Health Month, the game

Health Month is a new game (currently in beta) designed to help you find that ever-elusive motivation that you need to improve your health. Here's how you play. It takes place every month. Before the month starts, you choose your own rules that you'd like to follow. These rules are flexible. You can decide to give up drinking altogether, or you can decide to limit yourself to only 30 drinks a week. Everybody's different, and everybody has a different health riddle that they're trying to solve for themselves. I think it's best to just let you do it how you want to do it, and build tools to learn, build momentum, and keep going.

Choose your own rules

There are about 50 different kinds of rules. Half of them are rules about what to avoid — things like alcohol, white flour, artificial sweeteners, and illegal drugs. And half of them are rules about what you do more of — things like exercise, sleep, greens, and multivitamins. Choose however many you like, and ignore the rest (you can always add more next month, right?). After choosing your rules, you have the option of making a promise to yourself about how to reward yourself if you stay in the game all month, or to build in consequences if you don't make it. It's all about self-accountability, in public. It works.

The game starts on the 1st of every month

You start the month with 10 life points, full of potential. Every day, you come to the site and let the game know which rules you followed, and which you didn't follow. Every time you don't follow one of your own rules, you'll be dinged a life point. Don't worry though, following all of your rules on a given day, or getting sizable streaks of doing good things many days in a row, will earn you fruit. Fruit can be used to heal your own life points. However, sometimes you don't need the fruit, because you're on a roll. They say that the best place to store spare fruit is in the bellies of others. Therefore, you can also use fruit to heal other people playing the game.

Spirit animals can help

Depending on the kind of rules you've chosen, you'll also be picked by one of the four spirit animals that influence players during the game. Everyone needs a spirit animal on their side when things get rough, right? There's a crane, a fox, a polar bear, and a lizard. The first three all try to help you. The fourth, the lizard, will occasionally try to thwart you. It's a dangerous game! It's not all flowers and roses, we're trying to change our fundamental habits that trigger our very sense of survival, after all. Each spirit animal will encourage certain different qualities in your rules by giving you bonus points every day. For example, the fox will encourage easy and fun rules, and the polar bear will encourage difficult but rewarding rules. In addition, every day these four spirit animals will move around the board of rules and have a small influence on the number of points you get for those rules for that day. Over time, these spirit animals will help you learn which kind of rules are most effective, for you, and which ones either don't seem to be working for you, or are too difficult to follow.

Learn from your own behavior

Every day, after you fill in your score card for the previous day, you'll get all kinds of charts and graphs about your behavior. It's all about trying to learn what works and what doesn't. Are you able to follow "DO" rules more than "DON'T" rules, or vice versa? Do you respond better to cold-turkey rules, or to rules that are more about moderation? These are things this game is designed to help you learn.

Play alongside others

You are able to compare your progress to others who are doing rules of about the same difficulty as your own. Sometimes a little bit of friendly competition is all we need to get off our asses. We're all playing our own games, but we're playing it very near to other people. It's important to know how you're doing compared to others, because it helps us remember that we're all human.

When the game ends

The game ends at the end of the month, at which point you get stats based on your experience. You can play again (carrying over any streaks that you're on, of course), or take a break. We've got our whole lives to figure this stuff out, and it's important enough to try to get right, but you also don't want to burn out. Play once a year, or every month, as you wish.

Who is building this?

I am. You can also find me on Enjoymentland. Other things I've built include 43 Things, Locavore, and 750 Words. I'm attempting to conceive of, build, and launch this site as part of a 90-day challenge with myself, which means this site will be launching sometime before September 16th.

Want to know when it officially launches?

Want to be a beta tester?

I'm currently letting people create accounts and get ready for next month's game by signing up here.

I'm also on Twitter @busterbenson, and will definitely be mentioning it there too.