

Netflix Achievements (A Design Suggestion) - philipkd
http://philosophistry.com/archives/2010/07/netflix-achievements.html

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stratospark
I wonder if it's a beneficial thing to add extrinsic motivation to view a work
of art. Shouldn't most of the value come from the work itself?

I imagine some people thinking: "This show sucks, but if I watch 3 more
seasons I can get the badge like all my friends." Then the notion of Netflix
could shift from highly individualized recommendations to novel social game to
lowest common denominator social chore.

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limedaring
On a personal perspective, the achievements feel more like a fun "to-do" list.
I often don't know what movie to watch, and having a list to go through and
check stuff off of (aka, "Oscar Winners in 2010") would give more direction on
what to watch next.

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bbatsell
No affiliation, but <http://www.icheckmovies.com/> is based around a similar
concept.

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philipkd
This is great. I created the achievements mock-up article primarily because I
was excited about tracking my National Film Registry movies. And this site has
that! Thanks!

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hugh3
Have there been any successful applications of the "achievements" model
outside actual video games? People talk about it a lot, I don't think I've
ever seen it done.

I also don't think my life needs any more pointless random goals set by
somebody else. I have enough pointless and random goals of my own.

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swilliams
Works pretty well on StackOverflow. And credit card rewards/miles/etc are
_kind of_ like achievements.

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potatolicious
Not really - credit card rewards/miles offer a _real_ reward for doing
something, achievements in the way Xbox does it (and everyone copies
thoughtlessly) does not. I can exchange my points for something of tangible
value to me - I doubt people would care about credit card points if they were
purely for shits and giggles.

Achievements are fascinating, and MS certainly has pulled it off admirably.
But whenever I hear of a web startup doing achievements and other game
mechanics, I can't help but feel that it often is simply trying to mask the
fact that their service offers insufficient value to their user, and they have
to inject "socialness" to make it more attractive.

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mortenjorck
Netflix's discontinuation of the friends feature, following the
discontinuation of multiple queues, has pretty much proven them more feature-
averse than Apple. Could this be done by a third party through the API,
though?

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Timothee
As far as I know, after the backlash following the announcement of the planned
discontinuation of multiple queues, they backed out and left them in place.

At least, my wife and I still have our separate queues.

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cmelbye
This is a cool idea for Rails Rumble this fall. Hmm...

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zackattack
I recently wrote about the psychological elements behind fun game/webapp
design, elaborating on a very cool UX presentation:

[http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/why-games-are-fun-the-
psy...](http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/why-games-are-fun-the-psychology-
explanation/)

