Gamification is getting more and more rampant in our everyday life, and while some people consider this a problem, I am not one of those people. That being the case, Onefeat sounds like a terrific idea to me. The concept is simple: you embark on “missions,” take pictures of things or of yourself doing things, submit them, and gain xp. As you level up, not only do you get more, increasingly difficult missions and more meaningless rewards but you also get a growing collection of (theoretically) awesome pictures of yourself and your friends.
The creators of Onefeat were inspired by FourSquare but found its game aspect to be lacking. One of Onefeat’s co-founders Souheil Medaghri, put it this way in an interview with The Next Web:
These [geolocation] games define you based only on where you go, not what you do. Locations are such small parts of our lives compared to all the amazing things people can do everyday. We are missing a big chunk of what real life is. Let’s forget geolocation for a while.
For all the cool potential of this service, there are a few details that are still up in the air, or at least not readily accessible from the outside looking in. You gain experience by completing the feats, which instruct you to “find the oldest thing in your room,” for example. Ok, well who verifies that? Now I know that the honor system should be sufficient for a project like this and I’m not suggesting that someone needs to carbon-date everything else in the room in question in order for xp to be recieved, but is there anything in place to keep users from continually submitting bogus, random pictures? Maybe crowd-sourced voting? Success is always more satisfying in contrast with the possibility of failure.
Either way, Onefeat is young and currently in an invite-only stage, so there is plenty of time to fine-tune the way the system works. Regardless of the way the cyber-badges and nominal rewards are doled out, it seems like a cool project and a good reason to run around taking pictures of yourself; we all need another good reason to run around taking pictures of ourselves.
(via The Next Web)
