My Jira ticket is blocked. No blockers. Please don't give me an F-, my Jira GPA is totally not inflated!
Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#42> Books don't even have a progress bar on them (at least physical ones don't yet) I find the idea that books don't have progress bars to be very amusing. Have the author never looked at a book with a bookmark in it from the side? :)
You don't even need a bookmark. Just open a book. It is a progress bar in itself.
I've been making origami bookmarks since elementary school [1]. Recently I've been making them out of ephemera, e.g. old coupons, the receipt for the book itself.
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#43I like to make new HN accounts every few months to avoid falling into this trap (i.e. feeling an obligation to sink more time into HN or reddit because I'm proud of the amount of points I have).
I've done this with reddit several times as well. It seems a positive thing to me to retain a level of detachment and not get too involved in building up the karma score or trying to build some kind of reputation. I've also taken to using the randomly generated usernames that it recommends rather than customizing them.
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#44I think this article is written a bit like that cash register anecdote. There is no conclusion other than examples why you are this way. Why do you think you are like this? Not everyone is - I’m not. But I’m currently working on a rewards gamification system in a surgical-medical training device and we’re discovering in user-testing that while yes, medical students do fixate on optimizing their scores, the system doe…
> For me gamification turns some things into a slog. same for me. i admit it still feels nice to "watch the number go up", mostly on content platforms with a social component to it (hn, reddit, stackoverflow) as you feel whatever you've said has either been useful to, or at least resonated with someone. as social creatures it's only normal to seek some sort of validation. i think the only gamification set of features…
It seems to me gamification is a feature in some situations, a bug in other situations and with no uniformity between two people.
I despise the upvote/karma bullshit when it comes to discussions. It completely changes how people think and interact. The "witty" mention from the author is so cringe to me. The average person is just not a comedian and it is really the main reason I never use Reddit. To me, Reddit is an engine of non-comedians trying to be witty and funny playing an upvote game. The worst part is I imagine many are like the unfunny person who thinks they are funny because people fake laugh at their jokes because otherwise the interaction is just uncomfortable given the volume of bad jokes from the non-comedian. It all becomes self reinforcing in an awful way.
That is so different than something like duolingo that is motivating just to do a little bit of work that you might otherwise would not have and keeps bad streaks from forming. I just experienced this using Anki where all of the sudden I haven't practiced my language in 2 weeks but my language of choice is not on duolingo.
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#45Self-promo: If you're interested in the rise of gamification, how it works (and doesn't work), and how it's being used in workplaces, schools, governments, and social media, I published a book last year called You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All . https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adrian-hon/youve-be... I've been designing games for twenty years, and I'm C…
Self-promo successful - just bought your book on Amazon! ;)
I actually did Zombies, Run! over the pandemic and we had a great time doing it - honestly one of the few examples of gamification that works. Really it's so good that I didn't even think of it even as gamification, which is saying something. I also worked in the game industry for years and gluing on trophies or points onto some otherwise irrelevant task is not true gamification, it's just the most basic example of "if you measure it, they will do it".
Looking forward to reading your book.
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#46When all is said and done, there is still an important metric to "gamify": the number of happy years lived. For me, all the others have to subordinate to that one.
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#47> Books don't even have a progress bar on them (at least physical ones don't yet) I find the idea that books don't have progress bars to be very amusing. Have the author never looked at a book with a bookmark in it from the side? :)
Librera Reader and FBReader have discreet progress bars you can set at the bottom of the screen which, when clicked/tapped, will take you to that place/chapter in the book!
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#48> Books don't even have a progress bar on them (at least physical ones don't yet) I find the idea that books don't have progress bars to be very amusing. Have the author never looked at a book with a bookmark in it from the side? :)
Clearly someone who hasn’t read a book lately! They are the physical embodiment of progress bars and badges of achievement once you finish them and put them on your shelf.
There is so much other media to consume, I don't ever have the desire to reread any of my books.
So the thing I unlock when I finish a book is a gift for someone else.
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never really noticed it as a key component to their success, but some of my favorite games model the degradation of skill over time. Both CDDA and Rimworld do this, and as a result, you end up with characters that are more nuanced and specialized, but also moldable into the “next right thing,” whatever you think that might be. Maybe it is the thing that makes these games fundamentally compelling over a longer time…
CDDA stands for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world.
I imagine it as some sort of mix of Dwarf Fortress and Project Zomboid.
The crossover I never knew I needed.
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a good bit of research in the medical field. Eg here's a meta study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33128662/ I found this bit of the abstract interesting: > However, most studies lacked well-defined control groups and did not apply and/or report theory to understand underlying processes. This paper seems to be a good overview of the theories underlying gamification https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti…
> A good example is the Odin project study paths, or Khan Academy courses. One other example that has a few of my friends hooked is Duolingo. Learning another language was something they'd wanted to do, and had tried to do in the past. They just had trouble sticking to putting the work in. But Duolingo's particular brand of gamification has got them doing the thing they always wanted to do, but never got round to bef…
Gamification definitely works better when it's in conjunction with something you already want to do, or feel like you should do. It gives you an excuse to push a little harder to keep on task. It mostly seems to not work at all when it's for something you don't care about.