All right, it's time to stop all of this now.


I set up an account on Project Wonderful (thanks once again to kjorteo for reminding me of its existence) and am now waiting to see if anyone wants to bid on my high-traffic but low-geographic coverage transit tracker site. So far it's been very pleasant to navigate its friendly, spacious interface with the Silk Icon set that everybody in the entire world now uses.

With the exception of this - every time you do anything at all new on the site, such as submit an advert space for bidding, give yourself a publically visible name or upload an avatar, it sends you one of these patronizing little emails awarding you for your so-called achievement. Thankfully you can turn them off, but they're still around on your profile and even just the idea that they're there at all makes the whole experience feel patently idiotic. Game-like features have been creeping into things that aren't games for some time, and when they're done in the right way they can make them far more compelling - there's a site where you can log your household tasks and level up an imaginary character using the experience gained, for example - but here I have the distinct feeling that if the technology had been available, the team behind this site would have periodically emailed you a pat on the head and a biscuit.

I was absolutely delighted at the end of last week when I got some instant feedback on specimens in racks in my lab management system working - it was strangely addictive being able to type in a barcode, watch it spin for a bit and then pop up an icon showing whether it existed, was missing, due for special handling, or whatever status it had. Particularly if you submitted a whole lot at once and could then watch the updates cascade down the screen. But I didn't set up a system of collectible rewards like "Congratulations, you've stored your first test tube rack!" or "You've processed 1000 specimens in a row with no bad barcodes!", because that would have been stupid. So stop it. (I'll give 100exp to every site that does.)