Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

I've been wondering why it is so easy to stay motivated in repetitive games, but not in work. Maybe it is time to add bonus quests, experience points, badges and leveling to the issue tracker.

Or maybe not - by now I am actually sick of that kind manipulation, to the point that I don't even want to try foursquare.

View on HN

Isn't that simply because work is harder? This is one end of spectrum, and the other one is laying on the beach doing nothing, which becomes tiresome even sooner. Games are somewhere in between--something for the brain to chew on the edge of boredom.

Harder in what sense, though? Both playing WoW and programming I sit perched in front of a computer, nearly motionless.

True the quests in WoW are all prepared in nice little chunks and don't require much brain power. But a lot of programming is not really hard, either. Especially for web programming there usually is a cookbook for achieving what you want.

Maybe it just needs to be chopped down into smaller chunks, too.

I think the solution is to have multiple colored lights that flash like a game show whenever you finish off a certain task. Makes it seem more important than if you had just made a little mental note of it

At my old job we had a few Ambient Orbs (https://www.myambient.com/productDetail/OrbBeaconSupportPage...) hooked up to serial ports on our PCs and had a Ruby server polling our logging db for different activities (commits to the repo, errors on live, etc...) and would change the colors on the Orbs accordingly using their developer API.

This is actually a good point. StackOverflow showed that badges work and not only in games. Probably not for your internal company tracker, but for an open source project, an issue tracker with badges, quests (you've got steps in there already, just follow them!) might be a light-hearted way to get people interested and motivated to contribute to it.

It's just because games are intentionally designed to keep the player engaged, but work isn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com