Real-life Achievements

[Siewart]

In the past four years a new way of making people addicted to their video-game has been growing. These, usually referred to as achievements, are mechanism that introduce additional tasks in a game that challenges the player to do more difficult tasks. These tasks are recorded on a community page for that game so others can see it. This will create a competition between players to show off what you have achieved in the game. So the best way to describe an achievement is probably a decoration or award they use in the army.

 

Some games unlock even more parts of the game when you achieve an achievement, like new weapons for characters to play with. A good example is probably Team Fortress 2. This game is developed by Valve as a game to experiment with, one of these experiments were adding new achievements. By achieving enough of them you would receive a new weapon a specific character. Because TF2 is a competitive game and the new weapons would allow for new tactics everyone wanted to get these weapons. 

 

I think this mechanism could also be used in Qarma as a "real-life achievement" system. The question that arises here is what is the difference from this system and the hedon/dolor system? Because all users have the same list of achievements to achieve these are more target at social issues. Also because they have the same list they can compare the achievements easier. Also the award could be different, I think a specific award would be a nice addition. If the only way to get this specific award is to achieve an achievement, a person will be more motivated to get this achievement. 

 

Because these achievements are target to social problems a new thought comes to mind. What if we give for example, each city a list of achievement that can be achieved by any resident in that city. You could create an competition between cities for example who has less litter on the streets. This will be hard to make fair because of the different amount of users per city. Another thing we could do is to award an entire city when the city has achieved that goal. The award could be in any form, from a physical new fountain in the park to a fountain in you virtual garden.

 

This has been done in Team Fortress as well, although this was not called an Achievement. Two of the characters in TF2 had to kill eachother. So if A killed B, A got a point, but if B killed A, B got a point. At the end the character with the most killed received a new weapon to unlock. (This was unlocked for all players, but only for one character. Because of the players character preference this was a very interesting concept.)

 

Another problem is time, eventually a player will take 100 pills or have a whole month without forgetting to take pills. Or they could no longer be relevant after some time, like using less water, is only really relevant in the summer. So achievements should be updated constantly. Achievements that have been achieved will be stored, but not on the front page of your community page.

 

This concept could also be used for big companies. Like MC Donalds that tries to promote their new (healthy) salad. For each salad you buy you get a point and after 10 points you achieved the achievement, which gives you a free MCFlurry. This is already done of course with stamp cards, but achievements will also give the web presence of the stamp card, which could lead to more publicity for the MCSalad.

 

[eliens]

nice contribution, the actual challenge though, as I see it, is to arrive at a calculus of hedons, dolors and collectons, in short something as a hedonic of felicific calculus, related to utility theory, which then may result, for example, in appropriate (context-dependent) achievemenents, suitably visualized.

[Siewart]

Could you disable the approve before publish setting? Or is this a mechanism you use to get a notification of a new blog post? (Or as the intended bullshit filter)

[eliens]

it is indeed a bs filter, but next blog of yours will be approved with full permission for all your future contributions