Real Life Incentive Games: Pact

Recently, I've been replaying Shadow Hearts (including Koudelka) and all that good stuff.  But, what's really caught my attention since the New Year have been various incentive/goal keeping sites.

Pact, formerly branded as Gympact, is an app I've used since last year.  You set an exercise goal - in my case, five days a week - and a penalty.  In my case, the penalty for not keeping my pact was $5 per workout, the minimum allowed (yes, I am British - they don't support £s yet).  If you don't do your workouts, they charge you $5.  If you do, you get a share of other people's penalties.  The money fined from people who don't make their pact has 30% skimmed off the top for developers costs, and is then divided between everyone who did their whole week.  It's generally between $1-2 dollars per week that you get, and as soon as you have $10 you can withdraw it via paypal.

Your workouts can be made in a variety of ways.  You can link the app to a runkeeper account, and have every half hour walk or run count, which is what I mostly do.  You can also sign into a local gym, which will be checked via googlemaps (ie, if it looks like a house, it won't count).  As long as you're there half an hour (tracked by GPS), it'll count.  You can also link to a step counting app, which I've not explored, and have 10,000 steps in a day counted as a workout.

I started using Pact around Christmas 2012.  Most years I go down to a homeless shelter, and since I was unemployed at the time, I figured it would serve two purposes.  Firstly, if I kept it up for a whole year, I'd probably make enough to fund my next trip.  Hostels, trains, and lunches at various places along Oxford St don't cost too much.  Secondly, I figured it'd be a good incentive for me, which turned out to be the case.  Losing $5 is a much bigger deal than just not sticking to my plans.

I've found the Pact team to be very fair when any bugs or issues come up.  Since the new year, they've rebranded as pact, and included food-tracking and fruit/veggie eating pacts.  These work the same way as the gym pacts.  You vow to track your food intake a certain number of days per week, via MyFitnessPal.  As long as you log three meals a day, of at least 1200 calories, it counts.  You don't have to come in under your calories goal as long as you're tracking, which I think is a good thing.  I'd be tempted to lie.  It's embarrassing to track when I've been binging, but it's good for me to acknowledge it rather than just sweep it under the rug.

You can check out Pact here, and that page includes links to the iOs and Android downloads.