Much has been made in the news of the perils of World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs. These devil games are so addictive we can expect otherwise rational beings to play them so hard that they game to death!

Slow news days and sketchy journalistic ethics aside, there’s no denying that role-playing games, with their neverending cycle of quests and rewards, have a certain captivating quality that makes them hard to step away from.

Meanwhile, on the New York Times bestseller list, we find three books this week purporting to help you achieve your goals (including my personal favourite, by doing nothing). The internet’s productivity flagship, Lifehacker, is roughly the 800th most popular website worldwide. It’s clear there are a lot of people out there looking for ways to get stuff done.

So there it is: we have trouble achieving useful goals in real life, but in a game we’ll happily sit there for hours whacking bears to collect bear pelts. My project with the Games Lab is an attempt to unite these two halves of the human condition; to make a game out of your life that rewards you for achieving your goals. I call it Real Life Quest.

I’m not the first person to think of this, of course. There’s the venerable Chore Wars, which turns your housemates into a ragtag group of adventurers and your housework into a quest. thesixtyone is an online “music adventure” where different ways of finding new music are quests that give you in-(game?) rewards. There’s also Jesse Schell’s excellent presentation at DICE 2010 – skip to 21:00 for a harrowing future where XP, loyalty points and money have merged, and our lives are ruled by the fearsome lovechild of Big Brother and FarmVille.

I think the secret sauce in this case is understanding exactly what it is about quest systems and roleplaying games that makes them so compelling, and applying that to create a productivity system that isn’t just a to-do list with swords, but something that makes you think about your goals in a fundamentally more game-like way.