabitRPG is the leniency: unlike a lot of similar systems, it's not trying to punish you, but rather to nudge you in the right direction.
spindritf 12y ago
It's open source, too https://github.com/HabitRPG/habitrpg https://github.com/HabitRPG/habitrpg
- johnchristopher 12y ago
  I wish someone would have forked it with a different theme (something like default bootstrap text only instead of the 90's RPG look).
alkonaut 12y ago
I quite enjoy "my life" the rpg. I could do without the grinding for items though. Also, my characters appearance is frankly ridiculous and I have failed to find a way of customizing it. I'm starting to think I picked the wrong class to begin with.
ReAzem 12y ago
We have deployed HabitRPG at work and use it to manage our sprints. As far as we know, it's not really free and open source. There is hidden stuff to enable "Diamonds" the item that lets you do every single fun thing in this game. So we have developped The HabbitRPG Black Market. It integrates into habbit RPG and lets you buy diamonds: https://github.com/titilambert/Habit-Black-Market https://github.com/titilambert/Habit-Black-Market I may be wrong and it may just be badly documented.
benjvi 12y ago
There seems to be some recurring popular methods for habit formation and many diffent apps. Each product has its own branding and different twist but the most common themes seem to be (1)"not breaking the chain" (2) precommitments/accountability/public shaming (3)positive feedback of some sort - positive messages or gamification. This is not a bad set of methods - there is some (varying) evidence to suggest that each of these is effective in improving habit adherence. However, there are loads more facts about habits that don't necessarily fit into this paradigm so neatly: - Automaticity does not start to level of for a routine until at least a minimum of 20 days for quite a simple task, and it can be many times longer for more effortful tasks (like doing a daily workout). Average was 60 days but with a very high variance (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.674/abstract;jsessionid=F5E9F5BFC7933360C8C73C2E062575D9.f01t03 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.674/abstract... ) - A single failed repetition "breaking the chain" does not have any effect on the development of automaticity of the behaviour, only repeated failures tend have a negative effect - It has been suggested that it is much more difficult to try to build multiple habits in parallel rather than serially (although I cannot quite find an authoritative source just now) - Habits have a structure: Cue -> Routine -> Reward. It is useful to understand the conditions and motivation for a routine before trying to replace it (substitution approach) - Furthermore, if trying to establish a new habit to reach a goal you might find that there is no intrinsic reward in the routine. It will be very difficult to keep up the routine like that, and it may often be better to look for a different way to achieve the same goal - Habit formation can in some cases be thought of as a rewiring of the instinctive valuation system. For example a resolution to eat healthily might be helped more by giving yourself more exposure to delicious meals consisting of mainly vegetables, than by a purely willpower-oriented method For these reasons - I tend now to think "less is more".It should be more about focusing on one or two correct habits and continually reevaluating them than to rely on a plethora of different external motivators to get you to do a dozen different things every day
dang 12y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=habitrpg#!/story/forever/0/habitrpg https://hn.algolia.com/?q=habitrpg#!/story/forever/0/habitrp...
UweSchmidt 12y ago
As a feedback: the German copy text ... does the job. Someone on the team had German in school? Quick job from fiverr.com? Graphics and UI look nice and engaging. Philosophically, I'd consider that our society, our generation is already living way more quantified and optimized than any previous generation: Technology provides the numbers, the internet lets us compare ourselves with the very best at anything. With this game, you are also holding the carrot on the stick for yourself - Leonardo DaVinci or Elon Musk didn't have to do that - something else made them do what they did. Without meaning to trash your app entirely, I'd suggest - focus on that one task that really moves things forward (instead of doing push for secondary points) - staying alert for the effect of the (self-)optimization - megatrend on employees, children etc.

70 points by phreeza 12y ago

k__ 12y ago

Advertising FB authentication and then telling me in the Android app how I need to copy big strings from a webpage. Bad UX ;)

phreeza 12y ago

I just thought I would post this here, I am not involved with the project but I have been using it for a while, and I think it is a very nice example of gamification being used for good. I am not even usually into role playing games but I have genuinely managed to get myself excited about levelling up my character and collecting gear.

Aardwolf 12y ago

Looks very interesting! One thing: > If your health drops too low, you die and lose some of the progress you've made. I think when losing some of the progress, I would just give up on the game. Real life would already be negative, so I wouldn't need something negative to happen in the game as well, so the easiest improvement at that point is to stop the game :).

oneweekwonder 12y ago
I did not read the article, but a way to counter that is for a motivation boost. Allow the player to make up for it the next day. From a MMORPG pov you would have just got killed and your loot(progress) would have dropped, you now spawn at the nearest town and have a day to get your loot back or lose it. And so maybe in courage you to hit the ground running faster the next day, because you know you are dead.
toyg 12y ago
> I think when losing some of the progress, I would just give up on the game. I don't think anybody really dies while he's actually playing, in the sense that you can easily salvage your character at any point by just deleting all tasks. The point of the game is to motivate you into doing chores; a low health bar should give you the motivation to reassess your priorities, get a reality check, and rearrange your tasks so that they can be dealt with more realistically. If you can't do it right away, take a rest in the Tavern and come back later with a better plan and a simpler approach: chuck all the "deep red" items, and start with ONE OR TWO VERY SIMPLE TASKS you can reliably achieve. Once you've got your health back, get more adventurous and start adding hard stuff back in, slowly. In most RPGs, if you can't defeat a monster, there is no point in immolating yourself; it's better to run, hide, grind out easier enemies, and come back when you've leveled up. The real-life equivalent is a honest reality check about what you can and cannot do right away.

krat0sprakhar 12y ago

Chains.cc[0] is another tool which on the same lines of making it easier to build habits. It does not have any gamification elements, but it is still a simple and nice app for tracking habits. Wish they had an Android app though! [0] - https://chains.cc/ https://chains.cc/

visakanv 12y ago
They still don't have an Android app? Damnit, I stopped using it because they didn't have one, and that was like, a year ago.

midko 12y ago

I've been using HabitRPG on a daily basis since April and overall I find it useful. Things I like: - by far the thing I like the most is the streak counter on the dailies. It's quite rewarding to see you've done your morning light workout 120+ days in a row -- there's just no chance that you are gonna break that chain just so that you nap 10 more minutes! - low management overhead - I usually spend 1-2 minutes on the website - character gamification: getting random food and pet drops and critical chance for gold rewards; upgrading items with that gold -- all of these are completely useless :) but even so, these things do give you a tiny mental push to do that extra remaining task. Health and Experience points have similar effects -- I've had days where my character was low health and it was getting towards the end of the day (you lose health if you missed some dailies), which made me consider whether I could quickly achieve one of the remaining tasks - distinction between daily tasks that are a 'must' and habits that are 'nice to have' but I don't want to do every day. I don't use the social aspect of it, so I cannot comment on that.

toyg 12y ago
Same for me. There is no way that I'm going to break my 96 streak in "cleaning up kitchen after kids breakfast", so my wife can reliably find the kitchen clean every day and I have a routine to start the day productively rather than going through Reddit.

armansu 12y ago

Being Beethoven [0] is another habit building iOS app. The idea is that you adopt daily habits and rituals from the most effective and creative people in the world. At the moment they have Richard Feynman, Lev Landau, Elon Musk, Bruce Lee, Bill Gates, etc. [0] https://itunes.apple.com/app/being-beethoven-adopt-daily/id908987642?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/app/being-beethoven-adopt-daily/id9....

Argorak 12y ago

I am surprised how many of those habit-building apps completely ignore that there is a weekend. I've been using Commit for a while and - because I am a bit lazy in that regard - committed to tracking my time properly every day (instead of as a bunch after 2-3 days). (I usually keep a note around) Now, I obviously don't do that on a weekend, but it still breaks my streak all the time, which makes the streak kind of moot. I have the same issue with GH streaks: I would enjoy if the whole system was more lenient, allowing days off the chore.

phreeza 12y ago
HabitRPG allows you to pick weekdays on which your daily activities are active, so the weekend is actually covered. What I do miss is having tasks that are weekly or monthly.
- Argorak 12y ago
  Huh? I looked around but didn't find that. Thanks!
  - phreeza 12y ago
    Once you create the daily, click the little pen on the right, and the item will expand and show a configuration, with the active days, among others.
Void_ 12y ago
Just bought Commit and I'm very disappointed. It's way too oversimplified.
aymeric 12y ago
Can you share the url for Commit? I am curious to see what it is...
- Argorak 12y ago
  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/commit/id473527073?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/commit/id473527073?mt=8

eponeponepon 12y ago

I can't quite see why this type of thing is so in favour at the moment. I also find it slightly disquieting (although admittedly that's got a lot to do with episode 2 of Black Mirror - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes ). It just seems like an unnecessary abstraction of willpower - if one already doesn't have the willpower to (for example) limit one's drinking, what is a cutesy game going to bring to the table? I mean, what's to stop me adding "smoke five cigs" or "drink an extra beer" to the list of habits in this particular example?

rprospero 12y ago
I'll put your question into more concrete terms. I've tried this sort of software before. I didn't cheat at it. However, every time I've tried it, after the first month, I usually have several bright red messages indicating how badly I'm failing at life. I then stop using the app, because it doesn't tell me anything I don't know. The apps all seem to be based on the idea of not breaking the streak. While that's great when you have a streak of successes, it's frustrating when you have a streak of failures.
- visakanv 12y ago
  If you have a streak of failures, wipe the slate clean and start with something smaller and simpler. For severe cases, it might be necessary to start with something as simple as "brush your teeth 1x a day" and NOTHING else. This can seem ridiculously juvenile, but I wasted years of my life making little progress because I thought small things were too trivial to be worth getting good at.
- toyg 12y ago
  I have about 15 "deep red" ToDos sitting there at the moment. Over a certain threshold, they don't really affect your character very much (you get wounded mostly by failed Dailies and Habits); but when you finally get around to striking one or two off, the satisfaction is immense. One thing I really like of HabitRPG is the leniency: unlike a lot of similar systems, it's not trying to punish you, but rather to nudge you in the right direction.

spindritf 12y ago

It's open source, too https://github.com/HabitRPG/habitrpg https://github.com/HabitRPG/habitrpg

johnchristopher 12y ago
I wish someone would have forked it with a different theme (something like default bootstrap text only instead of the 90's RPG look).

alkonaut 12y ago

I quite enjoy "my life" the rpg. I could do without the grinding for items though. Also, my characters appearance is frankly ridiculous and I have failed to find a way of customizing it. I'm starting to think I picked the wrong class to begin with.

ReAzem 12y ago

We have deployed HabitRPG at work and use it to manage our sprints. As far as we know, it's not really free and open source. There is hidden stuff to enable "Diamonds" the item that lets you do every single fun thing in this game. So we have developped The HabbitRPG Black Market. It integrates into habbit RPG and lets you buy diamonds: https://github.com/titilambert/Habit-Black-Market https://github.com/titilambert/Habit-Black-Market I may be wrong and it may just be badly documented.

benjvi 12y ago

There seems to be some recurring popular methods for habit formation and many diffent apps. Each product has its own branding and different twist but the most common themes seem to be (1)"not breaking the chain" (2) precommitments/accountability/public shaming (3)positive feedback of some sort - positive messages or gamification. This is not a bad set of methods - there is some (varying) evidence to suggest that each of these is effective in improving habit adherence. However, there are loads more facts about habits that don't necessarily fit into this paradigm so neatly: - Automaticity does not start to level of for a routine until at least a minimum of 20 days for quite a simple task, and it can be many times longer for more effortful tasks (like doing a daily workout). Average was 60 days but with a very high variance (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.674/abstract;jsessionid=F5E9F5BFC7933360C8C73C2E062575D9.f01t03 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.674/abstract... ) - A single failed repetition "breaking the chain" does not have any effect on the development of automaticity of the behaviour, only repeated failures tend have a negative effect - It has been suggested that it is much more difficult to try to build multiple habits in parallel rather than serially (although I cannot quite find an authoritative source just now) - Habits have a structure: Cue -> Routine -> Reward. It is useful to understand the conditions and motivation for a routine before trying to replace it (substitution approach) - Furthermore, if trying to establish a new habit to reach a goal you might find that there is no intrinsic reward in the routine. It will be very difficult to keep up the routine like that, and it may often be better to look for a different way to achieve the same goal - Habit formation can in some cases be thought of as a rewiring of the instinctive valuation system. For example a resolution to eat healthily might be helped more by giving yourself more exposure to delicious meals consisting of mainly vegetables, than by a purely willpower-oriented method For these reasons - I tend now to think "less is more".It should be more about focusing on one or two correct habits and continually reevaluating them than to rely on a plethora of different external motivators to get you to do a dozen different things every day

dang 12y ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=habitrpg#!/story/forever/0/habitrpg https://hn.algolia.com/?q=habitrpg#!/story/forever/0/habitrp...

UweSchmidt 12y ago

As a feedback: the German copy text ... does the job. Someone on the team had German in school? Quick job from fiverr.com? Graphics and UI look nice and engaging. Philosophically, I'd consider that our society, our generation is already living way more quantified and optimized than any previous generation: Technology provides the numbers, the internet lets us compare ourselves with the very best at anything. With this game, you are also holding the carrot on the stick for yourself - Leonardo DaVinci or Elon Musk didn't have to do that - something else made them do what they did. Without meaning to trash your app entirely, I'd suggest - focus on that one task that really moves things forward (instead of doing push for secondary points) - staying alert for the effect of the (self-)optimization - megatrend on employees, children etc.