Why the game

The Plus1living game is a self development game for entrepreneurial people that sets out to create an environment of positive motivation, free from anxiety, fear, doubts and excuses in which the players can seek out their true potential by challenging their own assumptions and learn through experience.

It can be classed as an Alternate Reality Game, but without the 'Alternate' part. By removing limitations the game leaves the players free to expand their horizons and move towards a world they would want to see for themselves and their loved ones.

The role of the blog is simply to provide additional resources to the players which will help them understand the underlying mechanics and showcase other players' quests and challenges.

We have all read the books and seen the motivational videos.They all feel right and somehow obvious.They inspire us for the moment and they give us a warm and fuzzy feeling inside, but it dissipates soon after we finish with it until the next one comes along.

We tend to find ourselves very excited by the concepts to the point of repeating them in conversations but maybe less than 1% ever get implemented. Games on the other hand are all action. For some reason they pull us in and keep us playing for hours at a stretch even if we're physically tired or hungry. We DO things and then DO some more.

Fact of life is that 99% of people who listen to advice of gurus or people who have achieved success in some form, NEVER TAKE ACTION. We have a self defeating reward mechanism in our brains that rewards us with injections of a drug called dopamine every time we feel that we have validated ourselves. Listening to gurus who tell us that by listening to them we have taken the most important first step makes us think like we have achieved something already and so nothing happens. The game sets out to change that.

Players choose the things they had wanted to do for a period of time, but they haven't done it for a number of reasons. Then they are encouraged to carve out time for such challenges, remove the reasons that had stopped them and complete the tasks as best as they can.

By taking such challenges the players learn about their limitations and take action to push them further away.  They also learn about their true potential and unlock it gradually with play. This is turn gives them solid belief in their abilities, because it's earned by experience.

One thing that will differentiate this game from other forms of motivation tools is that the players will not waste time on the game itself, but rather funnel the available time into their life changing activities. The game sets out to simply create an encouraging environment, free of pressure in which people naturally excel, as it has been proven by thirty years of psychological research on intrinsic motivation.

This is a work in progress and used to create a framework for the author to un-stick his life and move it forward. Some of the elements can stand on their own and you - the visitor- are encouraged to take them, use them and improve them as you like. With your help and input, the game will eventually evolve into a multi-player community of people free of fear, doubts or anxiety, always ready to go out and follow their dreams.