Most people who try to run their life as an RPG go through the same arc. They make a spreadsheet, a Notion board or a list of quests in an app. Push-ups are worth 10 XP, a chapter read is worth 20, and a level-up comes every 500. The first week is great. By the third, the sheet hasn't been opened in days.
It's easy to blame discipline for that. The research on why games hold us points somewhere else: most life RPGs copy the parts of a game that are easiest to build and leave out the parts that do the work.
What actually pulls you into a game
In 2006, Richard Ryan, Scott Rigby and Andrew Przybylski ran four studies on why people keep playing video games. They didn't find the answer in the points. Players enjoyed a game, and came back to it, when it satisfied three needs from self-determination theory: competence (feeling capable and getting better), autonomy (choosing what to do) and relatedness (connection with other people). In their online survey of multiplayer players, each of the three predicted enjoyment and future play on its own.
Competence, in their account, is fed by challenges pitched just right and by positive feedback, and they expected it to be among the most important things a game gives you.
A level number is a scoreboard. The game is the feeling that you're getting better at something, and the feedback that proves it.
Why XP you give yourself goes flat
In a self-made system, you are the player and the referee. You tick the box, you award the XP, and the system takes your word for it.
Psychology has studied what rewards do to motivation for decades. The best-known summary is a 1999 meta-analysis by Edward Deci, Richard Koestner and Richard Ryan that pooled 128 experiments. Rewards that people expected, and rewards for doing or finishing a task, lowered how much people chose to keep doing the task on their own afterwards. Positive feedback went the other way: it raised both free-choice persistence and how interesting people found the task.
The theory behind that result says any reward has two sides. One is controlling ("do this and you get that"). The other is informational ("this is how well you did"). When the informational side wins, motivation grows. When the controlling side wins, it shrinks.
Those experiments weren't about apps, so this is a reading of them, not a finding: a flat 10 XP for every set of push-ups sits much closer to the controlling side. It arrives whether the set was your best or your worst, so it tells you nothing you didn't already know.
The novelty problem
There is also a plainer reason the first week feels better than the third. In 2014, Juho Hamari, Jonna Koivisto and Harri Sarsa reviewed the empirical studies on gamification published up to then. Their overall answer was yes, gamification has positive effects, but they depend heavily on the context and on the people using it.
They also flagged that some of the effects may not last and could come from a novelty effect, and that most of the experiments ran for too short a time to tell. Points and badges are fun because they're new. A system that runs only on points has nothing left once they aren't.
What lasts: progress you can see
If novelty fades, what's left? Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer have one of the clearest answers. Their team collected nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from more than 200 people working on creative projects in seven companies. The single biggest motivator in those diaries, by far, was making progress in meaningful work. Amabile calls it the progress principle. The 2011 article where they first set it out is called "The Power of Small Wins".
The study was about work, but how they found it is worth noticing. People wrote down, every day, what had happened, and the progress showed up in the record.
So what does a life RPG need?
Put together, the research suggests four things.
- XP that carries information. The score for a session should say how it went: better than your usual, about the same, or lighter. A fixed amount per tick can't do that.
- A standard that is yours. Competence means getting better relative to where you were. A beginner's first 5 km run and a marathoner's easy 5 km run shouldn't earn the same, and shouldn't be measured against each other.
- Pursuits you chose. Autonomy is one of the three needs. The system should track what you care about, from lifting and drawing to cooking or a campaign you run on Fridays, not a preset list of "good habits".
- A record you can look back on. Progress motivates when you can see it. A level number is a summary. The record of what you did, deed by deed, is the proof.
None of these need fancier game mechanics. Most of them need a referee who isn't you.
How the ledger does it
This is the idea Ledger of Deeds is built on. You write down what you did in your own words, and the Judge reads it. It weighs each deed against your own recent work in that pursuit and scores it with a short verdict on what it saw. A vague entry earns little. The same session written up in full earns what it was worth.
Each pursuit keeps its own level and its own record, and the record is the thing you keep. It doesn't solve every part of the research above, and it isn't meant to. It's an answer to the one question a homemade life RPG can't settle on its own: did that count?
Sources
- Ryan, R. M., Rigby, C. S., & Przybylski, A. (2006). The motivational pull of video games: A self-determination theory approach. Motivation and Emotion, 30, 347–363.
- Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627–668.
- Hamari, J., Koivisto, J., & Sarsa, H. (2014). Does gamification work? A literature review of empirical studies on gamification. Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
- Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The power of small wins. Harvard Business Review, May 2011. Study figures from Amabile, T. (2025), The secret to motivating people at work, Global Peter Drucker Forum.