Raemon comments on Leveling IRL - Less Wrong

33 Post author: cousin_it 05 August 2011 09:35PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (125)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Raemon 05 August 2011 11:47:56PM 7 points [-]

Chore Wars and EpicWin exist. (Haven't actually used ChoreWars. I used EpicWin for a while, I still technically do, but it's not as effective as I'd like.

Up until recently I'd have been highly supportive of this. A few days ago I read a counter argument, specifically to the gamification of education, which made the point that a) when you have extrinsic motivators, people are less likely to care about the things for instrinsic reasons, b) people tend to game the system rather than actually accomplish the thing you intended.

I don't know how true those statements are, but they dampen my excitement about this idea.

No matter what, I think one problem is that people are far too individual for any kind of universal system to work.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 August 2011 01:07:41PM 6 points [-]

One thing I've experienced is that you do NOT want to assign points for number of things done unless you have some way to assess that they're done well -- I spent a while maximizing the number of things I did per day, and quality went wayyyyy down.

Comment author: cousin_it 05 August 2011 11:53:28PM *  2 points [-]

Thanks for the links! But EpicWin and Chore Wars are trying to solve the problem of getting things done, while I'm trying to solve a completely different problem.

Comment author: Raemon 06 August 2011 01:40:53AM 1 point [-]

I use(d) EpicWin for something closer to what you're talking about.

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 06 August 2011 04:04:40AM 1 point [-]

Up until recently I'd have been highly supportive of this. A few days ago I read a counter argument, specifically to the gamification of education, which made the point that a) when you have extrinsic motivators, people are less likely to care about the things for instrinsic reasons, b) people tend to game the system rather than actually accomplish the thing you intended.

Dan Pink discusses some of the research regarding this problem in an RSA Animate video. (He also wrote a book about it.)