Life tasks as RPG
August 21st, 2008 by rbanks
Games Without Frontiers: Fun Way to Lose Weight: Turn Dieting Into an RPG
"When you first log in to Weight Watchers, it determines how much food you’ll be allowed to eat that day, expressed as a number of "points." My friend gets 23 points per day. Each time she eats a piece of food, she enters it into the online database, and it calculates how many points she’s used. A small apple is one point; a piece of fried chicken is seven points. When she first started the program, she was stunned at how quickly she burned through her daily points. A single bagel was six points — more than 25 percent of her daily quota. "How the hell am I going to do this without starving?" she wondered. But pretty soon she learned to hack her daily eating to suit the system. She snacked on vegetables that took zero points — like bell peppers — or only one or two points, like a tasty brand of microwave popcorn. Then she’d save up the big points for a really decent dinner." 
Wired
