Make a game out of doing real world stuff. Ie- I get points for running a 5k, points for skydiving,etc. Now people can cheat, but if you added in proofs like pictures/getting your friends to endorse that you did it, that would be cool.
There are a few really interesting things that came out of the project. First off, getting people to participate is hard. Without friends or others publicly participating it is less fun and becomes a list of achievements / resume / bragsheet / etc. No one wants to have the fewest achievements. Verifying or other similar proof is difficult. There are plenty of technical solutions but balancing them is key. I ran through a lot of combination and there is a fine line between the verifying processing being clumsy/difficult and being trivially hackable. There have been a lot of unsuccessful attempts in this seemingly obvious space[1,2].
I have continued thinking about this and would love to be involved in creating such an application. Currently I'm bootstrapping which doesn't match up well with this sort of project so it was shelved.
I think a successful real life achievement app is likely to start out with a small team including design and marketing. So it's unlikely to be bootstrapped, at least by me. But, never say never. Something simple may very well be better than the bloat that is out there. Anything that relies on facebook or iphone won't be the overall winner. It needs to be broader than that. There just aren't enough people comfortable with facebook or using their iphone. Since a successful implementation of the idea involves the network effect the winner will need to be ubiquitous. I guess that is just another way of saying it'll likely be a webapp first then a mobile app and facebook app second.
Some interesting related attempts:
[1] Life Points http://apps.facebook.com/getlifepoints/
[2] Booyah http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/93475-Booyah-Bring... who knows what happened to it ... but it is now "MyTown!" http://www.booyah.com/
EDIT: syntax... owned by markup.
It talks about the history of objects, the future that Schell talks about, and then what's next after that... 'biots.'
Is this kind of like what scvngr is doing?
scvngr.com is just the sort of platform that could enable a real life achievement app.
I don't think that real life achievements necessarily imply location. For instance, an achievement where you "Watched every episode of Friends" is interesting and something people may enjoy finding out about you... but it didn't happen in a single location. Or necessarily a single time.
But that is my take on it. I may be wrong. scvngr.com definitely do it right and it's more interesting to me than foursquare. scvngr.com is ideal for city councils, the smithsonian and universities to create great user experiences in certain locations but focuses too much on location. In my opinion there is room for an even broader application.