A friend told me last week about a web site called Chore Wars. It’s set up like one of those online character games, but you set the quests and the points for your particular group. Each family member can have a character that earns experience points based on the chores done. The game even has the character grow muscle if a lot of manual labor chores are completed, or lose intelligence if nothing mentally challenging is done.

The boys and I each chose characters two days ago. They were more excited about it than I had expected, and took off around the house cleaning. Can’t argue with that.

We’re going to have to work out some details, like how often a chore can be claimed (they wanted to claim grocery shopping twice since we hit 2 stores. But it was one trip). Also, I have to input some custom chores that aren’t on the generic list or else find other people’s chores to import to our group. Some time will be involved with that. Once a chore is defined, though, you can use it over and over. Editing is very easy, but some familiarity with the overall scheme is helpful. For instance, I applied too many reward choices to the chore I input. I thought I had to fill in all the check boxes, but when I looked at the generic chores on the list I saw I had overdone it.

Chore Wars is a free program, or you can pay a one-time fee of $10 and the program will keep your records forever. In the free version information is only kept for 30 days. We’re going to try it out for the 30 days and see if we really want to use the program or not. I have friends who’ve signed up and are very enthusiastic in their first week. I personally am not prone to sticking with reward programs for very long…not because I don’t like rewards, but because I like to have things happen naturally and reward stickers, etc. bore me after a short time. I don’t like things that seem contrived.

Another feature of the game is battles that your character has with various nefarious creatures. It’s all text based, which I predict will not impress the young ones. You click the mouse and the game says “you strike at the rat and miss” and you click again and it says “the rat strikes you for 2 health points” and your health points go down. I think we’ll wind up clicking madly through the whole thing and just finding out at the end how it came out. The boys would enjoy an actual cartoon movie of the battle rather than the text, but surprisingly they enjoyed what they saw this week.

The game characters range from somewhat mild to spooky and exciting. There was even a dragon for the Captain to pick. I have never played Dungeons and Dragons, but a friend mentioned that this has a similar look. I doubt anyone ever washed windows in that game.

Both The Mercenary and TechnoBoy were able to log in and choose chores themselves. Of course it quickly turned into a competition over who could do what when, but I’m accustomed to mediating those discussions. And who can complain about boys demanding to clean the bathroom?

by AmyL

[tags]home, kids, parents, children, parenting, work, chores, housework, cleaning, Chore Wars, game, incentive[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by Orcoo, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved