Tag Archives: #games

Join the Gameful Habits Launch Team

June 18, 2021Self-Gamification#booklaunch, #gamefullife, #games, #habits, #OptimistWriter, #selfawareness, #selfgamification, #selfhelp, Ideasvica

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Habits are both visible and invisible threads, sometimes representing and always connecting the projects, activities, tasks, challenges, or anything else we want to master or tackle. — Gameful Habits

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I will soon launch my book called Gameful Habits: How to Turn Your Daily Practices into Fun Games.

Since habits are always present in our lives and (often) minds, I decided to do the following. I invite you to participate actively in the launch of this book. It will be a standalone book in a collection (series) of books I call “Gameful Life.”

You will get:

A review (i.e., free) copy of the book in e-format of your choice (you can choose between epub, mobi, or pdf) as soon as the book is published or even a little earlier (as soon as I submit it to the online shops).

I’ll need your help with (depending on your preference, one or both of) the following:

Spread the word about the book on social media and/or other places (e.g., your blog or per e-mail) by using the marketing materials (visuals and quotes) I will prepare and share with you. You can also post thoughts of your own.
An honest review of the book on Amazon, other online stores online, and/or Goodreads.

Join now:

The book will be published within the coming two, three weeks. I will self-publish it without using a pre-order scheme. So, it will be available as soon as the retailers verify it and make it available for purchase.

Since the publishing date is only two, three, or maybe even less than two weeks away (I only need to make one more read-through), there might be only two handfuls of days (or even less) to join the team. Therefore, don’t wait, join, and learn how to have fun while turning habits into fun games.

Here is the description of the book:

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Description of the Gameful Habits

Turn your daily practices into fun and exciting games.

Many people struggle to motivate themselves to start the day, work on a project, or maintain a healthy or otherwise beneficial habit. They consider many of their daily routines to be a necessary chore that they will never enjoy.

The pioneer of Self-Gamification — a unique approach to turning life into fun games — Victoria Ichizli-Bartels, has discovered another way for herself, and offers this possibility to others by sharing her experiences.

In this unconventional book on habits, Victoria shares the Super Sleeper game she created to ensure she got enough sleep, and how this success was extrapolated to the other habits and daily practices she wanted to develop.

Read Gameful Habits, and you will learn the three skill sets required to succeed in your self-motivational games, i.e. any habits, projects, challenges, tasks, or other activities turned into fun games. These skill sets are:

Seeing yourself, the world around you, and your thought processes non-judgmentally, as an anthropologist would do;
Identifying your dreams and goals, and taking action, one small and effortless step at a time, the kaizen way;
Applying gamification; that is, seeing and treating whatever you are up to like a game, and learning to appreciate every step on the way with gameful rewards.

These skill sets, which you can easily put into practice immediately — along with the awareness that when you turn your life into fun games, you are both the player and the designer of these games — will help you turn happiness into a lifestyle, and health and other beneficial practices into exciting games that you can’t wait to design, play, and continue developing.

Join here:

To join, please send me an e-mail to vib@optimistwriter.com using the Subject line: “I want to join the Gameful Habits Launch Team” and let me know which e-mail address I should add to the team’s mailing list. Please note that I will also add your e-mail address to my general mailing list (Optimist Writer mailing list). You can unsubscribe from either or both at any time.

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Thank you for taking the time to read this post!

I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

With best wishes,

Victoria

Free Speaking Game for the Cheerleading for Writers

May 4, 2021Cheerleading for writers, Self-Gamification#cheerleadingforwriters, #gamefullife, #games, #littlefungames, #OptimistWriter, #selfgamification, #selfmotivationalgames, #show, #showdonttell, #showvstell, #tell, #writing, #writinglifevica

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Here is the ninth blog post in a series featuring videos on YouTube, where I read a paragraph from one of my motivational books and use it as a prompt to speak freely.

This idea was inspired by the free-writing exercise well-known among writers. I used dice and timer to turn this free-speaking exercise into fun games. I hope you enjoy watching them and maybe trying out this gameful approach for yourself and tasks you want or need to tackle today.

In this video, I read from my book Cheerleading for Writers: Discover How Truly Talented You Are.

I am reading from the chapter titled “L – Life, Libel, and Liability.”

Here it is if you want to read along, prior, or afterward.

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Excerpt from the Cheerleading for Writers

Some questions for contemplation: What are your experiences with writing your truth and taking care of people so that no-one sees your writing as libel? What balancing acts have you done in your writing? And how did this creative discomfort feel for you?

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The next step

I hope you enjoyed watching this little creativity game.

Since we all need a little cheering up from time to time, I invite you to read Cheerleading for Writers and discover what it can do for you. To look at the book and buy it on Amazon, click on its title above or this image below:

If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to my page, Optimist Writer, on ko-fi for $5 a month, and besides supporting what I do, you will also get access to all my motivational books, which I share there once a month or each time a book is out. Right now, you can get access to eight of my books there — one upon subscription or one-time support and seven in the posts solely for subscribers. Cheerleading for Writers will appear later this year or sooner upon explicit request from the subscribers.

I wish you a beautiful, creative, cheerful, and also gameful day!

One Minute Read from the Cheerleading for Writers

February 25, 2021Cheerleading for writers, Self-Gamification#cheerleadingforwriters, #gamefullife, #games, #littlefungames, #OptimistWriter, #selfgamification, #selfmotivationalgames, #show, #showdonttell, #showvstell, #tell, #writing, #writinglifevica

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Here is the ninth blog post in a series featuring videos on YouTube, where I read from one of my motivational books for one minute.

In this video, I read from my book Cheerleading for Writers: Discover How Truly Talented You Are.

I am reading from the chapter with the title “S – Show Me What You’ve Got (or How a Writer Can Serve Others Without Putting Too Much Pressure on Herself).”

Here it is if you want to read along, prior, or afterward.

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Excerpt from the Cheerleading for Writers

As with almost any book on writing and its various facets, this one will also address the aspects of showing and telling. But it will approach show and tell from another angle.
During the first three years of my writing career and especially recently, I have come to realize that I joined an exotic species of the working population.

We, writers, want to write books that we would want to read. On the other hand, we also want others to love them.

Or we write motivational guide books to pull ourselves out of initially hopeless situations. At the same time, hoping these books will pull other people out of their miseries too.

What is interesting, though, is that whether others read our works or not, people survive without them. No one seems to need what we do for their daily and most urgent needs.

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A big surprise

Two days ago, I got a big surprise in my inbox. An author I follow has featured Cheerleading for Writers on his blog. This author is the New York Times bestselling author, John David Mann. He is co-author of many fantastic books, including the Go-Giver series with Bob Burg. Here is what he has written about this little book in his blog post titled “NINE RESOURCES TO ROCK YOUR WRITING” about resources he strongly recommends for writers, which include such legendary books as Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird:

“Cheerleading for Writers: Discover How Truly Talented You Are, by Victoria Ichizli-Bartels. This little book doesn’t lecture you; it holds your hand, brews you a cup of fresh hot tea, whispers in your ear, and reminds you of all the good things you should know about yourself. It also offers dozens of nuggets of writerly wisdom along the way, in twenty-six bite-sized pieces, A through Z.”

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The next step

We all need a little cheering up and holding our hands from time to time. I am super happy that this little book can provide such comfort to writers. So I invite you to read Cheerleading for Writers and discover what it can do for you. To look at the book and buy it on Amazon, click on its title above or this image below:

If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to my page, Optimist Writer, on ko-fi for $5 a month, and besides supporting what I do, you will also get access to all my motivational books, which I share there once a month or each time a book is out. Right now, you can get access to four of my books there — one upon subscription or one-time support and three in the posts solely for subscribers. Cheerleading for Writers will appear later this year or sooner upon explicit request from the subscribers.

I wish you a beautiful, cheerful, and also gameful day!

One Minute Read from the Gameful Writing

February 23, 2021Self-Gamification#blogging, #compassion, #courage, #encouragement, #gamefullife, #gamefulwriting, #games, #gamification, #grief, #kindness, #love, #OptimistWriter, #sadness, #selfawareness, #selfgamification, #smallsteps, #writing, #writinglifevica

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Here is the seventh blog post in a series featuring videos on YouTube, where I read from one of my motivational books for one minute.

In this video, I read from a parable Gameful Writing: Seven People, Seven Stories, Seven Lessons Learned (Book 4 in the “Gameful Life” series).

I am reading the extract from section 3 (“***”) of chapter 5, “Torben.”

Here it is if you want to read along, prior, or afterward.

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Excerpt from the Gameful Writing

Torben finished reading the blog post and reread it. The blogger was right. It was time to play. It was time for him to pack all this stuff and move back to Odense. Maybe without letting Karina know. But he would call just in case to make sure she still wanted him to come back.

But first, the pre-quest. Torben felt strange, he realized. He still wasn’t sure about the writing thing. He could find other ways to spend his time. For example, the pre-quest, or the side-quest, as the blogger called it. Never really a gamer himself, Torben was still wondering, how just one article, or five if he was honest, had moved him to speak in terms of a game player. In Lily’s slang, as he realized, and as it seemed this blogger’s too.

OK, let’s get my favorite cup. Torben went back to the kitchen and took out the cup he wrapped in paper towel before reading the last Gameful Writing blog post.

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The next step

If you want to find out more about these seven stories in one about turning writing or anything else in life into fun games regardless of the circumstances, then I invite you to read Gameful Writing. To look at the book and buy it on Amazon, click on its title above or this image below:

If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to my page, Optimist Writer, on ko-fi for $5 a month, and besides supporting what I do, you will also get access to all my motivational books, which I share there once a month or each time a book is out. Right now, you can get access to four of my books there — one upon subscription or one-time support and three in the posts solely for subscribers. Gameful Writing will appear later this year or sooner upon explicit request from the subscribers.

I wish you a beautiful, gameful, and creative day!

Self-Gamification is an Art and a Game

May 1, 2020Gameful Practice, Self-Gamification#games, #gamification, Ideas, Life, Self Improvementvica

(An excerpt. Read the full article on Medium)

Self-Gamification is an art

Self-Gamification is an art of turning whatever we are up to into fun and engaging games for ourselves. It is the application of game design elements to our own lives.

It is also a self-help approach showing us how to be playful and gameful, and bringing anthropology, kaizen, and gamification-based methods together.

In Self-Gamification, we are both the designers and the players of our self-motivational games, which are the challenges, projects, and activities turned into games.

But wait a minute! It is an activity too. You need to be active in the design and play of the self-motivational games.

So it is also a game.

Self-Gamification is a game

I was surprised to have had this epiphany only recently, after gamifying my whole life for three years consistently, and parts of it for an even longer time.

But on the other hand and when looking at it anthropologically, it is not surprising at all. I wasn’t thinking that much about the game. I was playing it. And that is the only way to experience it as a game.

Only when I was challenged to play another game, the game of explaining how Self-Gamification works could I see it more clearly. That is a paradox. Which is why it makes sense since we humans are highly paradoxical beings.

Some time ago, I recalled how, when I was young, I rarely referred to what I was doing in my games or play as such. I was busy with some activities. I might have called them “games” or “play,” but I didn’t think of the terms when I was playing.

However, outside of the game’s or play’s realm, the gameful and playful activities seemed safe, and I could easily imagine doing them than a chore my mother had asked of me. Only when she shaped the idea of the chore as something enticing did I agree to give it a try to be entertaining. And I must admit that it did happen more often than not.

(Continue reading on Medium)