Chore Wars
20 Jul 2007Chore Wars is just too funny as a concept. Yet, I can completely see how it would work.
Essentially everyone in your household creates a character and you form a group. Then as chores are done it logs them and assigns XP to the character that did it. Every 200 XP you level up.
Now, initially when I heard about it I thought that it was completely ridiculous. Then when I thought about it, if Holly and I were to do this (admittedly she does way more housework than I do), and her character got ahead of mine; I would feel the pressure to “level”. After my years of WoW, I can completely see me putting in a few minutes here and there, grinding vacuuming to increase my strength, etc.
The game preys on the hard core gamer mentality that you are letting your team down because you aren’t keeping up the leveling pace. It also gives you a measure to see that you are letting the group down. That is the key. The ability to track a metric.
As a general rule of thumb when you create what the chores are and how much XP they give, they say you should reward 1 XP for each minute the task should take.
I think one thing it should add, that it doesn’t have yet, is the ability to make a task worth more for some people. As an example, I loathe cleaning the cats’ litter box. It would be nice if I could get double XP for that. Holly hates folding laundry, it would be cool if she could get double XP for that.
When Holly gets back from her trip, I’m tempted to set this up and see how it goes…