Gamification for theses and papers

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 "fall off the yellow brick road" 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 "N commits per week" 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.

One of the most common suggestions to aspiring writers (and this advice applies to thesis writing as well), is to make it a habit to write every day, say for 20 or 30 minutes. This is sometimes called a "Seinfeld chain", and you can find many apps where you can keep track of your progress, by ticking off each day you in fact write. The goal is to not break the chain, i.e. write every day. A low tech solution would be to mark days on a calendar. Some of the software tools allow you to see statistics, give you awards for completing a chain of a certain length, etc.

Another way to keep track of progress is to use something like Github, where you can also see a graphical representation of activity (in that case, number of commits).