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Comment by FredFredrickson | Hacker News Reader

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FredFredrickson

Seems like a janky way to do things, to be honest.

Achievements for productivity software? Seriously.

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Achievements for productivity software? Seriously.

Achievements can be used as motivation, increasing productivity. Makes sense to me.

I can see it now -- BWOOOOSH -- ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED -- TYPED 1000 WORDS IN AN HOUR

Honestly -- this could definitely work for someone like me. I'm addicted to micro-achievement alerts

If you use Visual Studio, you can get this ;) http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio

I used that, then I ran into the bug that was causing building to fail, with an error that gave no indication it was the plugin that was the cause. I haven't touched it since, but it was fun for a while. I definitely wouldn't use it for anything that you do for work.

Achievements might work as motivation for some but it can also easily divert attention from work to simply 'hunting' achievements especially if you are competing with colleagues.

With the example of the visual studios achievements (http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio) that a few has already posted here, there are even achievements 'just for fun' that doesn't exactly encourage productive work. For example the 'Go To Hell' achievement for using a goto statement.

It's also useful for teaching new features. If you are mindful of the existence of achievements, you might check the list once in a while and see something like "Fast Copy - Use Ctrl-C to copy something instead of clicking on the button!"

The best thing about achievements are that they teach you new ways to play a game (IMO). When I play a game with well-designed achievements, I'm constantly learning: "Oh, I can approach enemies this way." Or they make me try a new weapon type: "Oh, this weapon is effective in this situation, now I will update my default play-style." I would love to have such achievements for Emacs, because I feel like I don't use it to its potential, but I also don't have a good sense of directions to explore.

If you're already comfortable, the next best thing to do is start reading the Emacs manual from start to finish.

You'll soon run across things you don't take advantage of (it was registers and org-mode for me).

Just play a round of `M-x keywiz` each morning.

I would recommend: When you want to customise the behaviour of some command, don't google for the answer. Instead do `C-h f` or `C-h k` to read the built-in documentation for that function or key. From the help screen, click the link to view the function's source code -- if you don't see that link install the "emacs-el" package (using your system's package manager). See what variables that function uses. Do `C-h v` to read the documentation for each variable.

If you like this approach, I've written a guide (http://david.rothlis.net/emacs/customize_c.html) which, at 3,000 words, is half the length of the Emacs manual table of contents.

Achievements in business apps are getting tons of traction now. My startup has an achievement engine which we've plugged into things such as Salesforce.com

http://iactionable.com

While it is odd, it is steam's built in feed back mechanism. Dev's get notified of them and can track user progress. They use them in games for post release analysis of what users found hard and such. Bringing that concept to app software will hopefully help show which are the 20% of features used by 80% of their customers, or rough spots that could be smoothed.

Just look at stack exchange. It's gamification is part of what makes it so rewarding to use.

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