I've now spent roughly a week using Superbetter after a traumatic injury I sustained in May, and I'm coming to understand the game mechanic a little better. In my last post I detailed the seven missions that I needed to complete in order to set up my "secret headquarters." In this entry, I'll share some details about how I've been using the game, as well as some information about my secret lab, and about the achievement and resilience scores.

First and foremost, Superbetter has been helpful. Logging into it every day keeps me mindful of things that I need to be working on. A lot of my goals are daily or several times weekly goals that force me to be more social and active, and they have been a net positive. 

In addition to quests that I set for myself, my allies are able to set quests for me. My wife, Sarah, has been consistently setting for me reachable, but reasonably challenging quests that have been very helpful in playing the game. They haven't necessarily been oriented on my physical health, more they've just been attempts to keep me being creative and engaged.

Co-producer PJ Vogt, on the other hand, has given me exactly one quest in the week I've been using Superbetter, which was to smile at a stranger on the street. In New York City that's as likely to get you punched in the face as anything. It doesn't help that OTM senior producer Katya Rogers says that I look like a serial killer when I smile.

Making everyday experiences gameful (as Jane McGonigal would say) requires creating a framework by which to track progress. Superbetter does that by both creating heroes and villains and quests. But it also has a couple of other scorekeeping components called "resilience" and "achievements." Unfortunately, I've had difficulty connecting with both of these components of the game.

Your resilience score increases as you complete quests and use power-ups. As you can see, mine is currently 79. My problem is that I feel like I can't get excited about increasing my resilience score, because I'm not entirely sure what it's measuring. I just continue to accrue points. It's not 79 resilience points out of a thousand or a million. It's just a number floating in space. Most videogames have long since done away with point scores, and even in the old days when point scores were more popular, games would typically show you how your score stacked up against your friends' scores. I feel like I would be more invested in the resilience score if I could pit myself against other people.

Achievements are similarly difficult for me, because they are so open ended. If you are a stranger to the world of games, Achievements are sort of like a trophy case of things you've done in a game. Team Fortress 2, one of my favorite video games of all time, has tremendous replay value precisely because there are numerous achievements. For example, did you know that I'm a spymaster?

For me, part of what makes achievements a particularly gameful and fun part of the Team Fortress experience is that they are finite. While there are a ton of them (379, to be exact), the game allows you to view a list of all possible achievements as well as the ones that you have attained (I have 89 out of 379, in case you were wondering) giving you something to strive for.

Superbetter doles out achievements, but it doesn't give you any way to check the achievements you have yet to unlock. Additionally, your allies can bestow achievements upon you at their leisure. While this improves the social component of the game, for me it makes the achievement aspect less valuable, because the achievements are essentially infinite.

Your secret lab is yet another way to track your progress over the course of the game by charting your feelings over the course of your attempt to reach an epic win. There are a number of metrics that it uses, and it will plot your emotional state and chart it over the course of the epic win. I haven't been using this aspect of the game enough for it to give me detailed information, but it charts progress over time and gives you specific milestones in terms of emotional and physical state, and allows you to overlay quests and resilience score.

Superbetter's strength lies in constantly making me reassess my emotional state both by myself and by checking in with my allies, and this is just another example of how it helps you do so. 

Since the social aspect of this game is so important (and since one of my allies leaves so much to be desired), I wanted to crowdsource a little help with my epic win. I'm asking you, our listeners to help me reach my epic win by becoming an ally. As an ally, you can assign me quests, give me achievements, and generally keep in contact over the course of my progress. Additionally, you can create your own secret headquarters. If you are interested, please email me at agoldman@wnyc.org. The first 10 people to email me will be invited to become my ally in my quest to be superbetter. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

(Follow the links for other superbetter articles: Segment from September 30th episode of On the Media; Entry 1; Entry #3; Entry #4; Entry #5; Entry 6; Entry 7; Entry 8)