Jesse Schell @ DICE 2010

    Yes it's definitely coming, even more so because it will be funded by an industry that is exponentially bigger than the gaming industry and is currently struggling to find new ways to grow: Advertisement media.

    You could see it coming when they started attaching labels to flies and releasing them in rooms so people would see the message when swapping them away

    At my daytime job we actually discussed this a couple of months ago in our programmer team; that we should try to implement game play ideas into our product more so that the whole experience because more fun. We're making an ERP soloution/Economy software for small businesses.

    And here I thought I was clever and being the only one who thought of this idea.

    All software companies need to implement an achievement system for their products so that when you do something you've never done before (that is hopefully productive and does not involve system crashes) you get an achievement. For example, when you create a pivot table in Excel you get an achievement.

    Ok maybe unrealistic but in terms of health care there is a book I read last year called "TH3 NUM3RATI" that features a section on implementing some dubious big brother monitoring systems into people's homes to more accurately track medical data on a daily/hourly/minutebyminute basis as opposed to annual checkups that tell doctors nothing without overall context of a patient's life in the year since the last checkup.

    Speaking of run-on sentences...

    ...you could implement a health and wellness achievement system where your activities are tracked and you get achievement points for exercise and "contra" achievements for engaging in activities like smoking. The best part is there is absolutely no chance of privacy rights being violated (wait...that doesn't sound right ) and it will solve this nagging healthcare debate in the US.

    [Blocked Image: https://migrationtest.mapcore.org/public/style_emoticons/default/mapcore_smilies/emot_shakehead.gif]

    I taught a game design class and tried using an achievement-style system for grading / attendance... it failed because that meant I had to keep track of said achievements and it was a total pain the ass. I mean, it sounds great in theory, but without a computer (or an underpaid aide) to track and log everything for you in the real world, then it's really not worth the relatively meager gains.

    Quote from Campaignjunkie

    I taught a game design class and tried using an achievement-style system for grading / attendance... it failed because that meant I had to keep track of said achievements and it was a total pain the ass. I mean, it sounds great in theory, but without a computer (or an underpaid aide) to track and log everything for you in the real world, then it's really not worth the relatively meager gains.

    It would take you about a days work with any programmer tool to make that job take you 5 minutes.

    Wow. Sounds like a sick world IMO. Could be fun, but jesus that would be super annoying. When you are controlled by games\apps, then you have a major malfunction and you need to be unfucked\unplugged. I remember me and my brothers obsession with Tamagochi (sp?), and that was sickening, now imagine that times 1000.

    Quote from Skjalg

    It would take you about a days work with any programmer tool to make that job take you 5 minutes.

    Or you could set up a spreadsheet to do the whole thing in no time. Unless you were using Openoffice Calc, which would corrupt itself after 3 minutes for no reason.

    I was talking about this with a friend of mine when walking back from work and he wondered if he could use it to improve his attempts to learn Chinese. Though we agreed any kind of grindable achievements (i.e. learn hanzi) would actually be bad as you would be too eager to move on, forget things and burn out. So it probably is better restricted to daily things, deadlines and chain bonuses. Real life experience points, serious business.

    Anyway, I'm sure it would be slightly more cumbersome than imagined as you'd need some systems in place to stop it being exploited. There are already people who try and get xbox achievements by fiddling with their xbox and they are just some meaningless number, not used for discounts and free credit (as in the Dr Pepper and tattoo examples) which would require something very secure - and that is less a reality than putting small chips and wifi in everything. Ex: I would drink Dr. Pepper five days in a row for a bonus (it's lovely after all) but I wouldn't log into my Dr. Pepper account and pass a captcha before I drank it.

    2 years ago, when my achievement points addiction was at its height, I would've loved to have these kinds of scores all over the place in everything.

    Nowadays, I really want less of these kinds of points since I know how destructive it can be when you get properly hooked on em, but I also acknowledge that its something that everybody is doing to keep people playing their games.

    On a side note, then I think stuff like this makes it even more interesting, and cooler, that Bioware decided to more or less take out the visible XP system from Mass Effect 2. It's something that is being put into almost any genre these days, and its actually pleasantly refreshing to see somebody do an RPG and not go that route, even if experience points are heavily associated with RPG in general.

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