I Increased My Productivity 10x - By Turning My Life Into a Game

When I was younger I used to play a lot of video games.
But as I grew older, they started taking too much time from my other activities.
For this reason, I started to gradually reduce the time I spent playing them, until I eventually quit.

But recently, I decided to incorporate some more down time into my schedule. And I gave video games another shot.
This is when I remembered just how fun video games can be.
It wasn't long before I was looking forward to the end of the day, just so I could hop on the computer and play. But this also got me wondering.

What exactly made those games so compelling?
And could I somehow apply those game elements to other areas of my own life to make them more desirable?