Netflix Achievements (A Design Suggestion) | Hacker News Reader

Netflix Achievements (A Design Suggestion)

philosophistry.com

29 pointsphilipkd18 comments

I wonder if it's a beneficial thing to add extrinsic motivation to view a work of art. Shouldn't most of the value come from the work itself?

I imagine some people thinking: "This show sucks, but if I watch 3 more seasons I can get the badge like all my friends." Then the notion of Netflix could shift from highly individualized recommendations to novel social game to lowest common denominator social chore.

I like the idea, but not everything needs to be social. I've been slowly working through certain collections of movies, and if I could add them automatically to my queue, that would be great.

I have no need to 'show off' to my friends, because my Netflix queue is highly personalized to me. But, it would certainly make it easier to feel like you had a grasp on any certain body of work (such as my current obsession: everything directed or produced by Scorsese).

On a personal perspective, the achievements feel more like a fun "to-do" list. I often don't know what movie to watch, and having a list to go through and check stuff off of (aka, "Oscar Winners in 2010") would give more direction on what to watch next.

Part of Netflix's business model is about trying to avoid encouraging everybody to watch the same things, meaning that they don't need to stock many copies of each movie.

Heck, part of Netflix's business model is encouraging you to forget to watch DVDs for weeks at a time. They've got no interest in making you power through arbitrary lists of films.

No affiliation, but http://www.icheckmovies.com/ is based around a similar concept.

This is great. I created the achievements mock-up article primarily because I was excited about tracking my National Film Registry movies. And this site has that! Thanks!

Having a todo list with predicted ratings is really great.

If I built this, I'd be sure to allow ratings without a corresponding rentals, for DVDs, DVRs, etc.

Even without achievements, I've played with Greasemonkey scripts to sort by predicted rating & made an effort to turn around the DVDs quickly. It did start feeling like work instead of play, so I cut back a bit.

Great username. Did you get that from a book?

I think Charles Stross' "Lobsters," the first part of Accelerando, was one of a couple of stories I stumbled on in quick succession that used the term "pronoiac," & I liked the idea.

Edit: If anyone else's wondering, a pronoiac's the opposite of a paranoiac - someone who thinks people are working behind his back to help him. It's a mindset I try to cultivate.

Have there been any successful applications of the "achievements" model outside actual video games? People talk about it a lot, I don't think I've ever seen it done.

I also don't think my life needs any more pointless random goals set by somebody else. I have enough pointless and random goals of my own.

Sometimes Achievements can be for things you were going to do anyway but now you have a way to prove/show off that you did it.

http://stackoverflow.com/users - Jon Skeet probably doesn't go out of his way to earn points and achievements. Its just a biproduct of his actions and a good/measurable reputation followed.

Works pretty well on StackOverflow. And credit card rewards/miles/etc are _kind of_ like achievements.

Not really - credit card rewards/miles offer a real reward for doing something, achievements in the way Xbox does it (and everyone copies thoughtlessly) does not. I can exchange my points for something of tangible value to me - I doubt people would care about credit card points if they were purely for shits and giggles.

Achievements are fascinating, and MS certainly has pulled it off admirably. But whenever I hear of a web startup doing achievements and other game mechanics, I can't help but feel that it often is simply trying to mask the fact that their service offers insufficient value to their user, and they have to inject "socialness" to make it more attractive.

Netflix's discontinuation of the friends feature, following the discontinuation of multiple queues, has pretty much proven them more feature-averse than Apple. Could this be done by a third party through the API, though?

As far as I know, after the backlash following the announcement of the planned discontinuation of multiple queues, they backed out and left them in place.

At least, my wife and I still have our separate queues.

This is a cool idea for Rails Rumble this fall. Hmm...

I recently wrote about the psychological elements behind fun game/webapp design, elaborating on a very cool UX presentation:

http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/why-games-are-fun-the-psy...

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