Chore Wars and EpicWin exist. (Haven't actually used ChoreWars. I used EpicWin for a while, I still technically do, but it's not as effective as I'd like.
Up until recently I'd have been highly supportive of this. A few days ago I read a counter argument, specifically to the gamification of education, which made the point that a) when you have extrinsic motivators, people are less likely to care about the things for instrinsic reasons, b) people tend to game the system rather than actually accomplish the thing you intended.
I don't know how true those statements are, but they dampen my excitement about this idea.
No matter what, I think one problem is that people are far too individual for any kind of universal system to work.
One thing I've experienced is that you do NOT want to assign points for number of things done unless you have some way to assess that they're done well -- I spent a while maximizing the number of things I did per day, and quality went wayyyyy down.
I just got this random idea that people who want to become better at life could benefit from a common scale of "leveling". No, I don't mean vague Lesswrongey things like "changing your mind". I mean a set of concrete criteria like "you qualify for level 2 if you can do 5 pull-ups, have solved 30 Project Euler problems, and did 10 cold approaches". Obviously there would be separate ladders for different character classes, but not too many. Also obviously, my example was a bit too high for level 2. So I guess I really want to ask some meta questions here:
1) Do you think agreeing on a common leveling scale would be a good thing for a substantial subset of LW users? Would you feel good about leveling up and telling other people about it on LW?
2) Is there some good way to determine leveling criteria that are neither too high nor too low? Maybe make an intermediate scale of "experience points"?