Last week I told you about how I used to be an “ideas person” and had difficulty ever committing to and pulling off any of my cool, big “take over the world” ideas.
I also told you about the way I beat this – by building good habits.
A habit is built through a process of three simple steps:
- A trigger
- An action
- A reward
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg is the best book I’ve ever read on this and I really implore you to read it – that book will change your life.
Today, I want to walk you through what I noticed while playing Destiny 2 – in my opinion, it takes serious advantage of this habit loop concept. Once you see it in action and uncover what it looks like, you can take advantage and build your own momentum-building habit loops based on the framework Destiny 2 lays out for you – that’s what we’ll go through next week.
Before I break it all down for you – I want to let you know that though I have played some role in the audio of both Destiny and Destiny 2, I have had nothing to do with any of what I’m about to walk you through below. This is all my subjective opinion, what I’ve noticed, and how I’ve utilized it for my own benefit.
Cool? Let’s break it down!
The Habit Loops of Destiny 2
If you’ve never played Destiny or Destiny 2 before – a considerable amount of the game revolves around you shooting aliens, which powers up your character through various means.
Doesn’t sound that much different than any other game, right? You start off “weak” and then you build your character to be much more powerful, while the game meets you with more and more difficult challenges.
Well, that’s true – until you break down how Destiny 2 goes about doing this.
Remember, habit loops form with the following framework:
- Tigger
- Action
- Reward
And Destiny 2 uses these steps very smoothly, repeatedly, and in a structure which encourages you to complete ever-difficult tasks. Again, by applying its concepts to your work, you’ll easily be able to take down “exotic” projects (exotics are the most powerful weapons and armor in the Destiny universe).
The Trigger
The first non-story task you’ll usually ever do in Destiny 2 is called a “bounty”. Bounties are usually very simple and straightforward to accomplish. They look something like this:
Shoot 25 enemies with a scout rifle
You pick up this bounty at a vendor (one of Destiny 2’s characters), and for any serious Destiny 2 player the very first thing you do when you load up the game is go and pick up bounties as they’re the quickest way to build your character.
Bounties are Destiny 2‘s initial trigger. From the very first time you load up the game, it encourages you to pick up a bounty and then traverse the world. Of course, you can completely ignore bounties, but then it takes you longer to get more powerful.
These bounties are so simple to complete, that it’s nearly mindless for you. Anyone who picks up the game can shoot 20 enemies. If you remember, last time, I encouraged you to break up your projects into laughably small tasks. Bounties are Destiny 2′s version of a task that is so easy to complete that you’d never procrastinate it.
Eventually, you become so powerful that one single bounty doesn’t do much to build your character. Even picking up multiple bounties at once, while useful, doesn’t build your character the way it once did.
At that point, the game’s “quests” become a primary driver in future character growth.
The Action
While Destiny 2‘s bounties are quick and easy to complete, quests is where things really start picking up in the “action” department.
The action for a bounty, again, is usually something like:
Shoot 25 enemies with a scout rifle
Whereas a quest might require multiple steps and starts with something like:
Complete a very specific mission on Mars
Or, it can be broken up into multiple bounty-like tasks:
Shoot 100 enemies with Arc damage
Shoot 100 Fallen enemies in a specific location with a Bow
Get 100 melee kills
Quests like the above begin to introduce the concept of a progress bar that could take a few sittings to complete. It’s at this point that Destiny starts giving you tasks to accomplish that are just outside the amount of time or energy that you’d normally desire to expend playing the game.
So, instead of 1-2 missions or strikes, you’d have to do 2-3 to fully complete a quest.
It’s nothing impossible, but the game starts encouraging you to stretch yourself. To keep you engaged you’re given at least one – if not multiple – green progress bars to see how you’re doing. As your first reward, watching this little progress bar go up bit by bit feels really nice. But, of course, the progress bar isn’t quite enough.
At this point, you’ve been encouraged by the game to either pick up a bounty or receive a quest as your trigger.
The action is simply doing the work to complete the bounty or quest.
Once you’re used to ever-difficult quests, Destiny 2 starts giving you exotic quests. This leads us to our final step in the framework – the reward.
The Reward
Exotics in Destiny 2 follow the exact same formula that quests and bounties have presented to you before – but the amount of action and difficulty to get to completion ramps up significantly. In fact, the largest difference between regular and exotic quests is just that exotics usually take a lot of work to complete.
But, much like real life, it’s at this point that the habit loop involved separates the big winners from the rest of the pack.
“Casual” Destiny 2 players won’t pick up many – if any – exotic weapons or armor. Whereas the die-hard players will try and get as many as they can, as they completely change how the game plays and the level of fun involved.
Trade out exotic weapons for dream careers, successful entrepreneurship, a great marriage – and you quickly get the idea. It’s not a 1:1 – those who put in the most work don’t always achieve the most success. But, tremendous success is usually accompanied by large amounts of effort.
Destiny 2 even does a fantastic job of visually branding each of these tasks – bounties, quests, and exotic quests – to take advantage of the habit loop.
Regular bounties have various colors associated with them due to their different vendors and their associated icons. Quests are always purple – which matches “Legendary” weapons and starts to stand out as “medium difficulty” tasks. Exotic quests are always yellow – a color which isn’t regularly used anywhere else in the game – and pops significantly against the usually dark Destiny 2 menu backgrounds.
Simply through the yellow color alone, it’s exciting to see one of these quests and you become interested in pursuing it because it’s different.
And, when you do accomplish any of these things, Destiny 2 rewards you in a myriad of ways. The most significant and regular reward is a simple UI event and an incredibly satisfying sound effect.
When you succeed, you see the task’s icon flash up on the right side of your screen and a big “whooosh!” plays – it’s plenty enough to get you excited!
When you accomplish an exotic quest, you get the best reward – high-powered weapons or armor. These things have their own special stats and unique abilities that require you to engage even further. Once you’ve gotten your first exotic and learn what special, unique thing it can do, it doesn’t require much pushing for you to want to dig back in and keep going.
How This Works Together
Destiny 2‘s habitual loop system is, in my opinion, pretty brilliant.
The tigger, action, and reward are very easy to notice when you look at the system objectively – but they don’t get in your way so much as to clearly spell out what’s going on or inhibit the player experience.
The system repeats itself in bounties, quests, and exotic quests – differing primarily in effort and branding – and the system usually pays attention to the difficulty level and doesn’t often ask too much out of power-users. Only those who want the rarest of rare rewards (such as 100% completions of tasks across the game) are in for an extremely heavy grind.
To lay it all out in summary for you:
- The trigger occurs when you get a task to complete
- The action is completing said task
- The reward is custom gear, a pretty UI event, a great “completion” sound, and new ways to engage with the game
The game keeps you engrossed by trying not to set the difficulty bar so high as to turn you off (starting with ludicrously easy), and by letting you visibly see your progress through the game’s quest progress bars.
Believe it or not, you can definitely co-opt this system and use it to engage with your every day life. It hasn’t taken me very much effort, and I’ve adapted an “analog” system with my daily journal that keeps me on task, encouraged, and consistently knocking out large projects in small chunks.
Next week, that’s exactly what I’ll teach you. For now – be thinking about ways you can adapt this to your life. If you play Destiny 2, try picking it up again and looking at what you’re doing a little more objectively – I bet it will surprise you!
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