Can we gamify the writing of our master thesis?

As we're looking deeper into gamification and getting used to the concept, we cannot fail to see all the brilliant ideas out there; it's the chorewars.com who makes role-playing out of cleaning, there's the fitocracy.com who gamifies training and the NaNoWriMo that gamifies the act of writing, among a lot of other excellent ventures.

(courtesy of xkcd.com)

But maybe more importantly, it gives us the insight that almost anything can be turned into a game. Some companies are now looking into making traveling into a game, to enhance the experience and to motivate travellers to explore even more. But why aren't anyone trying to make a game out of public transportation to motivate urban citizens to leave their car at home?

Or why not realize our "thought of the day" (we try to keep it down to one new thought each day, otherwise things get complicated) -  why aren't we gamifying the writing of our master thesis? We've always found it hard to begin writing an academic paper (and I'm fairly sure we're not alone in that particular problem). A big project like a thesis could certainly make use of some fun and friendly competition. The only problem with this is how to measure writing progress in a good way. How do we know who's winning? The other mechanisms of a game, like rewards and feedback we could handly fairly easily. 

If (when?) we figure out how to gamify our thesis we'll post it here. In the mean time, start using some of the excellent games out there. And remember, this is just the beginning. Soon there'll be games out of everything. And we'll probably not even notice when it happens.