I woke really early this morning. I think it’s because of the two itches. One is the physical poison oak itch; the other is the brain wondering where the surrogate ego went and why we didn’t scratch that itch last night.
I think I need to build myself a reward system, sort of a submission leveling game. MMORPGs are made up of various quests. The quests are normally something along the lines of collecting a certain number of items for a non-player character in the game. “Oi, you, go fetch me five pig ears from the Hellish Boars of Antioch and I’ll give you a stick with a shiny bit on the end!” So you take your little avatar, run out to some field where Hellish Boars of Antioch are out rummaging around and you hit them with your not so shiny stick until you have your five pig ears. Go back to the guy and get your shiny stick and a few points to help you level and then you move on to the next shinier stick.
This is pretty much the basis for all MMORPGs. Sure, they get more interesting and there can be a story behind the killing of the Hellish Boars of Antioch that normally has something to do with the great Unholy War of the End of Times Holy War, but most of the time the story is superficial to the getting of the latest and greatest shiny stick. Because you want to be able to run around with all the other avatars showing off how great your shiny stick looks. It looks even better if you stand in the middle of town wearing nothing but said shiny stick and dancing without clothes or armor on. That seems to be the soul driving force of many MMORPG players. And honestly, the whole thing is a bit of fun. Waste of time? Yes, of course, but a lot of fun things are complete wastes of time. Think of most of your dates from high school and your early twenties. See what I mean?
Here’s a clue. If you’re consuming something, you’re probably wasting time. If you’re producing, there’s a good chance you aren’t. Hence the negative connotation that goes along with the consumer driven society, economy, or whatever. We tend to pick fun over work. Fun is easy for us to get. Credit is cheap and all that good stuff that is causing our entire world to fail right now, but that’s nothing I care to even talk about. We are the MMORPG generation. Even if you aren’t playing an MMORPG on the computer, you’re probably playing one in real life. Go sell X number of widgets and I’ll give you a paycheck and you can go buy a new shiny stick. However, leveling is much harder and getting the shiny sticks isn’t as easy.
Well, knowing that I myself am susceptible to this shiny stick addiction, I’ve decided to start using it in my real life as a way to motivate me from being a consumer to a producer. Because outside forces can help this, but aren’t guaranteed to, it falls to me to set new shiny stick type goals, create my quests, and have some sort of measurable leveling strategy. Something akin to getting a nice new shiny every five pounds lost or so many leveling points for each submission sent to a particular magazine. These are traceable gains. These are also gains I can set reward levels for.
Now I just need to think up some good rewards. And a cool sort of application to go along with this new game.