App Worthy: Epic Win.

Profile.

Hi. My name is Matthew, known properly as Matthew of Libraricus, and I'm a Level 2 Stooping Dwarven Nerd-Do-Well.

My hobbies include felling ogres, emptying casks of mead, and crafting masterpieces from wrought iron.

I recently earned 300 experience points for conquering a mountain of filthy laundry.

Yeah. I'm pretty awesome. You're jealous. Aren't you?

I should also mention that I recently came across the Epic Win app during one of my semi-weekly hunts for cool video game apps  and couldn't resist paying the $2.99 to "level-up my life".

The Epic Win app can help you level-up your life by making a game out of the typical, dreaded, and/or mundane everyday tasks you can't avoid. It's gamification and it's working for me, so I thought it was worth sharing in case it could work for you, too.

Creating a new quest.

The premise is deceptively simple. Create quests and set experience points based on "epicness" of the task at hand. If it's a pretty simple job to overcome, maybe you'll assign the quest 50 epicness points. Much more dreaded or challenging tasks can be assigned more epicness points. Select a feat (strength, stamina, intellect, social, or spirit) to pair with the quest and then determine when and how often the task should repeat. From there, it's as simple as holding yourself accountable for completing the tasks and rewarding yourself for a job well done. The game also awards loot as epicness points are accumulated. For example, I recently attained the Ugly Blunt Axe of Function Over Form.

And, no. You can't borrow it. You'll just have to earn one for yourself.

By the way, my quests currently include:

• Blog it, Dagnabbit! (to remind me to create a blog entry semiweekly)
• Journey of the Blue Bin. (to collect and take out the recycling)
• Quest of the Library Card. (to take my son to the public library to check out new materials)
• Wrinkled Hands. Blessed Dish Cleanliness. (to incentivize washing the dishes)
• Path of the Smelly Garbage Bags. (to collect and take out the trash)
• Mountains of Filthy Lanudry. (to collect, wash, dry, and fold our family's laundry)

Quests regenerate based on settings.

Because you create the quests, this could easily be an app for home or professional use. Imagine if you used it with a class of students and tasks included:

• a percentage of students passing a weekly math quiz
• remembering to turn off the lights ( a certain number of times each week) when the class leaves the room to go to lunch, related arts, etc.
• a number of consecutive days where all homework was turned in

The idea being that if the class worked as a cohesive group, the avatar could level up through the collective works of the individuals. Two neighboring classes could compete to level up their character through the same challenges. It could be EPIC!

Here's a cool video of the Epic Win app for further convincing or to preview with a bunch of students.

Definitely app worthy.