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Xbox Achievements for Everyday Life

2008 Sep 16, 7:54

I just upgraded to the Zune 3.0 software which includes games and purchasing music on the Zune via WiFi and once again I'm thrilled that the new firmware is available for old Zunes like mine. Rooting around looking at the new features I noticed Zune Badges for the first time. They're like Xbox Achievements, for example I have a Pixies Silver Artist Power Listener award for listening to the Pixies over 1000 times. I know its ridiculous but I like it, and now I want achievements for everything.

Achievements everywhere would require more developments in self-tracking. Self-trackers, folks who keep statistics on exactly when and what they eat, when and how much they exercise, anything one may track about one's self, were the topic of a Kevin Kelly Quantified Self blog post (also check out Cory Doctorow's SF short story The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away featuring a colony of self-trackers). For someone like me with a medium length attention span the data collection needs to be completely automatic or I will lose interest and stop collecting within a week. For instance, Nike iPod shoes that keep track of how many steps the wearer takes. I'll also need software to analyze, display, and share this data on a website like Mycrocosm. I don't want to have to spend extreme amounts of time to create something as wonderful as the Feltron Report (check out his statistic on how many daily measurements he takes for the report). Once we have the data we can give out achievements for everything!

Achievements for Everyday Life
Carnivore
Eat at least ten different kinds of animals.
Make Friends
Meet at least 10% of the residents in your home town.
Globetrotter
Visit a city in every country.
You're Old
Survive at least 80 years of life.

Of course none of the above is practical yet, but how about Delicious achievements based on the public Delicious feeds? That should be doable...

PermalinkCommentsself-tracking data achievements

The Quantified Self

2008 Sep 16, 4:56All about self-trackers who track and graph all sorts of personal data. I suppose mycrocosm is like the self-tracker's twitter. "A quick overview of the emerging culture of self-tracking ran in the Washington Post the other day. Called "Bytes of Life: For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There's a Web Site to Help You Keep Track." The subtitle is a gross exaggeration, although in time it will be true."PermalinkCommentsprivacy data social personal kevin-kelly
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