Creating the Illusion of Accomplishment

My co-workers and I play Left 4 Dead at lunch. The game requires intense team-work for you to succeed. Since we started playing, the best of us have gotten so much faster, more perceptive, and attuned to the notifications and strategies of the game. When we're playing well, it's awesome. Pure flow and desperate competition. It takes me about an hour to come down off the high of a good game.

Thing is, there's another game -- kind of a real-time-strategy one. It's called life. I wonder what else we could have done with those hours? :(

Accomplishment is a matter of framing; you can get a powerful sense of it by visualizing some simple outcome (e.g. drawing a short line), then doing it, and then comparing the (remembered) blank space, your visualization, and the result. You have changed reality through your will; you are an agent; you have an impact on the world.

I think this is the basis of all sense of accomplishments - it's just a matter of what you allow yourself to count as a "real" one. After all, what is your contribution to any accomplishment but a complicated conditional sequence of perceptions, judgments and actions? You can raise the bar (for misery punctuated by brief moments of joy), or lower the bar (so every moment is ecstatically joyous). I prefer the latter, but seem to spend most of my time in the former...

Don't all computer games give an illusion of accomplishment? Isn't it just a matter of degree?

I thought this was going to be about startups. I was wrong.

I think the theory of game play is fascinating, and some of those games were very clever in their design. But I feel as though using only the Sunk Cost Fallacy, as the author calls it, to motivate a player to finish your game isn't enough. I play games for fun, and I think that games that keep you doing repetitive behavior just because you've already so much of it start to feel more like a job than a game.