Snap! The Job's a Game: The Gamification of Difficult Tasks

Bryan Young
June 12, 2024 | 3 min read

“In every job that must be done, there’s an element of fun,” Mary Poppins once wisely counseled Jane and Michael Banks. “You find the fun and SNAP! The job’s a game!”

The same is true for any task you're avoiding. Including writing.

There is a lot of powerful neurochemistry that's unleashed by turning tasks into a game. It's called "gamification," and there's a reason the most successful apps of today use it.

How many times has that sad little Duolingo owl shamed you into continuing your daily learning streak? Who among us hasn't gotten out of bed at 11:59 p.m. to reach their step count goal?

The same methods work for writing, too. It's just a matter of implementing them into your own writing process.

 

Gamification for Writers

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and its daily word trackers first showed me how powerful it was to record and track data on my writing progress. It kept me extremely motivated throughout the long process of writing a book. And being able to see the task of writing as a friendly competition with my friends worked even better.

But that was only active for the month of November. How could I keep it going all year-round?

Enter Freewrite.

Postbox is the name of Freewrite's web app that backs up your work to the cloud and syncs with other third-party cloud services. The best part about Postbox? It shows you some powerful writing stats!

By setting up a Postbox profile, you get access to a unique URL that serves as a home for your Freewrite stats and achievements. Things like word count are tracked automatically, and you earn badges for hitting certain milestones.

With my public Postbox profile, you can always keep me accountable. I’m currently working hard to get my 500,000 words badge. I’m well over 400,000 now, so I should hit it this year, easy.

Gamifying last year's NaNoWriMo with other Freewrite users is what pushed me to win the Freewrite leaderboard — I was the writer with the top word count among Freewrite users in November!

 

Picking Your Stats

Different stats will inspire different writers. Here are a few that work for me:

1. Word Count

Your Postbox Profile keeps track of your daily word count written on Freewrite and displays it in a handy graph. I've taken this method even farther in order to keep track of all of my writing across all platforms — from my Freewrite to my Smith-Corona 2200, my computer, and even pen and paper.

My writing group and I made our own spreadsheets to keep track of our daily, monthly, and yearly word counts against each other, but also keep track of our daily writing streaks.

2. Streak

This is the same principle the Duolingo owl uses to inspire (and terrify) users.

I’m the sort of writer who feels like working on my writing every day is a great way to keep up my momentum and to that end, keeping track of my streak gamifies it in a way that keeps me on task.

Watching my streak has been so effective for me that as I write this, I am on day 3,261 in a row of writing. That means I started in July 2015 or so and haven’t stopped.

Being able to watch that number tick up every day has kept me writing through vacations, surgeries, illnesses, hospital visits, holidays — you name it.

 

Find Your Motivation

In that nine years of daily writing, I’ve written millions of words, dozens of books, thousands of articles, and more. Gamification works for me. For others, it doesn’t work like that, and there’s no shame in that.

What you need to do is find what works for you.

Like Mary Poppins said: Find that element of fun and SNAP! Your writing will be a game. Easy.

 

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But what if, in the future, your choice had larger implications on the state of literature as a whole?

This is the question that’s being raised from a new study by the University of Exeter Business School: If you could use AI to improve your own writing, at the expense of the overall literary experience, would you?

Let’s explore some context before you answer.

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The 2024 study recruited 293 writers to write an eight-sentence “micro” story. The participants were split into three groups:

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Then, 600 evaluators judged how creative these short stories were. The results confirmed a widely accepted idea but also offered a few surprising findings.

Prompts from AI Can Jumpstart the Creative Process

Right off the bat, the reviewers rated the AI-guided stories as being more original, better written, and more enjoyable to read. (Interesting to note that they did not find them funnier than the fully human-inspired stories.)

This actually isn’t that surprising. Most writers know the “blank page dread” at the beginning of a project. Even as I write this, I can’t help but wonder, “If I had been tasked with writing an eight-sentence story, what the heck would I have written about?”

Many writers share this sense of needing to pick the “right” story to tell. And that uniquely human concept of perfectionism can end up actually inhibiting our creative process.

A prompt, then, can help us quickly clear this mental hurdle. To test this, I’ll give you one, courtesy of ChatGPT: “Write a story about a teenager who discovers a mysterious journal that reveals hidden secrets about their town, leading them on an unexpected adventure to uncover the truth.”

Can you feel your creative juices flowing already?

Since its release, AI has been celebrated for its ability to assist in idea generation; and this study confirms how effective using artificial intelligence in this way can be for writers — some, it seems, more than others.

AI-Generated Ideas Helped Less Creative Writers More

It doesn’t feel great to judge a writer’s creative prowess, but for this study, researchers needed to do just that. Prior to writing their short stories, the writers took a test to measure their creativity.

Researchers found that those considered less creative did substantially better when given AI-generated ideas — to the point where getting the full five ideas from AI “effectively equalizes the creativity scores across less and more creative writers.”

This isn’t the case just for writing. Another study by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship WZ also found that AI tools most benefit employees with weaker skills.

So is AI leveling the playing field between okay and great writers? It seems it may be. But before we lament, there’s one more finding that proves using AI isn’t all perks.

AI-Aided Stories Were More Similar — And Needed to Be Credited

The researchers took a step back to look at all the AI-supported stories collectively. And what did they find?

The AI-assisted stories were more similar as a whole, compared to the fully human-written stories.

Additionally, when reviewers were told that a story was enhanced by an AI idea, they “imposed an ownership penalty of at least 25%,” even indicating that “the content creators, on which the models were based, should be compensated.”

This leads us to that all-important question about AI-assisted work: who owns the content?

According to Originality.AI, an AI and plagiarism detector, “When there’s a combination of AI and human-generated elements, the human elements may receive copyright protection if they meet the requirements.”

So right now, if a writer uses AI to generate ideas — but writes the content themselves — they retain rights to the work.

However, Originality.AI even admits that “the legal system is having a hard time keeping up” with the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. Time will only tell what AI regulations will look like in a few years.

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The researchers from the University of Exeter Business School study raise an interesting point about what the future landscape for writers may look like. If droves of authors begin using AI to come up with ideas, we may end up with a lot of well-written yet dime-a-dozen stories.

So will human beings choose the easier, but less diverse, path? Or will we stick to fighting through writer’s block armed with nothing but our own brain?

Or, a third option: can we somehow learn to harness AI to supercharge our writing process without sacrificing the wholly unique creativity that infuses human creation?

That’s one question that even ChatGPT can’t answer.

Editor's Note: Artificial intelligence may have already transformed writing, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be in control of your own words. Read Astrohaus Founder Adam Leeb's statement on AI and privacy.

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