Can masking be gamified?

Coming across a daily tracker of moods that resembled a github activity graph I was thinking with the covid fatigue we have going on in our 4th year of this seemingly immune dysregulating virus (and one where each reinfection is a Russian roulette of getting long covid) that potentially masking could be gamified / advertised and work in the same manner as the Nike Run app where you could be the most consistent “masker” in your vicinity/town/city. Perhaps partnering up with masking companies like flomask to have weekly/monthly prizes (of.. higher quality masks?) as we had our busiest travel day over Thanksgiving just recently and it’s not a surprise what follows.

Many questions come to mind of course – ethically if there’s no validation service (akin to Nike Run having say a validation of the GPS within the phone) then cheating comes to mind, but I think the userbase’s ethics (hopefully, or at least with the initial userbase) help endorse it enough that if it does gain any traction (highly doubt the idea would come to fruition) if it comes to the level of userbase where ethics are concerned it would have served enough of a purpose to attract people to hopefully start masking. Other questions / details include

  • types of masks: cloth masks are not ideal
  • length of mask wearing
  • would have to base the tracker around potentially multiple sessions of masking per day, a simple MVP could just be “mask at least once that day”

Screenshot of aforementioned mood tracker:

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