Gamifying Github
coderwall.com
coderwall.com
Few things feel as rewarding as getting a pull request accepted. Even filing a bug with enough detail that the project owner is able to take action feels great.
But, that's how software developers are wired; I get a rush when I make something work. I suppose the challenge is drawing more people into that cycle of participation and reward, but it's an angle of the game I'm not sure this project addresses.
There is good gamification and bad gamification. Bad gamification is slapping extrinsic rewards (or a contrived story) on top of an interaction. Good gamification amplifies the intrinsic rewards of a particular behavior – to increase the feeling of fun, flow, or accomplishment of the player. Players know bad gamification when they see it, because it doesn’t take their interests into consideration. Good gamification aligns the needs of both designer and player.
With coderwall, there's no way I'm going to alter my behavior in order to get badges on it. But it's fun - very fun - to see what badges appear, and to compare myself to other people. Coding is something that's already super personal, it's something people do for fun already, and thus I find it very unlikely that someone's going to come away from coderwall feeling something like, "I just slaved away on this code that was exciting to create and all I got was this stupid badge. Damn you coderwall! Damn you for manipulating me into doing something I'm proud of!"
My experience with coderwall was that it was very amusing to see the badges I'd gotten, and the fact that I had more than some people I know provided me with data for gloating. But will it send me on a downward spiral, making me grind away at programming so that I can get the "Forked 500" badge while I increasingly lose contact with reality? Will it make me feel like I've been gamed when I do someday create a project that's been forked 500 times? I doubt it.
Then again that is a pretty awesome looking badge.
I was thinking about creating 100 fake github accounts to fork/follow my projects to get a badge ;) j/k
I too believe this kind of "gamification" is a nice addon. It's optional - hell it's even outside of the system. If I don't want to use it I don't have to. The bad kind of gamification is the one that is forced upon you.
You don't need to do that: you can force any real account to watch your project by adding them as a committer.
You're already altering your behaviour by checking out badges and comparing yourself to other people.
This is like adding points and badges to brushing your teeth. You're still going to brush your teeth but now you get a notification that you earned some points and a badge and hey do you wanna compare yourself to your friends and create an artificially competitive atmosphere? It isn't FUN to view stats and numbers unless you're the type of technocrat who believes in the supremacy of quantification.
Somewhere a copywriter felt a disturbance in the force..
> "Thanks for joining. During our beta we can only handle so many new accounts (due to API throttle limits and all). The current demand has us a little backlogged. Your expected wait time is currently 5 days in this queue."
Folks may also be interested in http://calendaraboutnothing.com/ which keeps track of your commit streak in hope of building a chain of committing every day.
(Since this github authorization thing was new to me, I didn't grant it. Paranoid, sure.)
They could just use the JSONp version of the API and trust that users aren't going to submit bad data about their own account (theyd only be cheating themselves.) This way, they wouldn't be subject to API usage limits.
(Typo spotted past the edit timeout.)
btw. is there a list of other github apps? calendaraboutnothing was nice too. have some free time toady that I'd like to waste :)