Microsoft Visual Studio as a Game

A team at Microsoft has created a gamification (if you will) extension for Visual Studio 2010: Visual Studio Achievements, which adds points for various Visual Studio actions. Full video about it at this link.

As you can tell, it’s on the ironic side of things, but it comes complete with a leaderboard.

Ars Technica has done us the favor of reviewing Visual Studio as a game, perhaps not the funniest post ever, but still.

The gameplay can be very uneven. Some play sessions are an exercise in frustration. It can be difficult to even create a dungeon in the first place, and the game gives few indications of what you’re doing wrong. When it comes to hunting down the monsters within the dungeon, you’re really on your own. But the experience can also be rich and rewarding. The spell-casting system is enormously flexible and varied, and the resulting constructions can be exquisite.

It’s all very Jesse Schell, but I think it points what to we could call the game-vs-tool problem inherent in the idea of gamification: it’s perfectly fine for a game to set up an arbitrary point system, because that then is what matters in the game.

But when I am programming, I am the one who knows that is or isn’t important in what I am trying to do, and somebody else’s point system is likely to be in conflict with my own personal goals.

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