Gamification for theses and papers It’s always been hard for me to stay focused and motivated when writing any kind of a longer text, e.g. an article, paper or gasp thesis, even if I’m interested in the topic and enjoy the work. The Stack Exchange and Wikia gamification systems with points and badges being awarded work well for me. I tried to reward myself for certain research and writing accomplishments, but realized early on that I’m not good at defining milestones and choosing bounties. Therefore, I hope someone else has done it.

Is gamificated thesis writing a thing? 
Are there integrated software solutions to support that? 

(I don’t use MS Word, but I could easily see how a plugin would detect the first quotation or the 10000th word etc. there. It would be great if it worked with Pandoc/Markdown or LaTeX instead.)

Related questions that are missing the gamification aspect


How to make thesis-writing feel less tedious? – Writing up existing results, mentioning techniques like divide and conquer or pomodoro time 
Motivation to write the dreaded dissertation – What to do if you’re not interested in or convinced by the subject and degree, external motivation
Optimizing a thesis writing workflow for Bachelor and Master theses – General advice on structure and workflow
Are there integrated software solutions to support that?

Beeminder integrates with Github or Bitbucket, so if you keep your Latex or Markdown in either of those, you can automatically gamify your writing without having to do any manual data entry.
Beeminder is a commitment tracking service that plots your progress towards your goals, like this:

(image source)
There's also negative reinforcement: if you consistently fail to meet your goal, you &quot;fall off the yellow brick road&quot; and you pay actual money. Beeminder is good at tracking your progress without punishing you for small temporal variations in productivity.
In this context, your goal would be to make a consistent habit of adding to or editing your thesis.
With git integration you can set goals like &quot;N commits per week&quot; and data points are added to your Beeminder graph automatically when you commit.
There's also integration with Draft, if you prefer to count words edited rather than commits.  I haven't used Draft myself, but it looks like you can use it to write in Markdown.