My roommates and I hate chores. Absolutely and incredibly hate chores. My husband will happily do just about anything to make the house clean – he loves everything in its place. Not me, nuh-uh. I would live in my mess if I could, but I can’t. (Not filth, but mess - there is a big difference between mess and filth - I like to be chaotic writer-ly disorganized with my thoughts spewing out on every paper I can find).A few weeks ago, I stumbled onto ChoreWars, this silly website where you get a character (much like D&D), but you level up for doing things around the house. Example: You wash the dishes, you get gold and XP. Since I’m still a hopeless gamer, I instantly fell in love with the concept and made an account. My roommate (and cohort on Adorning Schemes - we are also doing A to Z over there!) and I have been cleaning up the house on a more regular basis. And my husband? Well, he's kicking all of our butts since he racks up 74 XP every day.
But this sets the fire, “No – you cannot be better than me in ChoreWars! I will win! I will defeat you! Mwahahaha!” It mixes competition into the whole thing, which makes chores finally worth doing.
Digging up the yard to put in a garden isn’t fun – but if you add experience points and gold coins along with it? Yeah, sure, I’ll do just about anything for more XP. I’m obsessed with making my characters better (which is exactly why I'm good at being a gamer).
The inner five year old in me constantly jumps up and down every time I finish something. It’s like a gold star... without spending money on stickers.
I am, and forever will be, easily amused.
Tomorrow I post an excerpt from Rioss.
I want a gold star too! Apart from the fact my dishes need doing and I'm reading blogs... but I still get one, yes?
ReplyDeleteSure, why not ;) Gold stars for everyone!!
DeleteChorewars sounds like a great idea. Loved this post.
ReplyDeleteI hate chores too, but it's weird how doing them in an online game is fun. We are strange creatures.
ReplyDeleteOur household loves Chore Wars, too!
ReplyDeleteI thought I'd come up with a billion-dollar idea when I came up with the concept. I Googled it to see if there was anything similar, typing something like "role-playing game chores."
Then I found out that my idea wasn't original. ;) Instead, I found Chore Wars, someone ELSE's billion-dollar idea (okay, not billion. Maybe hundred.). My husband and our seven-year-old are video game junkies. The first night we signed up, they were performing chores I'd never seen done. Ever. Not by two guys, anyway. It was incredible. I just stood there pretending to do chores so I could watch the two of them speed through different jobs, logging on to update what they'd done. The gold coins were flying. The XP was through the roof. My seven-year-old wanted to go mow the grass. At 8pm. On a school night. ;)
It didn't last, though. Like Zynga, it was great for a while, but we kind of got out of it. Now that I'm working on my novel, I'm fairly certain Chore Wars will be making another appearance on a web browser near me in the very near future. Thanks for a great post! I really enjoy your style and will be following you from here on out. I hope you'll swing over to my slice o' the web, too!
You know, when you're not slaying dust dragons and all. ;)