Habitica

I came across this game a while ago, and didn't find it particularly interesting at the time. A friend recently reintroduced it to me, and I realised the potential of the game.

Habitica is a game that turns all your day to day tasks into quests. For completing quests, you earn gold, loot and experience. You can level up your character, purchase better gear, and battle monsters. The game is essentially a motivational tool, encouraging people to complete their work.

This game would be incredibly useful for use in classrooms or youth sessions, to encourage good behaviour. Each young person or team of people could have a character, gaining bonuses for good behaviour, and deductions for bad. A problem with the game, is that there is no way to monitor a player's task completion, and requires the player to be honest when marking tasks as complete. This can be easily be solved by only allowing leaders access to the account, letting them control when they add or deduct points. The young people would be allowed to choose their purchase options, class and enemies to battle, along with character appearance, pets, and mounts. For teams of young people, they could be gathered into a party, encouraging teamwork, and the result of battles depends on the effort of all in the party.

I may attempt to use this game with a group of young people, and see if it has a positive influence on their behaviour. As well as digital rewards, physical rewards could be given to those with the best score after a certain timeframe.