I want to learn about gamification but all I see is same-ification “You don’t know you’re born,” they would say to me during my first holiday job. “You don’t know you’re a sad, blubber-arsed freeloader coasting towards retirement,” I’d reply… in my head, of course. Out loud, I would complain that they were being unfair, and I would be slapped down with that most frustrating of clichés “Life’ …
"Wales is, of course, so small that it could fit inside Wales."
Thank you Dabbsy, that was exactly the pick me up I needed right now!
Also, thank you for creating yet another metal sub-genre - I'll start using the term "Butt-Metal" from now on whenever I think it fits.
Have a nice weekend anyway, everyone!
"So this is what gamification is all about? Doing the same old thing again and again but with better water particle effects, backed by $100m and determined by a roomful of blokes? No wonder I went off gaming."
What you on about? There has been 12 versions of Call of Duty and they all had different story lines.
http://bit.ly/28RkQ1I
What you on about? There has been 12 versions of Call of Duty and they all had different story lines.
I don't give a flying toss about story lines. I want to pick up a joystick (remember those), blast some aliens, beat a high score and then go out. I don't want to have to use 600 different controls and endure 45 minute tutorial and 30 minutes of a lame story line.
Ah the gold old days, when everything was amazing...
This post has been deleted by its author
It's still the echo chamber of the music industry and likewise seems to be run by grumpy old gits who only care about the next tuppence in booster fees or whatever their bakshish is called. I can't recall them ever contributing to anything in the way of development in music except to promote sales of predestined material. And as long as I can remember the old gits refer to yoof as "the MTV generation" as if it's somehow what inspired us all to become the mediocre nuisances they project us to be.
After watching Braindead I realised: it's all just an elaborate plot to get us to buy Cars singles and become host to alien Formicidea.
Gamification has nothing to do with games. It's about taking something inherently boring, and making it fun in a dopamine pathway / skinner box way.
Say you wanted to encourage teh Yoof to post on El Reg. Well they're not just going to do it on their own because stringing emoji-less sentences is hard and boring. You need to reward them, so after 10 posts with at least 1 upvote each, you give them a bronze star archiement, and the screen explodes in confetti "WELL DONE, YOU'RE AWESOME!".
Then you sell them 50 gems for £19.99
Nailed it. And, I'll add, there's no money in it as a side job for the struggling indie game developer. When a prospective client talks about Gamification, it means they're untrustworthy morally bankrupt scumbags who are desperate for cash and clueless to the fact that Peak Gamification happened 5 years ago and the world's immune to it now.
Plus, there's zero synergy. Gamedev is a tour de force of interesting programming challenges. Gamification is the worst of webdev, mobile apps, social surveillance, and cloud crapification.
Anon because don't want to give clients any ideas.
@ massivelySerial, I gave you an upvote but you really deserve several plus a couple of beers.
I came home hot, tired and ready for my nap but I laughed out loud at your comment and I'm ready for a beer or several myself.
Talking of old git phrases, back in my yoof we had park keepers, Parkies in common parlance.
They always had a stick with a nail in the end for picking up litter, however,if they caught us up to no good they would wave the stick at us and shout " Gercher cowsun!" "Gerrahtavit!" and then chase us.
I get cowsun as obviously being disparaging about one's origins but I would like to know what Gercher derives from.
Anyone?
Bootnote: Putting penny bangers down the chimney of their hut (yes I am that old) usually produced much more colourful language.
"Gamification has nothing to do with games. It's about taking something inherently boring, and making it fun in a dopamine pathway / skinner box way."
This. It is on par with adding more nicotine to cigarettes. Or worse, adding nicotine to ice cream. IT IS EVIL... for the most part.
This. It is on par with adding more nicotine to cigarettes. Or worse, adding nicotine to ice cream. IT IS EVIL... for the most part.
How is killing the boring and getting people to actually want to do something bad?
Unless you are an irredentist Marxist-Leninist who needs to rip the ugly façade of hidden oppression and exploitation off everything and generally is an unfunny guy who bemoans austerity even as your representative just got a 20% payrise?
Well said.
I happen to work in a Japanese games studio and:
1) There are plenty of talented women in the industry here
2) They aren't completely unaware of the world (at least anymore), and hey they employ immigrants like me
3) There is a lot of hard work and original ideas that go into games (at least in the studio's I've been involved with)
Still have a pint for making me giggle about wales ;)
I don't think we can just blame yoof for having repetitious retread games. They've always had a sameyness about them.
I dearly wanted to get into playing games, ever since they were in text only.
But every game I tried would start or quickly arrive at a random dark location where you had to randomly discover an exit by repeatedly trying, dying and starting again until you got the right sequence.
And long before I ever reached that point I'd just think Stuff it. There are better things to do with my life.
And here I am pressing these same old keys to write same old words in a somewhat different order in hopes of staving off existential dread for another couple of moments instead of submitting to the illusion that playing chess will increase my intellectual powers as long as I keep defeating the next Boss...
Or perhaps, you should note the correlation that you don't like either the music today, or the games today, and equally so it seems. If the music is terrible, perhaps the games are too, in actuality? Perhaps all of us want better but don't have it, or don't understand what it takes to get better.
Another irritating statement about the lack of women in programming. So what? There seems to be a lack of breastfeeding men in the world. We should do something about it! Or not.
Nothing is holding women back from developing. Games, productivity software, whatever. I think there is less bias than the media (looking at you Alister) would have you think. The fact is, women just don't find it interesting so they pursue other career interests. This isn't a bad thing. Women and men don't have to think the same and want the same things for there to be perfection in the world. We are different and that's how it should be. Otherwise the world would be quite boring.
As a side note, when I was last contracting at the Evil Large Software Company in the Redmond Area, there were actually quite a number of women in programming and systems roles. Those who want to do it will, those who don't will do something else.
John 104 --- In a sense I agree. Perhaps this will resolve itself as more of today's female gamers grow up and some of them become game devs. At the moment gaming can be more than a bit female-unfriendly. Not because the girls are no good at it, but because of established culture.
Both my wife (who is a racing genius) and my daughter (FPS boss) have to play with gender-neutral IDs and with their mic's off because it just gets somewhat unpleasant, especially when they're winning (as usual). I don't believe in positive discrimination but I can't wait for it all to become a bit less sexist.
Once there was a band called MC5 which if there ever was such a band single-handedly laid the foundations for heavy metal, punk, grunge and the future of rock generally.
They had a guitarist. More than one in fact. Incidentally to explain their sound and how they were different from The Who, they had a rhythm guitarist who played rhythm guitar the way Keith Moon played the drums.
Wayne Kramer gives a lecture here :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qgSBrgZlzM
on the dumbing down of music generally in the past 50 to 70 years. Helps to explain why the average attention span of today's pimply-faced teen or aging fart rock fan such as yours truly is 3 seconds. That's how long it takes to "get" the musical idea of the piece, if any, then you can move on.
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