Caveat/skull: The obvious problem is people attempting to game the system—they notice that ten pushups is way easier than doing the diligent work required to show up on time 95 times out of 100.
Not a full solution, but gesturing in a direction that you might find useful: build the system in such a way that gaming it is encouraged and useful, and that the punishments are somehow self-balancing.
E.g. if the punishment is “do some chores”, somebody who figures out that doing the chores is easier than their other obligations is at least clearing the list of all the chores that need to be done. If they run out of chores to do, new tasks can be added to the list, and they can choose whether doing them is still worth it.
I’m here kinda reminded of the evolution of pen’n’paper RPGs, which originally had disadvantages you could buy during character creation that made you more powerful in exchange; of course people would munchkin by “forgetting” the disadvantages during play. Newer games got past that by making disadvantages give you zero points during character creation (or even cost!), and instead had them award benefits if you roleplayed them during actual game. In general, games have gotten the better the more they have built “trying to munchkin the rules, automatically leads you to play the game more like it was designed to be played” as a fundamental game design principle.
Not sure of how to do the “self-balancing costs” thing, but I am reminded of the bidding systems some houses have for chores, where you offer money for doing some task and if someone else finds the offered amount of money more valuable than the pain of doing the chore they do it; otherwise you do it yourself.
Not a full solution, but gesturing in a direction that you might find useful: build the system in such a way that gaming it is encouraged and useful, and that the punishments are somehow self-balancing.
E.g. if the punishment is “do some chores”, somebody who figures out that doing the chores is easier than their other obligations is at least clearing the list of all the chores that need to be done. If they run out of chores to do, new tasks can be added to the list, and they can choose whether doing them is still worth it.
I’m here kinda reminded of the evolution of pen’n’paper RPGs, which originally had disadvantages you could buy during character creation that made you more powerful in exchange; of course people would munchkin by “forgetting” the disadvantages during play. Newer games got past that by making disadvantages give you zero points during character creation (or even cost!), and instead had them award benefits if you roleplayed them during actual game. In general, games have gotten the better the more they have built “trying to munchkin the rules, automatically leads you to play the game more like it was designed to be played” as a fundamental game design principle.
Not sure of how to do the “self-balancing costs” thing, but I am reminded of the bidding systems some houses have for chores, where you offer money for doing some task and if someone else finds the offered amount of money more valuable than the pain of doing the chore they do it; otherwise you do it yourself.
+1 to the general idea; not sure how to implement it myself but it’s worth some five-minute timers.