The Times They Are-a-Changin'.

Stand back and squint, and Apple is moving towards being everywhere.

They've been "hip" for a few years now, ever since the iPod, but under this hipness lies a push towards ubiquity. Not ubiquity in the sense of universal wifi or cell network coverage, but ubiquity across any one particular person's day.

When, once, Apple was just a computer company, now many people spend their entire day utilizing Apple devices. Your alarm clock is fueled by your iPod. Your phone calls, texts, and tweets happen through your iPhone. When you are at a computer, it's an Apple computer.

In a broad way, as more and more Apple devices utilize WiFi, bluetooth, and cellular connectivity, Apple is actually moving all of your data "into the cloud"- off of any one platform and on to, effectively, all platforms.

And increasingly, Apple is coming in to competition with Google.

Strange, to think that a hardware company and an internet search company are now vying for the smartphone and micro-computer market. A lot changes in five years.

But it begs the question: what is Microsoft now?

Irrelevant?

What To-Do Lists Can Learn From Video Game Design

For five or six years now I've been a Mac-Owner, so for most of my adult life I have not been a computer gamer. All through high school I played PC games, but when I switched to Mac, the combination of limited game availability, the entrance into college, and the OS's relative beauty kept me out of the gaming habit- I didn't want to blemish this machine clearly meant for artistic productivity with games.

Jokingly, I developed a theory back then, that Windows machines automatically tainted themselves by arriving with the little Minesweeper-and-Solitaire game pack, while macs remained pure.

Then Kongregate arrived, and games returned as part of my life.

Kongregate, as the name implies, is a web-site that gathers together and hosts flash games. Its brilliance as compared to NewGrounds and other sites is in its API.

(API, for those not in the know, stands for Application Programming Interface. An API is an abstraction layer within the programming of an application (a website, a computer game, etc) that lets other applications interact with it in standardized ways. For example, one can embed a YouTube video (rather than linking to the video's YouTube page) into a website because YouTube has written an API that allows any random website to interface with it's video database and draw videos directly out of it.)

Via this API, a game can externalize internal game data in such a way that Kongregate can read it and, from that information, track a user's progress through the games on the site. In addition to the usual goals of any game (IE, beating it, getting the high score), Kongregate implements "Achievement Badges" given out for achieving certain in-betweeng goals (beat the first five levels, hunt 1000 ducks, etc). These badges are worth points on Kongregate itself, turning "the playing of games on Kongregate" into its own meta-game.

Interestingly, many Kongregate Badges are not for achievements that have to do with a game's internal definition of "winning" - they can be for something as anti-winning as "die 1000 times in this game" The badge system actually extends these games, given the players goals that were not even originally coded into the game itself.

(It's a bit like if you were playing Monopoly, but your friends have told you they will buy you pizza if you purposely limited yourself to only buying properties that were being auctioned (as opposed to buying every unowned property you land on, the standard practice in the game). You can ignore them and just play to win, but then you wouldn't get any pizza.)

This is all, of course, incredibly counter-productive (it might even be meta-time-wasting: I am slowly accruing veritable "time wasted points") when it comes to accomplishing real goals in real life.

Or is it?

Another experience I have had recently is with Chore Wars, an online chore-tracking site that frames the doing of chores as one-time-quests and repeatable adventures worthy of experience points, being undertaken by adventurers.

It is not just a set framework though- both the chores and their experience point values are user-extensible.

In addition to experience (an analog of minutes-spent-doing-chores), one can also program in treasures, which serve as tokens of having done any given chore repeatedly. For example, we have a chore in our house's adventure set called "Give Emergency Ride to Housemate" - a chore which as the only person with a car, only I can ever really complete. It gives XP and Gold, but also a "Ride Token". Looking at my total number of ride-tokens gives me an instant sense of how often I give people rides to school (IE, how often they miss the bus).

Where things get interesting is the bonus chores we have programed in. In order to encourage housemates to clean things up right when they make messes, there are a couple of bonus adventures that one can claim in addition to the chores themselves that reward doing those chores immediately. So if I was to make myself breakfast, and after eating it immediately clean all of my plates and pans and such, I would get not just the 30XP for washing-a-half-load-of-dishes-and-drying-them-too, but a bonus 15XP for "Speed-dishing". If I waited at all before cleaning the dishes, I would do the same amount of work, but loose that extra half-again-as-much XP.

Why does this work? I have no idea. Something in my brain seems to like the idea of more reward for equal work, and so just loves to get those dishes done now, when they are worth more. You would think that this do-it-now-bonus would be ineffective as a psych-out tool, as it was something I myself programed into the reward system, but that doesn't seem to matter to my reward-seeking brain- once the system was in place, I just started trying to work it.

There was an article within the past few years about the way in which World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs design their games specifically with this matrix of work, reward, and micro-milestoning in mind. Players tend to stop playing either within the first ten hours, or after many months/years. The leveling system is designed with this in mind- the first twenty or so levels are a breeze, deliberately short and satisfying as a way to hook new players in, a sort of rapid-power-gain appetizer to a much longer meal. From then on, levels are spaced as a slow curve of increasing time-per-level-gained, but rewards stop being about levels and start being other things- quest items, badges, etc.

A balance must be struck between making the game hard enough to be challenging, but rewarding enough to be fun- the game designers aim for a mix of easy-and-rewarding, hard-and-rewarding, and easy-and-rewarding, with just a hint of hard-and-unrewarding thrown in to add "grit" or "real challenge", but try try to keep the areas of the game separate, so that at any given level you are attempting only the challenging-and-rewarding bits.

How, you might ask, could this possibly extend beyond chores and games, into actual productive creation and work?

Easily, especially since I am already enmeshed in David Allen's Getting Things Done system, which requires the creation of a dozen or so to-do-lists as well as a weekly review system.

All of my lists have tick-boxes- completing any one action or project is like gaining a small achievement badge, and I have built into these lists meta-badges. Specifically, at the beginning of the day I write down a short list of the three or four Most Important Tasks I want (or need) to get done that day. Checking off those three-or-four boxes lets me check off a larger meta-checkbox- "Did Most Important Tasks Today"

Like Kongregate and and Chore Wars, these meta-goals don't even need to be directly related to the various projects that the lists are ostensibly tracking. They can be as abstract as the busy-making "Check off 40 things actions before bedtime", a meta-task which might not get me further down any one project, but which will probably encourage the cleaning up of a lot of little loose ends.

A week where I can check that box off every day is a special week, and worthy of a real little token of achievement, a meta-meta badge, like the ride tokens or an "impossible" badge on Kongregate, a holy grail of productivity-pride.

Such meta-tasking may seem a little odd and maybe a waste of time, but I find that the more I get things accomplished, the more I enjoy the sweet sweet satisfaction of checking things off.

It is that same part of my brain that Kongregate and Chore Wars scratches, the competition against others combined with-a-series-of-small-milestones combined with a slightly biased reward system part of my brain that loves to replicate models of these little systems and figure out the best way to work them, the part that loves... not cheating, but working the system effectively.

In a way, I am outfoxing my own mind, cajoling it to play a game that it can't resist playing, but setting up that game in a way that is fully conscious of the way I tend to work games, and guards against ways I might play the system that will win within the system but fail at turning that in-system productivity into real life productivity.

Refresh Rate of the Real World Update [Digital Density]

Looks like Google Maps just rolled out a panning-between-photos-of-the-same-object navigation utility for the geo-tagged user photos that Street View now incorporates, in a manner similar to Microsoft's Photosynth but all in-browser.

Here's the Tower Bridge in London.

Excellent.