Or How to Gamify Good Behaviour

Being a parent in the digital age is hard. To be honest, not like it wasn’t hard before, but digital adds another difficulty level. Now, we have to protect children from all shades of madness online (where all their favourite entertainment now mostly reside). All it takes a one wrong click on a youtube link to go down a rabbit hole of weirdness and things that could scar impressionable minds fairly easily.

Beyond that, there’s the issue around limiting screen time, even if it’s safe stuff, there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing. Now, we’ve come into the longest school holiday season in the year. The challenge for most parents is how to keep their children productively engaged, without losing their minds. First thought that comes to mind for most would be summer school. However with all that’s happened this year, I’m not sure we’ll be able to make a reasonable budget for that (x 3) and pretty sure we’re not alone in this. Besides, you can only outsource so much parenting, final responsibility still rests with you (with great power, bla bla bla).

So this year, drawing from years of game design experience, I changed the rules a bit and created a gamification based points system for the little ones. One of the critical aspects of successful game design in today’s world is the implementation of an effective (balanced) in-game economy. Simply put, what we’ve done is create a system where they can earn points for good behaviour and lose points for bad behaviour. Earned points can be redeemed for treats, items on a wish list, and also basic things like watching tv, but there’s a cap on the number of hours that can be spent on this activity on any given day. Any violation of these rules then cost them points.

My objective in doing this was to implement an effective system for promoting good behaviour without having to prompt (or yell) instructions to the kids. Another motivation would be to teach delayed gratification and attach consequences to actions in a wholesome and loving way.

N.B. This is one of many experiment(s) in my journey as a parent. Putting it out there in the hopes that it would be helpful for others as well. ATM the results are looking very interesting. Perhaps, I’ll do a follow up and share results from this experience.