Is life a game ?

Saying “life is a game” seems to encourage you to take life less seriously. But it can also make you take it more seriously by getting you more invested and interested — the way any good game does.
“Scoring points” of any kind has an interesting effect. What gets measured gets managed.

Kids do better in school when it’s treated as a game and scored:

The class and its grading procedure include a number of features modeled on the computer game World of Warcraft, complete with “quests,” “monsters,” and “guilds.” Throughout the semester, the students can compare their standing with that of their classmates and devise a plan to accumulate more experience points. Whenever they do well on their assignments or exams, they earn points rather than traditional grades. When Sheldon introduced this system, he found that his students worked harder and were also more enthusiastic in class. In addition, the new system triggered collaborative behavior among the students and reduced cheating.

 

Want to quit a bad habit? Initially, don’t worry about reducing how often you do it, just monitoring the amount can help a lot.

Behavioral economist H. Rachlin proposes an interesting trick for overcoming the problem of always starting a change tomorrow. When you want to change a behavior, aim to reduce the variability in your behavior, not the behavior itself. He has shown that smokers asked to try to smoke the same number of cigarettes every day gradually decrease their overall smoking— even when they are explicitly told not to try to smoke less. 

 

And becoming happier is no different.

The most powerful psychology technique for increasing happiness is merely to count three things a day you feel thankful for. As M. Seligman, professor at the University of Pennsylvania explains:

Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well. You may use a journal or your computer to write about the events, but it is important that you have a physical record of what you wrote. The three things need not be earthshaking in importance (“ My husband picked up my favorite ice cream for dessert on the way home from work today”), but they can be important (“ My sister just gave birth to a healthy baby boy”). Next to each positive event, answer the question “Why did this happen?”

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