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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.

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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.

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