In the previous article I talked about creating a real-life status screen using three kinds of status indicators:

Condition indicators Option indicators Progress indicators

Such a status screen might be laid out something like this:

In this article I’ll be looking at what to put in Condition Indicators box.

The Primary Condition Indicator

Video game characters typically have several relevant characteristics. These are represented in the game with condition indicators.

One of these is more important than all the rest: “health” or “HP” (in this article I’ll just use the term “HP”). When your character’s HP reaches zero, you die and the game is over. At that point none of your character’s other stats matter — if your HP hits zero, the game is done.

Due to its privileged nature, I’ll call HP the “primary condition indicator”.

The Primary Condition Indicator In Real Life — “Satisfaction”

So what’s a person’s “primary condition” in real life? It’s whatever is most important to them. Your primary condition could be family or health or pleasure or religion or financial security or…the list of things that people can care about is endless.

Fortunately, we have a word that’s flexible enough to encompass all of those things: “satisfaction”.

No matter what’s important to you, you feel satisfaction when it’s going well and you feel dissatisfaction when it isn’t.

Now, how can we represent the state of a person’s satisfaction on a status screen?

Four Ways To Visually Represent Conditions

Representing Conditions With Numbers

HP is commonly depicted as a number (or a life meter, which is just a visual way of representing a number).

Numbers and meters are excellent for conveying precise information. Unfortunately, life satisfaction can’t be measured precisely, so we can’t represent it numerically.

Representing Conditions With Binaries

Another way to represent a condition is binarily — either you have it or you don’t. This is the simplest possible method for representing a condition.

If you were to represent HP as a binary, you would have one state indicating “alive” and one state indicating “dead”. The goombas in Super Mario Bros. are a good example of this — either they’re alive and walking around or else they’re squished and dead.

Satisfaction can also be represented binarily. Either you’re satisfied with life or you aren’t. You can represent that with a binary status indicator, like this:

A status screen that just tells you whether you’re satisfied or not isn’t particularly useful. We can design a more informative indicator by using ordinals.

Representing Conditions With Ordinals

Ordinals show relative amounts but not exact quantities. For example, look at the traffic indicators in SimCity.

Moderate traffic shows 2 cars per square. Heavy traffic shows 4 cars per square. The “2 cars” and the “4 cars” are symbolic. We don’t know how many cars are actually traveling through each square, but we know the “4 cars” squares have more traffic than the “2 cars” squares.

People typically have a general sense of how they’re feeling about life but can’t measure it precisely or numerically. That sounds like a case for ordinal representation. We could define an ordinal scale with four values:

Awesome! Okay Concerned Miserable

Then instead of the simple “Yes” or “No” of the binary scale, the status screen could represent life satisfaction ordinally, like this:

Each value has a color associated with it, from warm gold for “Awesome!” to dark red for “Miserable”.

The ordinal indicator gives a slightly more nuanced representation of life satisfaction than the binary indicator. We can get more nuance by expanding on ordinals with decomposition.

Representing Conditions Through Decomposition

HP in games is one-dimensional, represented by a single number. In contrast, life satisfaction is multidimensional. For example, you might be satisfied with your family life but dissatisfied with your job.

“Decomposition” is taking a complex value (like satisfaction) and breaking it into its constituent factors.

The status screen could visually list the factors that contribute to your overall sense of satisfaction. Here’s a person whose general satisfaction level is “Okay” (represented by the light yellow dot).

You can see that they feel “Awesome!” about their marriage (the warm gold dot) and “Miserable” about their job (the dark red dot).

Decomposing satisfaction into its components highlights specific areas to focus on in life.

Of course each of those dimensions could be further decomposed, like this.

Their marriage is “Awesome!” because its constituent factors (“fun”, “romance”, “reliability”) are also “Awesome!”, or at least “Okay”. Their job is “Miserable” due to the hours and the pay.

How many levels deep should a decomposition go? I’ll look at that question in more depth later, but the simple answer is that it should go deep enough to reach actionable items.

Wrapping Up

I believe that ordinal decomposition is flexible enough to represent anyone’s life satisfaction, no matter what their core values are. I think the model I’ve presented here (or something like it) could be a helpful guide for making life decisions. It could also be used as a tool for giving other people insight into your life — how you’re doing, and why.

Of course, satisfaction isn’t the only condition we care about in real life, but I’m going to cover a few other topics before I come back to look at the other condition indicators.

In the next article, I’ll look at using option indicators to connect the status screen with real-life actions.