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.

How to get rid of (more) books (and other things) [Man and Bits of Paper]

The short answer- be persistent.

When we move in a week or two, Rigel and I are taking a single car-load with us, and so to prepare we have been cutting down on even more of our possessions.

Clothing was the easiest- for a few months now I've been using to hanger trick and so it was immediately clear what I hadn't been wearing. I also finally gave up on some of my old t-shirts, many of which have stretched or warped and just fit strangely.

DVDs were a little harder- I had to call not just used video stores but used music stores as well. For some reason, Los Angeles seems to have a dearth of used-whatever stores- we had to drive twenty miles to the DVD-buying place I finally found, and got $40 cash for our troubles, which was cool.

Comics were also easy- we went to Pulp Fiction and traded 15 or 16 used comics (half trade paperbacks, half manga) for 3 new trade paperbacks, which was sweet, though a little counter-productive (but totally worth it! DMZ: Blood in the Game FTW!)

Books, though. Oh my.

It really started with a lot of thinking and reading and writing. Only after talking over the issue in my head for a couple of hours could I really bring myself to make book-decisions and begin to cull things off my shelves.

I found two thoughts to guide me:
- "If there was a fire and this was all destroyed, would I replace this specific book?"
- "Five years down the road, is this book something Awesome Happy Future Me would own?"

I found, for maybe the first time in my life, that for a majority of my books, the answers were both NO.

I think that for a long time books were my security- I knew that if I forgot something, I could always go back to the source and look it up. They let me hang pieces of my brain on the outside.

But I'm not at that place any more. As I mentioned in my previous post, when I was culling books there were whole shelves devoted to subjects that just don't hold my interest any more- I've moved on. Most of what remains are: fiction series that I have read and re-read and plan to read and re-read again- old friends that always show me something new; books on urbanism (but not the ones I found un-instructive or boring or not worth reading twice); a few comics (also old friends); and just five Dungeons and Dragons books (I sold thirty such ones last year). It's about a quarter of the high-water-mark, and less than half of what Rigel and I brought to the condo.

We took them one place, which took two of our three boxes. They had a pretty sketchy store credit policy- you could only used credit for up to half of your transaction. As they were offering us $52 in store credit, I'd have to... buy $104 worth of used books? That seemed pretty much counter to my intention to get rid of books. I haggled with the owner, and got him to just trade for two barely-opened Dungeons and Dragons sourcebooks, $40 to him but $70 retail! It was good.

The last box we took to another store the next day, and they bought five books for $6 cash, which was cool, but sort of a waste of time, as they took an hour to get around to us. Frustrated, we took the leavings (which were, weirdly, the nicest, least crappy-paperback-y of all the ones we were selling- urbanism textbooks, a few literary journals, some $14 paper-but-bigger-and-nicer-back sci fi, etc) to OPEN , just down the street from us, where they took everything and gave us store credit, which we plan on selling to someone on Craigslist for cash. OPEN was so plesant and such a well-lit, beautiful store, that I was almost happy just to give them the last few books- I knew it was a good home, or at least a pretty train station from which they would travel to good homes.

Weirdness pervaded the two days it took. What was most difficult was how long selling everything took- the whole process stretched out and gave me long periods of time to torture myself about how callous I was to push away so many words, and at such crappy prices.

It was also heart-breaking to enter so many used book stores- most of them seemed over-full and under-staffed. Apparently the recession is hitting the whole industry really hard- half of the places I called to ask were dead numbers of out-of-business stores, and another third weren't currently buying anything. All the open places were depressingly selective- they only seemed to want quick-selling paperbacks, while nicer-but-slower-selling tomes were shunned as short-term losses, even if they might be long-term gains.

But it's done, and despite the messiness of the operation, another weight has been lifted from my heart.

A Good Day [Man and Bits of Paper]

When I got home for Thanksgiving my parents too seemed to have caught the cleaning bug. The house was a lot emptier, a lot more serene, than it had been. My early christmas gift to them, they informed me, was to be the elimination of at least one, hopefully three or four or all, of my boxes of stuff in the garage.

My mind flashed back to packing those very boxes, five years ago. Books, I remembered, lots of books.

A digression: My parents are, shall we say, not poor. They might be rich- they probably are rich- but they don't act rich, and I never grew up thinking we were rich. But they are comfortable, and they do have discretionary income, although I rarely see them spend it.

I have, however, seen them spend it on books. Many times in my childhood would we venture to the bookstore and leave with armfuls.

I was a voracious reader in high school and middle school. In college most of that appetite was channeled towards assigned reading. Looking up now, I have four half-read books on my shelf, and two more in my bag. The habit has definitely stuck.

I think my parents logic went something like this: reading is a very good habit, and something we want to encourage Connor to do. He should probably be reading good books. If he picks his own books, he will pick crap for a while, but eventually he will start picking good books. But giving him good books is not as good as him picking them out himself. To increase the aggregate total of good books read over time, we should let him a) pick his own books, and b) let him pick a lot of books.

Given this, the logical thing to do was to take me and my sister to a bookstore pretty often and let us go nuts. They could, so they did.

And now we find me pulling huge boxes of generally bad but occasionally good science fiction and fantasy out of my garage.

It took less than thirty minutes to sort through three boxes of them. Everything went except for a) five books that were not actually mine and b) a signed copy of the un-utterably terrible Dune: House Harkonnen, kept because of the inscription:

"To Connor, who knows so much about the Dune Universe"

to which I always want to append: "From Brian Herbert, who knows so little about the Dune Universe"

The other two hundred books we took, along with two Ikea bags of books my parents also intended to not own, to a used book store, and sold them.

The store (BookBuyers, which is an awesome place that everyone in the bay area should visit) remaindered a half-box, and took the rest for two thirds store credit, one third cash. We are going to sell the store credit on Craigslist, or maybe the KGB board (all those googlers must love books!)

It was a good day.

Different Mixers [Man and Bits of Paper]

Four years ago when I lived in Massachusetts for a summer, I moved into a spacious but unfurnished apartment. As a present, my mother bought me a set of something like seventy cooking items from Ikea. They came in a big box, densely packed, and heavy as all hell.

I knew, when I took everything out of the box and arranged it all around the kitchen, that they would never, ever go back into the box again. Just by unpacking it, I had disturbed so much of the box's internal structure that I could not stack things inside
of it as neatly as they had been.

That point when I had opened the box but before I had removed anything was the neatest and most complete that set would ever be.

At present, I can tell you for certain where perhaps twenty of those seventy items are. Most of those twenty are infrequently used, hyper-specific tools, and I'm not sure why I even own them. I have a garlic crusher. I don't crush garlic. I have a lemon squeezer. I don't squeeze lemons.

I have, however, wondered why those two tools are fundamentally different in structure, when they do almost the same mechanical action onto similar products.

I think one of the measuring cups has survived.

I think.

I do own, however, about thirty unrelated cookware items that I know for a fact I never purchased.

My theory, at this point, is that that cookware set and I have gone through six or seven moves in the past four years, and have been housed with six or seven roommates, each with their own set of stuff.

The kitchens, in all cases, have been integrated ones- everyone's pots living with everyone else's, a communal knife drawer, etc. Moving out is always something rushed, and hiding behind those drawers and cabinets, cookware is usually forgotten until last. One doesn't always see the proper pan lid hiding in the sink, and one could miss the plate that is in a roommate's room.

I am as guilty as my roommates- over time I just sort of took stuff that I thought was mine, and, three or four or seven pieces at a time, I began substituting their cookware for mine, and now I have fractions of many distinct sets of cookware, and they certainly don't add up to a whole. I have three pots and four potlids, but the lids are for pots I do not own.

Additionally, a lot of that stuff is cheap and breakable. I think of the fifteen plates I once bought, three remain, and one of them is chipped. I do, though, possess an unrelated set of twenty floral plates that I would never in a million years purchase, but yet somehow possess.

In any case, when we move I will be abandoning all of it, save three items, all of them by chance, from Crate and Barrel, and all Christmas presents, though they were different Christmases.

The first is a circular spatula full of holes, that my sister got me for cooking pirogues.

The second is a cast iron skillet my mother got me, for cooking all sorts of stuff.

And the third is rigel's vegetable steamer that her mother got her for, well, self-evident vegi-steaming.

As for everything else?

There are plenty of Ikeas in California, and plenty of roommates here who want to cook with my strange cookware.

How to Rid Yourself of Books [Man and Bits of Paper]

I will start with a declarative. More than any other possession, books are hard for me to let go of.

I hold the printed word in such high regard that I can sometimes lend books (but only to the trustworthy), rarely give books away (but only to the special), sometimes sell them (but I am always frustrated that they are not worth as much to others as they are to me), and never, never throw them out.

The one time I ever threw books away outright was when they had been stored over the summer in my friend's basement, and that basement had flooded. Not, you know, a big puddle flood. A foot deep of nasty groundwater seeping in from the hardest summer rainfall in a hundred years.

One or two big boxes of books and clothing were at the bottom of the pile of stuff, and after five minutes of examining them and choking on the clouds of mold emanating from them, I realized that exactly 0% was salvageable, and that both boxes should be summarily blackbagged and tossed.

I mean, of course, big industrial garbage bags for to hold trash. Not that each book should be disappeared fascist regime/ secret police style, bag-on-head. Wow- some sort of V For Vendetta / Fahrenheit 451 crossover is playing out in my head now.

And so we arrive at the problem- I am probably moving in the next few months. My apartment has approximately 30 linear feet of books in it. That's 250 pounds of books. I cannot move 250 pounds of books. Moving them across town was a bitch. Moving them across the country will either be painful or expensive or both.

Enter my friend Alan. Alan grew up about six hours northeast of Pittsburgh, in Middle-of-Nowhere-No-Really-We-Mean-It, PA. He has had two stays in Pittsburgh of around two years and then around one year, and although he loves the hell out of the city and its residents, he hasn't been able to stay permanently, due to ongoing financial crises of various sorts. He visited for the long weekend, and crashed on my couch (and it is a damn comfy couch too).

He even helped name this blog. The suggestion of TS Eliot's 4 Quartets beat out my idea of The Waste Land as a source of floral but effective language.

In any case, it occured to me sometime tonight that Alan is someone I trust. I trust him to not only not throw books away, but to appreciate the hell out of them the way he appreciates me, and the way he appreciates Pittsburgh. He is a man to which I would love to give books.

Given as well that he is a poor man, and can purchase perhaps a book or two a year, giving him as many books as he could take seemed like the best of all solutions.

Boxed in his car's trunk are about 60 books- a sixth of what I own. I have given them freely, without any sort of monetary solicitation, however paltry, from either party.

I want him to have these books.

True, they cost me money to buy when I did buy them, but that is money I don't remember spending. That is money that could have gone to movies or popcorn or something frivolous, but instead they went to paper, and the enjoyment of paper. I've gotten my pound of flesh from the books he's getting- they are all one's I've already read. And if I really need them again, its not like things go out of print anymore. No book I own is old enough that copies are rare, or even semi-rare. Half of them are mass-market paperbacks anyway.

True, keeping them is a comfort. Knowing that all that information, all those quotes and paragraphs and words are just at arms reach is a good feeling, a sort of warm blanket of information and phrase. But it can be smothering, and although a good feeling, it is just a feeling, and perhaps not as good as other feelings that not having so many damn books might allow. You cannot keep everything.

But everyone wins now.

Alan feels good- he has books, and he loves books. And they were filtered through me and my tastes, so they probably won't be crap.

I feel good. I'm three shelves lighter than I was this morning. It sounds sort of callous, but its one more thing I can check off on my List of Things to Do.

And the books feel good to, as they aren't being tossed, or disappeared, or thrown into a big Nazi fire, or turned into terrible, terrible sewer mold. They are being loved.

Just not by me.

Household Plant is Sad and Gone [Man and Bits of Paper]

Some time ago, I had some crazy architecture student roommates. Those times are now over, and have been for quite some time.

One of their stranger ideas was inherited from a crazy forty-something Russian one of them had stayed with in a sixth floor walkup in Brooklyn during an architecture conference. (Never thought I would say that sentence, but there goes) Rather than a shower curtain, he instead had a long, low pot (almost a trough) full of ferns and small plants. The splashings from the shower would fall into that and water the plants.

To mimic this, we bought a potted plant. Not a fern, a plant. One of those five foot tall fern-on-a-stick plants that doesn't need sunlight, or love. After a month of pulling fronds out of the drain and mopping up the spilled shower water brown with dirt, I bought a shower curtain and moved the plant to the living room.

I think I watered it once.

I think.

Today, I looked at it, and saw that all but three fronds had turned brown. I took it out to the dumpster. Tonight, I will watch the garbage man laugh and then crush it into planty death.

If it isn't dead already.

In any case, this is instructive as to how things go in my apartment- there is a weird thing, then it becomes a clutter problem, then it is ignored, and then I flip out and deal with it in the most final, regime-changing way I can.

I do not clean in halves.