Make Walking Fun: Turn Your Daily Walk Into a Game You Want to Win

Willpower is a terrible engine for a walking habit. It's full on Monday, half empty by Wednesday, and gone by the first rainy Thursday. If you want to make walking fun enough to keep doing it, stop asking yourself to be disciplined and start giving the walk a game to win. Games run on curiosity and a bit of rivalry, and those refill every morning. This post is about gamifying the daily walk itself, the boring, same-route, same-time one. For games you play with other people on a single outing, our walking games guide covers those.

Why a game beats a goal

A goal says "walk 8,000 steps today." A game says "beat yesterday's number before the kettle boils tonight." They sound similar, but they feel very different.

A goal is pass or fail, and failing a goal feels like a small verdict on you. A game has a score, and a bad score is just a bad round. You shrug and play again tomorrow. That shrug is the whole trick. People quit habits after a run of failures, not after a run of low scores.

A game also gives you a reason to care about a walk that's already happened. You check the score, you compare it, you plan tomorrow's move. The walk lives on for a few minutes after you've taken your shoes off, and that's often what brings you back out the next day.

Start with a score you can't fake

Every game needs a number, and for walking the obvious one is steps, because your phone counts them without you doing anything. Minutes walked works too, and so does "new streets visited" if you like exploring.

What doesn't work is a score you have to log by hand. If keeping score feels like homework, you'll stop keeping score, and then there's no game. Pick something your phone already counts, or something you can tally in your head on the way home.

Write three rules, not ten

Rules are what turn a number into a game. Three is the sweet spot. Here are some that work well, mix and match:

• Beat your own Tuesday. Each day competes with the same weekday last week, not with yesterday. Mondays are different from Saturdays, and this keeps the comparison fair.
• The new-street rule. Every walk has to include one street you haven't walked this month. It forces small detours and kills route boredom.
• The ten-minute floor. On a bad day, ten minutes still counts as a played round. This rule matters more than any other, because it protects the streak on the days you'd otherwise skip.
• Weather bonus. Rain doubles your points. Sounds silly. Works, because it turns the worst walking days into the best scoring days.
• The no-repeat week. No two walks in the same week can follow the same route. Good for anyone who's slid into one loop around the block.

Write your three on a sticky note or in your phone's notes app. Rules you can see are rules you follow.

Give yourself something to lose

Here's the non-obvious part. Most people gamify walking with rewards: a treat at 50 miles, new shoes at 100. Rewards help, but research on habits keeps finding that people work harder to avoid losing something than to gain something of the same size.

So build a small loss into the game. A streak is the classic version: once you've got twelve days in a row, day thirteen matters a lot more than day one did. A debt works too. If you miss your number, the shortfall carries over, and tomorrow's walk has to pay it back. A bet with a friend is the strongest of all, because now somebody else knows if you lose.

Keep the stakes small and a bit silly. The point is a nudge, not dread. If the thought of breaking the streak ruins your evening, the stakes are too high.

Add a rival

Solo games are good. Games with one other player are better. You don't need a big group; one friend with a similar step count is plenty. Agree on a weekly target or a straight race, check scores on Sunday, and let the loser pick next week's rules.

The best rivals aren't the fittest people you know. They're people close to your level, because a race you can't win, or can't lose, stops being a game in about four days.

What this looks like in an app

Everything above works with a pen and your phone's built-in step counter. But it's a lot easier when the app keeps the score, because then the game runs without you lifting a finger.

That's how we built the game layer in Walk With Me. Steps count automatically and feed live rankings: a World board you can climb daily or monthly, plus Friends, Countries and Packs views. Each day's steps are capped before they count, so one heroic day can't buy the top spot, which keeps it about turning up. Rex, the in-app walking coach, hands out daily and weekly quests scaled to your own step goal, and every finished quest earns XP that builds your level.

The "something to lose" part is in there too. Pair with a walking buddy and you keep a joint streak, and you can wager XP on keeping it alive. There's a steps-debt, on by default and easy to switch off, that carries a missed day's shortfall forward for you to pay back within a week. And your buddy can be your rival: you can run a friendly step race of up to four weeks, as a sprint or as laps.

If you'd rather be on a team than against one, a Walk Pack puts up to five people on a shared weekly step-goal bar. Nobody wants to be the one who left the bar short on Sunday night.

Common mistakes when you gamify walking

Changing the rules every day. If the rules move whenever you're losing, you're not playing a game, you're negotiating with yourself. Keep them for at least two weeks before you tweak anything.

Making the target too high. A game you lose every day is a game you'll quit. Set the target where you win about two days out of three. Raise it only when you start winning nearly every day.

Only scoring volume. If the only number is steps, you'll end up pacing your hallway at 11pm. That's fine now and then, but add one rule about where or how you walk, like the new-street rule, so the game keeps you outside.

Playing alone forever. A solo game is the right place to start. After a month, bring someone in. The game gets better and so does the walk.

Pick your score, write your three rules, and play the first round today. And if you want a game that keeps score for you, with rankings, quests and a buddy to race, Walk With Me is free to try on iOS and Android.