BatWerk has messaging about the importance of completing your rings, notifications and oft-encountered triggers to remind you of the rings, random rewards to drive repetitive action, accumulation of rewards, creation of an incomplete pattern to make your OCD want to fill it in. The weakest parts currently are the messaging, reward accumulation and the pattern completion. Meaning that it's tougher than I'd like to get started, complete the 12 rings, and maintain a long-term view of the importance of action. Work is ongoing to make these better, and to implement other ways to drive long-term activity.
A periodic story is a good way to drive long-term interest, and to create a sense of importance for the activity. Remember, your brain strongly feels that exercise is not necessary. So it's crucial for your long-term success to make your brain feel that what you get through exercise is important. A story that progresses every day and frames the exercise as a very important activity makes you come back every day to see what happens next, and makes you think of the activity as something you should place great importance on.
Think of it like introducing money. At first, money feels worthless as it has no direct utility. As you learn what you can do with money and the difficulty of acquiring money, and the great competition among people to get money, money becomes very important for you.
As you create the habit drivers, you also create the identity. What kind of person would do this activity? How can the app match that identity and extend it with "does frequent exercise." As you create the identity, you have to define the values of the identity. What's important. Why.
Individual identity is not very strong for habit creation though. It's easy to put it aside and bend the rules of your identity, and even change the rules of your identity, since it's your individual identity. If you create a group identity, changing the rules becomes much harder. Now you have to get the group to agree to any rule changes.
E.g. if you like eating chocolate, try adopting the identity fragment "I'm a person who doesn't eat chocolate", and find out how long that lasts. Not long, and it triggers cognitive dissonance that makes you remove the identity fragment as it doesn't match your actions. Now try the same with the identity fragment "I'm a member of the Super Team" and the group identity fragment "Super Team members do not eat chocolate". This is harder to break, as you either have to quit or betray Super Team, or get Super Team to change their group identity. And when transgressing, cognitive dissonance doesn't come into play that much, as your identity as Super Team member is not in doubt, and the group identity of the Super Team is not in doubt either. You'll just gain a transgressor trait, which you have to seek forgiveness for with amends. But it doesn't break the "shouldn't eat chocolate" identity, so you'll retain the inhibitory effect.
The high-level design doc for BatWerk is Ring Fit meets Duolingo. Driving optional activity to improve health and mental state.
Habit creation. Maintaining the habit. Removing barriers to activity. Increasing reward level. Random rewards vs learned fixed rewards. Accumulating rewards to create investment. Playing the game creates shareable detritus that can earn you social capital (sharing funny videos of your workout, pictures to brag about achieving full rings, total coin count, and streaks.) Identity, group identity, character creation and building.
Minimal Effort
What I tried to do in BatWerk is cut the amount of pre-exercise hassle to a minimum. It's literally open the app and go. You don't have to touch the phone to start the move timers, just tilt the phone or walk to the bat that starts the timer. You don't have to choose anything, there's nothing to think about or plan or ponder, you just do the moves until you've had enough. Simple and effective.
There's a reason why I can do 12 ring sessions a day: the sessions have zero setup and zero teardown, it's all useful moves and motivation. And a session doesn't heat you up enough to make you sweat a lot, even in the subtropical summer here, so they don't require changing clothes and showering. I'm doing them standing next to my desk. I'm doing them sitting in the bus. In the elevator. A while back I wanted to get out of bed faster so I did moves after I woke up, still lying in bed.
The design goal for the ring sessions is to get you moving enough to get you energized, but not so intense that you'd get sweaty. After doing a session, you should feel like "Yeah! Time to work!" and not "Wow, that was great, I need a rest now." If I manage to keep up a decent pace of rings over the day, I don't really get the post-lunch tiredness or the 4 o'clock sleepiness. When I manage to couple that with regular use of the task mode in the app, todo lists fly by.
A Good Day Every Day
In a way, what I'm trying to do here is Monte Carlo integration of a good day. You start the day at zero, then do random activity over the day and have completed a full successful day at the end of it. Too much routine gets boring and reduces performance through lack of motivation, too little routine makes it difficult to get the necessary things done. So you want something that creates maximum structure and impact with high motivation and high interest.
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