We never got round to taking those Spanish evening classes. We didn’t do those Maya tutorials like we promised ourselves we would. We haven’t even cleaned out the fish tank. We have, meanwhile, found the time to collect all of the agility orbs in Crackdown 2. The disparity between our willingness to self-improve in the real world and level up in the virtual one is well documented. But with EpicWin, an iPhone App-cum-game by Tak Fung and Rex Crowle that has been launched today, it’s possible to combine the two, gaining loot and levels for every chore we check off the list.
It’s not a wholly new idea, as Crowle and Fung readily admit. To-do list applications have existed for some time, and several of them even award you points for completing your self-set tasks. But EpicWin goes above and beyond, tying your progress to a character’s advancement through an RPG-lite gameworld, spoofing the conventions of the fantasy genre as it does.
“The seeds of it were right back in our Lionhead days when we were playing this game called Progress Quest,” says Crowle, who has since worked as an illustrator and animator for hire, lending his talents to Disney and Media Molecule among others. “Actually, it wasn’t really a game, more of a metagame. In fact, it’s probably more accurately described as a progress bar.”
“It was almost a screensaver,” says Fung. “You’d leave it on and it’d level up. We could have been curing cancer or unravelling the human genome, but, no, we were just levelling up.”
“And yet it was just really compelling because the RPG setting is so ripe for humour,” says Crowle. “Because it had a high-score table, we got completely obsessed with it. We’d just leave our computers on for months. If you crashed at all, you’d fall thousands of places down the chart.”
Progress Quest was ahead of the curve; the idea of arbitrarily tying numerical advancement to activities has since come very much into vogue, with apps like Foursquare dishing out points for buying a sandwich from the same shop every day.
Rex Crowle
“There’s a trend at the moment, particularly at advertising companies, to put high scores on to everything,” says Crowle. “It’s a way to make web content more sticky and bring people back. It works to a point – particularly at the moment because it’s quite new. But if it’s just a score there’s no real narrative to it. What RPGs do well is take high scores and apply them to a story. Levelling up doesn’t stop with the number 20 – it means you look a certain way and you’ve had certain experiences to get to that point. So EpicWin brings a bit of that delight and surprise we get from videogames and transports it into something which enables you to be a bit more productive. You don’t always have time for an 80-hour RPG – but if you blend it with your life then you’ve got time to have an 80-year RPG.”
“When you cross off a chore and something nice happens, you link the two together and you want to go back and do more,” says Fung. “There’s a lot of loot you can collect, and you can see if you’re missing the Horn of Whatever; you want to keep on doing more stuff to get that next item. With an RPG you can bring in character and story and turn it into something cohesive.”