Let’s face it, everyday quests in our real lives are not as exciting or rewarding as when we achieve them in a game. But why? For starters, no one pats on you on the back for going to the dry cleaners, there’s no experience points, no levelling up and no epic wins.
The Sims is a great example of this, a game where taking trips to the grocery store and ensuring you’ve had enough sleep for work is considered exciting gameplay but doing it in real life.. well, usually sucks.
Epic Wins combines gaming with productivity and turns your to-do lists and painstaking tasks into quests of courage and strength, with the possibility to earn epic wins. Sweet! The adventure begins by choosing one of the animated characters then inputting an errand or a to-do list. Users receive experience points +100 for anything they do, walking the dog just became an amazing feat of stamina offering 300 epicness points, with the ability to level up and earn loot for overcoming such a daring adventure.
It’s up to you how much strength it takes to talk to mom on the phone. Users are able to set the amount of epicness points, how much an errand is worth and what type of quest they’re on; strength, stamina, intellect, social or spirit.
The profile and quest map screen of the hero (you) displays your level of greatness, the quest-type experience points and the progress of the user’s journey to loot badges.
It still champions features found in any good to-do list app. Users can also set the due date and reoccurring tasks although there’s one drawback, it doesn’t support the time of day it’s due nor does it send a push notification reminder.
The concept of this app reminds me of the Ted Talk with the brilliant game designer Jane McGonigal who’s changing and solving real-world problems through gaming. Her goal is to make the world as easy and exciting to save in real life as it is in games by providing props, skills points and epic wins.
Obviously Epic Win (the app) won’t solve world problems but it may motivate gamers to save their own butts and get more stuff done.
Get it (iTunes link) $2.99 available for iPhone, iPod touch & iPad
(source: found app on Tech Arcade )
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This is too awesome. Installing it now for my ipod. They’d better come up with an Android version; hopefully that’s on their list of epic quests and worth a lot of epicness points!
Cool thing is someone will rip this idea for Android, but the app will be free.
Hmm…I like it. Would be great if they skinned the app w/ a kids version…would be great to encourage homework and chores.
One thing though — I really hate when developers claim that their app is “available for iPhone, iPod touch & iPad” but then there really isn’t an iPad version of the app in the store…!
((
And no, using the 2x button to magnify an iPhone app doesn’t count…!
“The Sims is a great example of this, a game where taking trips to the grocery store and ensuring you’ve had enough sleep for work is considered exciting gameplay”
Only if you’re missing the sanity (Y) chromosome.
I’m torn on this app. I like the gaming aspect of getting rewards and experience for my to-do lists. Hence why I like checking in at locations. The problem for me is that it’s become app overload. I maintain a To-do list in Things on my Mac/iPhone/iPad. Having to duplicate my list in another app just takes time as well as me remembering to check it.
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