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Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard

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Re: Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard

#11

Post by DanBC »

shaggyfrog wrote: post #7

This ongoing trend of "gamification" is starting to drive me up the wall. Seems like some brainiac in marketing won some battle to sink their claws into the VS team. And I feel bad for them, because I'd hope they'd want to be spending their team actually improving VS (which is still an excellent IDE) instead of adding a layer of crapola lipstick. What next -- achievements for the taskbar?

There's a similar problem with games and achievements. The parody game "achievement unlocked" is a pretty good take on it.

(http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked)

Re: Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard

#12

Post by shaggyfrog »

contextfree wrote: post #9
shaggyfrog wrote: post #7

This ongoing trend of "gamification" is starting to drive me up the wall. Seems like some brainiac in marketing won some battle to sink their claws into the VS team. And I feel bad for them, because I'd hope they'd want to be spending their team actually improving VS (which is still an excellent IDE) instead of adding a layer of crapola lipstick. What next -- achievements for the taskbar?

This was not done by the VS team. It is an extension developed by members of the Channel 9 team inspired by this post on someone's blog -> http://blog.whiletrue.com/2011/01/what-if-visual-studio-had-... , and the associated Reddit thread.

My mistake, then. And thank goodness. Full ignominy goes to those guys, then.

Re: Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard

#13

Post by angrycoder »

That is pretty funny.

Reminds me of the time I was working on a .net project and the lead developer wired up a call in the OnApplicationError method to log the machine name origin of each error to a database. Every week he would hand out an award to the person with the most errors.

The interesting part was when he did the same thing for the bug tracker, the list was inverted. Those with more errors in development had fewer bugs in QA.

Re: Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard

#14

Post by georgefox »

eurleif wrote: post #6
brianwillis wrote: post #4

A quick look at the list: - Field Master: Have 100 fields in a single class. - Overload: More than 10 overloads of a method. - Potty Mouth: Use 5 different curse words in a file. These are funny, but they miss what achievements are good for - encouraging new users to adopt good behaviours.

I'm sad they don't have an achievement for writing >= N lines of code and having it compile (and not crash) on the first try.

Given that Visual Studio underlines all your compilation errors and lists them in the Error List as you write your code, I don't see how this would work.

Re: Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard

#15

Post by kmm »

brianwillis wrote: post #4

A quick look at the list: - Field Master: Have 100 fields in a single class. - Overload: More than 10 overloads of a method. - Potty Mouth: Use 5 different curse words in a file. These are funny, but they miss what achievements are good for - encouraging new users to adopt good behaviours.

Do notice that these achievements give exactly 0 points. They're not discouraging bad behaviour, but not exactly encouraging it either.

Re: Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard

#16

Post by bunderbunder »

angrycoder wrote: post #13

That is pretty funny. Reminds me of the time I was working on a .net project and the lead developer wired up a call in the OnApplicationError method to log the machine name origin of each error to a database. Every week he would hand out an award to the person with the most errors. The interesting part was when he did the same thing for the bug tracker, the list was inverted. Those with more errors in development had…

Thinking back on all the colleagues I've had who seemed to believe that 'debugging' is just another word for 'getting it to compile', that inverse relationship does not surprise me at all.

Re: Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard

#17

Post by shabble »

georgefox wrote: post #14
eurleif wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sad they don't have an achievement for writing >= N lines of code and having it compile (and not crash) on the first try.

Given that Visual Studio underlines all your compilation errors and lists them in the Error List as you write your code, I don't see how this would work.

It would be part of the upcoming Hardcore mode, in which not only are intellisense and on-the-fly error checking disabled, but if your code fails to compile first time, it deletes the entire source tree.

Re: Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard

#18

Post by lux »

kmm wrote: post #15
brianwillis wrote: post #4

A quick look at the list: - Field Master: Have 100 fields in a single class. - Overload: More than 10 overloads of a method. - Potty Mouth: Use 5 different curse words in a file. These are funny, but they miss what achievements are good for - encouraging new users to adopt good behaviours.

Do notice that these achievements give exactly 0 points. They're not discouraging bad behaviour, but not exactly encouraging it either.

Still encourages in the sense of wanting to obtain all of them, which can be pretty powerful, although I'm sure anyone would just do those for jokes (you could even write a script to win those achievements for you! :).

If I saw achievements in my text editor though, I'd feel it's a bit patronizing personally. What I want in new releases is to help me do my work faster and better, anything else just gets in the way.

Re: Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard

#19

Post by InclinedPlane »

These seem to be sending mixed messages. Some of these very much seem to be lampooning certain negative behaviors, some of them seem to be encouraging certain positive behaviors. Overall it seems to be ridiculous and an unhelpful distraction.
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