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.
● Posted the 8th of April 2009
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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.
● Posted the 4th of January 2009
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This morning I finally received the book Rogue Leaders about the history of LucasArts. I thought the book would be mainly text but there is also a lot of gorgeous artworks, design docs and doodles…
Unfortunately I cannot read it now because of my unread book stack is quite high already but I think I will put it on top of it that it will be the next one to read.
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!
● Posted the 2nd of January 2009
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