This idea has occurred to me a bunch of times - looks like someone has finally gone and done it, and in some style.
When you play a game like World of Warcraft, or even Call of Duty, you do some pretty boring things to get Experience points (XP) or to get new perks or items - kill 100 deer in a forest, or play through several rounds using a low-powered weapon.
I’ve never done either of the above for very long, but when I do, I notice that I’m doing things which are more boring than tasks I’m putting off in real life, just in order to make a slightly meaningless number (XP) increase.
I think we humans just crave progress. Seeing a number increase by our efforts makes us feel like we’re getting somewhere, proves to us that we can change things. The problem is that in WoW, although the all-important number does increase, no real life progress is being made.
I had daydreamed, for example, about a central clearinghouse where you receive XP for charitable donations or volunteering; your Charity XP could be displayed on Facebook for example.
Anyway, RexBox have applied the principle to real-life To-Do lists for their new iPhone app; here’s the pre-release trailer:
More detail at http://www.rexbox.co.uk/epicwin/ .
Published at February 7, 2009
in Tech and Japan.
This morning I found I could no longer switch to the Japanese keyboard layout on my mac - only the US layout was listed. So I went to System Preferences > International > Input menu and looked for the Japanese Input Method (called Kotoeri on the mac). There was no sign of it; here’s how it got fixed in the end.
Check that it’s a preferences / configuration problem:
- Create a new user (System Preferences > Accounts)
- Log out and log in as new user
- If the input methods are displayed correctly for this other user (see below), it must be a settings issue.
Fix the preferences problem:
Note: This is probably relevant for these other Input Methods also, as they disappeared and reappeared along with Japanese (kotoeri):
- Hangul
- Simplified Chinese
- Tamil Input Method
- Traditional Chinese
- Vietnamese UniKey
Published at April 21, 2008
in Tech and Japan.
For the craic, I sometimes call my students by the English translation of their names. For example, I had a student called Minami (南) in the last school year, and she got a kick out of being called South.
This year, a new student called Sekai (世界) arrived, which means I can mentally high-five myself every time I see her and shout “Hello, World!”
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