Defeat The Evil Lord of Laziness With EpicWin

Just a little more, you say, as you grind your way toward that achievement. Meanwhile, your fridge needs milk, your clothes need washing, and you still haven’t gotten to that book you said you’d make time for this year. Sound familiar? It’s ridiculous that we go so out of our way to complete menial tasks digitally–Farmville and Animal Crossing players, I’m looking at you–but most of us are incapable of giving the same diligence to real-life objectives.

But who can resist that gaming drug, those experience points, those platinum trophies? Enter EpicWin.

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It’s not just any to-do list: it ties in your real-world progress with to a character’s RPG adventure. This sets it apart from other to-do list apps which grant you an arbitrary number of points which don’t really go toward anything.

“There’s a trend at the moment, particularly at advertising companies, to put high scores on to everything, says Crowle, co-creator.It’s a way to make web content more sticky and bring people back. It works to a point – particularly at the moment because it’s quite new. But if it’s just a score there’s no real narrative to it. What RPGs do well is take high scores and apply them to a story. Levelling up doesn’t stop with the number 20 – it means you look a certain way and you’ve had certain experiences to get to that point. So EpicWin brings a bit of that delight and surprise we get from videogames and transports it into something which enables you to be a bit more productive. You don’t always have time for an 80-hour RPG – but if you blend it with your life then you’ve got time to have an 80-year RPG.”

Tak Fun elaborates on this, When you cross off a chore and something nice happens, you link the two together and you want to go back and do more, says Fung. There’s a lot of loot you can collect, and you can see if you’re missing the Horn of Whatever; you want to keep on doing more stuff to get that next item. With an RPG you can bring in character and story and turn it into something cohesive.

Of course, this can’t quite mimic a game’s usual mechanics in full. For example, it’s not possible to “lose” or “die” in EpicWin. But, if that’s the case, what’s stopping people from simply making up stuff to input so that the game keeps progressing? EpicWin starts intervening in that case, making it harder for you to progress. Still, the fact that cheating is possible may prove to be a problem  for the application’s usefulness: we like spending countless hours completing mindless tasks, for crying out loud! I don’t think it’s beyond people to just input infinite fake tasks if it means the game can elongate their e-peen, even though at that point it becomes an exercise in cheating oneself.

Still, if you’d like to give self-improvement another go, you might want to head down to the app store and purchase EpicWin for 2.99. Hey, in the end, it doesn’t matter how you motivate yourself, as long as it gets things done. Plus, it seems as if there’s going to be loot in it for you…and who isn’t obsessive about loot?