Figuring Out What Works: Gamifying Writing

Now I know what you’re thinking: You’re thinking that just yesterday, I wrote that quantifying was bad, and you’re right. I did! But is there a little gray area to work with? Let’s find out.

People “gamify” writing in many ways. For example, keeping track of wordcounts is one example I threw under the bus. It’s also quite possible to think of the Amazon algorithm, the 20 Books to 50k group, or monetary marketing results as games you can “play to win”. These examples are quantitative.

NaNoWriMo is another quantitative example of gamified writing.

Some writers delight in creating stories based on random elements (such as through daily story prompts), while others enjoy writing collaboratively, such as posting the next part of an ongoing story in a web forum where many contributors are involved. These examples gamify writing, too. But they are not quantitative.

Some even play out their stories using pen and paper RPG mechanics (all-too-common with fantasy novels, but not my style), and some even turn their story world into a game world itself (LitRPG).

The above examples generally don’t work for me. I’ve tried collabs, story prompts, wordcount trackers, and even ran an alternative to NanoWriMo. I’m glad I gave these a try, but ultimately, they didn’t keep me writing.

Critique circles, on the other hand, do work for me. Not only can I handle criticism well, but I enjoy working with a partner, and I enjoy editing much more than I do writing. Some of my best progress has happened while doing weekly exchanges with a crit partner.

Scribophile.com is a critique exchange gamifier that has worked well for me in the past. It requires the writer to edit manuscripts from other contributors to earn points, which can then be spent making your own works available for critique. In theory, this setup should work well.

But it gets lopsided because it’s not a one-for-one ratio, or even two-for-one. You have to edit three or four works before you’ve farmed enough points to post a single work of your own, and works are limited to 5,000 words or less.

It’s not uncommon to have to post a short story in two parts, which means one must do in-depth edits for seven or eight works from other members just to make one of your own short stories available for critique.

By the time you’ve posted an entire novel, you’ve likely put as much work into edits as you have actually writing your novel. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective. It certainly gives you a whole lot more editing experience, and lets you read and interact with many authors at various skill levels.

I did find this website rewarding, but it’s not for everyone, and it’s begun to wear thin on me. I ended up giving a lot more to the community than I got out of it–even as a paying member–and there were definitely bottom-feeders who did low-quality “drive-by” reviews just to farm points. I also got a lot of “This isn’t my genre BUT…” style critiques.

Now I don’t mind putting in hard work, but I certainly don’t want to come away from the whole experience feeling used, especially if I’m paying for the privilege.

I’d much rather be in a small, tight-knit community that focuses on fantasy writing. You’d think that such a group would be easy to find, but no. Groups that feature fantasy often lump it in with sci-fi and horror, despite all three being very different experiences with different core audiences.

How about a local writing community or club that writes fiction? Maybe they were easy to find 30+ years ago, but not today. As much as I wish things were different, the days of groups like The Inklings are long gone, at least in my neck of the woods. I’ve been checking flyers in pubs and colleges for decades. No luck.

Just think. A whole city, and barely any writers who actually want to meet in real life. It’s kind of sad. You may be thinking I should start my own writing group. Well, I have. But that’s a story for another day.

Another gamified writing website that I had very high hopes for was 4thewords.com. You can create a character, level up, earn gold, and buy swag for your avatar to wear. You can “slay monsters” that have built-in timers and wordcount goals, and they can even be tied to quests and drop rare loot. This website was practically made for me! I love RPGs, I love writing, so what could possibly go wrong?

…How about losing over a week’s worth of work during a particularly productive flow state?

That’s right. I had a polished, completed chapter in a post-edited, ready-to-critique state. I wrote like I was possessed for over a week, trusting the little green blinking orb in the lower-right corner of their website that promised my work was being backed up every few seconds or so.

I had gotten in the habit of copying and pasting everything I typed on their site in order to archive it. But this time? Well, I intended to backup what I was typing after it was finished. I grew to trust that little green light too much, it seems, figuring it would go red or notify me if there were any problems syncing.

Imagine my shock when I finally clicked in there to copy/paste my work, only to get booted out and forced to a login screen. Once I was logged back in, everything I’d written was gone and had reverted back to its sloppy “pre-writing notes” state from weeks before.

I did my best working with the 4thewords staff. They dragged me along with false hope for an additional week or two before it became abundantly clear they hadn’t saved anything. I was LIVID.

Even going back to the 90s, I was a firm believer in diligently backing up all my work. And now, to this day, I refuse to trust any website that claims it has “saved” my writing. Needless to say, 4thewords has lost me as a customer. Permanently.

I’ve been searching for an alternative ever since, but nothing similar has risen to take its place.

Then, somewhere along the line, 4thewords lost their focus on making the writer experience fun in order to step into the political arena. Why? I have no idea. No one actually cares what 4thewords in particular thinks about current events, do they? Or at least, they shouldn’t. NaNoWriMo pulled the same crap. I miss the more innocent days when companies like this stayed focused on writers and writing, and didn’t feel the need to rub everyone’s noses in their political opinions.

Long story short, I had to get over myself and rewrite the entire chapter from scratch. It wasn’t easy, and these things never turn out as good the second time. Losing real, tangible progress like this is one of the most soul-crushing momentum killers out there. The wound still festers, because it’s still the last chapter I ever finished for Five Rings.

So when an author tells me their work was lost, especially an entire novel, my heart goes out to them. I got a taste of how bad this can sting, and that was enough for me. Losing even small amounts of work can be demoralizing. And none of us are immune. It can affect even those who are the most tech-savvy and diligent about backing up their work.

I think that about covers my experiences with gamification, and I intend to dabble with it more in the future. Some methods worked very well for me, while others didn’t work well at all. I wish some of these experiences had panned out better *cough4thewords*, but fun little gimmicks like this tend to at least get some productivity out of me, and a little bit of progress is always preferable to none.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to copy/paste this, THEN click “Save draft”.