🌲 The Best "Gamified X" App is a GAME

Pokémon Go has done more for my overall productivity than any number of attempts to make something like Habitica work for me.

In a long-ago discussion about teaching kids to read, a friend of mine mentioned that he taught both of his kids to read using (warning: affiliate link incoming!) Zelda: Breath of the Wild¹. His overall point was that most edutainment is garbage, and the best ‘educational games’ are ‘games that can be leveraged to educate.’ I tend to agree; back when I was still teaching world history, parents would sometimes ask what supplemental materials they should get for their kids to learn the subject better. My answer was always: whichever version of Civilization they could most easily afford (although Civ VI is best for this purpose).

Education software being pretty terrible is one of the (many) reasons I left the profession. My experiences as a mom poking around edutainment software — everything from DuoABC to the app my son’s chess club encourages — have done nothing to disprove my friend’s point: games designed as games by game designers tend to be orders of magnitude better than lessons gussied up in a thin veneer of cartoony bubble-fonts and high-pitched voices with lootbox mechanics to provide the occasional dopamine hit.

In fact, my experiences with productivity software makes me think the same holds true for adults. Pokémon Go has done more for my overall productivity than any number of attempts to make something like Habitica work for me.

Ever since I quit teaching, I’ve had trouble with exercising. Pregnancy complications haven’t helped matters at all, of course. There’s also a counterproductive part of my brain that likes to insist that if I’m at my desk, I’m working, but if I’m out walking around or doing yoga or lifting weights, I’m slacking off. Unfortunately, after a couple of hours of working at my desk, “sitting at my desk” ends up being all I really can do — I’ve caught myself just staring at the screen, hitting refresh on some unimportant thing, because my brain is too mushy to start the next big thing.

Taking a break fixes that, but sometimes taking a break feels like being lazy.

The reality is that on days I go for walks and lift weights and do yoga, I get more done. I’m less tired, I don’t need a mid-afternoon nap, and my brain is sharper. Taking an iron supplement helped as well, but I’ve vastly improved my exercise habits this year. As I mentioned back in January, ignoring the metrics and taking a “don’t think about it, just do it” approach has really helped with that.

Pokémon Go — and the new breakfast place that’s within casual walking distance of my house — has helped even more.

When Pokémon Go came out back in 2016, I — along with like 25 million other people — loaded it up on my phone, got out of the house, went for more walks, met people in community spaces, experienced extremely fast battery drain and phone overheating, and eventually fell out of the habit of playing.

I am, as I’ve mentioned before, very bad at habits — but I was also teaching full time, which is a pretty physical job if you float between classrooms and believe in the value of proximity for classroom management (which is to say; I walked around my classroom a lot and didn’t really need any nudges to walk).

I picked it up again after I had kids and stopped working, but not because I wanted an app to help nudge me to go for walks. No, the reason I picked it up again was because I was spending more time at parks, walking in the woods, and kept getting lost.

Pokémon Go has incredibly good maps for walking. I opened up the app because I was lost — and it genuinely helped me orient, figure out where I was, and get moving in the right direction along the trail. Most map apps — like Google’s — are optimized for cars and commuting — walking paths tend to be an afterthought, and the “street view” isn’t nearly as useful as the pokéstops for orienting using landmarks and points of interest. I was once out hiking with Annie Normal (who does not love the wood as I do) and we got a little turned around. I whipped out Pokémon Go, found the nearest pokéstop on the nice big map with the incredibly clear UI so simple a five year old can figure it out, and we were fine.

And speaking of points of interest, Pokémon Go makes visiting new places really fun. When I was in Montana for work, the pokéstop descriptions taught me a lot about the towns I stopped in for food. When I visited Harpers Ferry with my son (a few weeks after I went with my husband for our anniversary), we both enjoyed the scavenger hunt element of matching real-world locations to the photos in the pokéstop spinner. Here’s a pixelated version of what I mean —

— but even aside from the joy of the hunt, being allowed to play Pokémon Go (his only phone game) motivates my son to go for walks with me. He’ll happily trudge 3-4 miles for the opportunity to take over a gym or two, which is <10 minutes of screen-open gameplay. He’s pretty much memorized the type charts at this point, after studying a one-sheet printout on the way to school — doggedly, for weeks. We got an auto-catch device (which was much cheaper last year) for Christmas so we can spin pokéstops and catch pokémon while we walk without needing to take the phone out unless we’re lost or looking for a nearby battle to participate in.

Apps like Strava are great for tracking your runs. They clearly work for lots of people; Strava has millions of active users (though it’s hard to be sure how many monthly active users an app actually has), including several of my friends. I don’t use it because I don’t (can’t) run, and don’t really find data about my (lack of) progress motivating. At least, not when that’s all it is.

Pokémon Go also keeps track of how much I’ve walked in a week — I have a little widget on my home screen. There’s a reward if I ping 5km or 25km (or 50km, lol) in a week. I hit 25km sometimes. But walking also hatches eggs; there’s a “free” 1km egg, along with 2km, 5km, 7km, 10km, and 12km eggs. You can also earn hearts by walking 2km with a buddy pokemon on the map, and candy every 5km — which lets you make your pokemon more powerful.

And this is just one subset of the many mechanics Pokémon has, because it is a game. It is designed to appeal to many the different preferences that gamers have, in the same way that Minecraft can be a creative sandbox block design game, or a defeat-the-dragon adventure game, or a social shared-project game, etc. The very best games appeal to lots of different gameplay preferences.

Enjoy the social group aspect of gaming? The best Pokémon Go raid monsters require a team to defeat. Pokémon trades require in-person meetups as well as long-term investment in gift-giving — 88 days to get the best luck in trades.

Enjoy collecting? Several of my pokémon (like the starmie I caught after a trip in a small 4-seater plane piloted by a friend) bring back fond memories. The lady in the next neighborhood enjoys raids, but she collects shinies. We met this Halloween when I saw her plushie collection and asked if she ever did the nearby route — routes are another way Pokémon Go incentivizes walking. Users submit good, safe walking paths of varying lengths, which begin and end at a pokéstop. There’s always a description, with details on length and elevation.

Unlike most dedicated hiking apps, some of these routes go through community parks in urban and suburban areas — which means they’re more accessible to working moms like me. In general, Pokémon Go just has more data about good places to walk; in Harpers Ferry for example, there’s an offshoot of the Appalachian Trail that cuts though a graveyard and back to town. It was built by a local Eagle scout, who led a project to add stone stairs to a dicey part of the path. It isn’t marked at all on Google Maps, but Pokémon Go got me back to my destination much more quickly than Google Maps would have, because it actually had the cut-through recorded.

There are a thousand other reasons I think Pokémon Go is a fantastic game. I especially like that it offers little dopamine hits throughout the day that don’t suck me in — the actions tend to be a quick battle here, catch a pokémon there, I should head to a gym now then go home. I don’t find it addictive the way something like Tetris or Candy Crush or even turn-based games like Civilization encourage constant play. It’s casual, which is perfect for someone like me — a busy working mom who likes to go for walks.

Fundamentally, powerhouse companies like Niantic, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Company know how to make a good game. They are The Game Experts. They have been making world-class games for decades. People (kids, yes — but also adults) enjoy games. Games are, like stories, fundamental to how the human brain learns.

My brain learns to exercise better when it’s by dint of games, not spreadsheets. Pokémon Go encourages me to walk and chat with the neighbors, and those things help make me get more done because they boost my energy and my mood.

By that standard, Pokémon Go is my favorite of the “productivity” apps on my phone.

What’s yours?

1. My husband has wanted to play Zelda:BotW since it came out, but we haven’t really had a good set-up for it. Our youngest will be 2.5 at Christmas, so we finally got a TV for family room and plan to pick up a console. I’ve been enjoying evening family Cosmic Kids yoga storytime, but I’m looking forward to when my husband gets to enjoy the new TV too :P