Comment by gbalduzzi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbalduzzi | Hacker News Reader

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The article does explain the comparison, and it doesn't mean that it's fun.

These are the actual comparisons:

> You interact with people from all corners of the world.

> You complete tasks on different online platforms (Slack, GitHub, VS Code, Google Docs, etc.).

> You have a list of your main quests to complete (you can find them in your journ… Kanban board!)

> There are also side-quests to take care of (“Hey Damian, could you take a look at this bug?”).

> Sometimes you can gang up with your teammates to slay a big beast (“Hey, I have this nasty bug that I have been working on for the past few days. I know you have better knowledge of this particular part of the repository, could we jump on a pair programming session?”).

> And you get to level up once in a while!

> > You have a list of your main quests to complete (you can find them in your journ… Kanban board!)

Wish I've been to a place that gave you only one quest journal. The fewest distinct quest journals I ever got to is four: the mailbox, the blessed Jira/Gitlab Issues/Kanban/Trello/whatever board, the personal list of things to be done that don't belong anywhere else, and the TODO/FIXME comments in the codebase.

That's a minimum. In one places I had like 4 distinct issue boards in active use.

Point being, there's one other major thing other than fun, that games have and work doesn't: videogame UX doesn't suck, and wants to help you do your quests.

Sounds like a business opportunity.

And so a fifth quest journal was born and provided to every employee.

don't forget the "there's an XKCD for that"!

https://xkcd.com/927/

I find the game analogy silly. Of course reality is "like" a game – games are inspired by and modeled after reality, after all!

If you flip it around to say "games are like working at a remote job", then the flaw becomes obvious. A remote job is not like playing all games – only the ones with activities that mirror what we already do in real life. Which is, ultimately, not a very interesting statement.

These are all things that we were doing in person as well...is in person work not a video game that pays then?

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