I’ve always been a pretty ardent supporter of gamification, and it’d take a lot to change that. That being said, the addition of achievements to Microsoft Visual Studio via a Windows Phone 7 app authored by Den Delimarsky is weird, but still neat. You wouldn’t think that coding is something that you could add achievements too, but you’d be wrong. Achievements are unlocked for feats like writing a class with a certain amount of public and private members, or an enum with more than 30 fields, and the like. The app is currently in closed beta, and looks promising.
The only issue one might find with this bolted-on achievement platform is that it necessarily has to watch you code. This kind of monitoring isn’t too out of place when you’re playing structured, on-rails video games, but gets a little more disturbing when you move to things like reading habits and maybe hits a high water mark when it comes to coding, an actively creative activity. All that being said, I’m sure the app doesn’t care about what you’re coding and doesn’t report back to the hidden rulers of the government or anything (yet, anyways). And man, achievements are just awesome and I always want more of them.
(via Neowin)
- The social network Onefeat gamifies photo-sharing
- It’s important to have achievement systems at work
- Not everybody loves achievements as much as I do
