

Creating the Illusion of Accomplishment - zimbabwe
http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/07/creating-the-illusion-of-accomplishment/

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JabavuAdams
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? :(

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10ren
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...

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KC8ZKF
Don't all computer games give an illusion of accomplishment? Isn't it just a
matter of degree?

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Jumbo135
I think the team work and bonding carry over.

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

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zimbabwe
Should I edit the title to mention that it's about game design? (Though the
thoughts in this article could easily relate to the idea of designing web
sites using leaderboards and user scoring to maintain user attention online,
if you want to make that leap.)

~~~
spitfire
I was making a joke about the irrational hubris and hype from
startups/dotcoms. Forget about it, it was a neat read regardless.

~~~
zimbabwe
Heh, whoops. Ignore me, I need sleep.

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psawaya
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.

