ARG MATEY!  

My epic fail with the Alternate Reality Game "Chore Wars"

Since my family was preparing for a visit of 14 additional people for the Thanksgiving holiday, there was much work to be done.  I tried to get my family to play “Chore Wars” with me.  I set up the account and gave the sign up info to both my older son, Darren, and my husband so they could set up an account. 

My husband’s first reaction was “I’M NOT DOING THAT”.  He said I would have to set up the account for him.  I did that and tried to get him involved in choosing his avatar, but again he refused to participate. 

My son was more receptive and he set up his own account and created an avatar. 

I made up a list with various chores that needed to be done along with the XP that could be earned for completing, and I set about doing some of them.    I thought that maybe once I started pointing out XP for different chores that maybe the other two would start to come around and actually play along. So I'd be feeding the dogs and call out, I'm getting 5 XP for this!  It was truly a bit ridiculous!

It didn’t quite work that way.  My husband did a lot of chores, but he refused to enter his XP. So I did it for him.  I thought maybe he’d be encouraged to play along once he saw his score go up, but it never happened.  My son on the other hand, was willing to enter his XP, however, he was not motivated to do chores.  In the end, we “played” only for one day and my husband had the most points. He didn't care about the points, he was doing the chores because they needed to be done. Darren had the least points, he also didn't care, he was just not participating much because XP didn't mean anything to him and he hates chores. The screen shots below are of mine and my husband's results.

I think this game could be maybe used with smaller children, however, there is a lot of prep that goes into it and a lot of work for the participants to keep up with the scoring system. I also think it would have the tendency to encourage kids to adopt a "sticker and star" attitude wherein they only would want to do chores in order to gain points.  A sort of "what's in it for me" attitude, instead of doing the chores simply because they want to contribute to the family. It further reinforced my belief that fixing a "broken reality" cannot necessarily be done through a game. 

As for me and my family, this game was an epic fail and waste of time for me to set it up!