
DevShop: The Cool Game that Makes Development Look Fun - lt
http://www.secretgeek.net/devshop_i.asp
======
michaelcampbell
Wait, what? Development IS fun. Bull$#@! corporate politics is not. (And yes,
I understand the nature of humanity and all that.)

------
Tichy
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.

~~~
pp
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.

~~~
Tichy
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.

~~~
tsestrich
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

~~~
dolinsky
At my old job we had a few Ambient Orbs
([https://www.myambient.com/productDetail/OrbBeaconSupportPage...](https://www.myambient.com/productDetail/OrbBeaconSupportPage/serialPrefix/R/))
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.

