Time Management Issues? Combine Gaming and Life!

Having trouble combining gaming into your hectic life? Constantly searching for a way to solve this issue? Look no further. I have found the answer for you. It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Unfortunately for all us non-iPhone owners it currently is (if you know better please let me know!). For the growing amount of iPhone users, however, there is now an app that claims to do just this. Those of you who follow our twitter feed (@readyup) would have seen a jealous mention by me a couple of weeks ago of this particular item, but I couldn’t help myself, I still had to blog. EpicWin is a new app that allows you to enter a to do list and as you complete it, you earn experience and occasionally loot in order to level up your RPG character. Makes perfect sense, right? Do your chores and level up. Awesome idea.

I was immediately taken by this idea and was upset to find that there is no similar idea currently available on the PC or a console. It’s pure genius. It was then I recalled many a conversation with my friends about achievements being given in real life. How much better would you feel about going to work everyday if you got achievement points for it? The current generation has got us all so used to your progress being tracked and rewarded in a specific way that real life gratification does not always seem to cut it. What’s wrong with gamerscore being based on life? It’s something to keep us motivated and mixes the two worlds the hardened gamer lives in. Got a pay rise? Ker-plink! Went to the gym every week this month? Ker-plink! Got married? Ker-plink!

There are many times that people around me have assigned an imaginary achievement to a life event of mine or theirs. It makes me wonder if long-term gamers can ever really leave the gaming world behind in our day to day life. It seems that overexposure to anything means it leaks into your life eventually. How many of us, back in the day, would close our eyes to sleep only to be plagued by Tetris blocks falling? How many of us look around our real life environment and find good places to take cover or strafe from? For many gamers, individual aspects of gaming can manifest into our subconsciousness so why not a concept like gamerscore?

It really is a merging of two worlds at the moment; apps and thought processes trying to link games to real life and Kinect and Move trying to bring our gaming experience closer to life. You look at visions of the future 10 years ago and tech like VR has been left behind. The two worlds are smudging together rather than the head-on collision we were expecting. There was no announcement, no one told us it had begun… but every now and again things like EpicWin come along that make me realise how much our lives are now blended, and I just can’t wait to see where it’ll end up next!