Long time no see. Lately I was thinking a lot about micro-rewards.

I started using the soft The Hit List. A quite polished GTD enabled Todo application. The soft has lots of nice touches but my favorite is just the sound when you complete a task. Usually sounds in application are there to get your attention but here the sound is used to get an extra layer of satisfaction. You completed a task and The Hit List is rewarding you with a short sound.

So a micro reward is most of the time a sound or an animation. It will bring nothing new in the game but it will reinforce the player’s sense of accomplishment.

The perfect example is Peggle. From the incremental sound of the ball hitting pegs to the craziness of the last peg, the game transforms small achievement into big deal. And the result is clear, you keep playing in the same way I keep trying to complete task in The Hit List.

So this was my message today, micro rewards are important.

2008 was quite a busy year. My travels schedule change a bit compared to 2007, less travel but a bit more outside Europe. The yearly report generated by Dopplr is a great way to haver a summary of the year (see picture).

By the way for the Dopplr users, here a trick. You can generate the raumzeitgeist picture in any size you want. Just open the picture (for example mine here) and simply change the width parameter. It’s great to create a nice wallpaper or if you want to put it in your blog sidebar.

But the real surprise when I open the box is the animated lenticular cover (like Big Bang Mini). Here a short video of it:

Oh and while I’m posting, when I was in Canada I finally found a new copy of Drill Dozer on GBA (with the rumble of course) in a bargain bin. A french version of the manual was provided separately with a terrific translation. “includes Rumble Feature!” was translated by something like “With Virtual Reaction”. Canadians are awesome!

The Jewelry Man. I know it’s silly but I wanted to do it since I saw the list of bosses of Megaman9.

I Don’t know what I want ! I have often changed the structure and purpose of this blog. In its current format it’s more about stuff I found quickly posted with a small comment (often to complain). The goal was to be able to post often but it doesn’t work right now. The previous format was a more standard blog format and my goal was to write a post every week. It also failed.
My other project GamOvr on the other end is working pretty well for some reason: focus, simple and fast to post, several people are posting…

So what is the point of this post? Well you probably guessed that I will change again the formula. I keep this blog, but I will update it less often with probably more original content and less repost. At the same time I open a new blog to post all interesting the stuff I found on the web: Nic’s mess.

Finally, David Perry talks at TED and I am a bit disappointed. The start is good with some retro feeling but I don’t get the point of the talk. Is video game fantastic because there is fabulous graphics and sound? Is this really the message that David Perry wants to bring to TED?! And what is this student video? His arty non-sense ticket to justify his presence at TED?