Just so you are forewarned, this is a bit of a ramble….

angryArcGIS
You know you want it....

It came to me in day dream whilst using ArcGIS to digitise my second city for the day, for use in a master planning project. I really quite enjoy the process of plotting roads from a base of satellite imagery. Maybe its just me but there really is something supremely satisfying watching a clean satellite image fill up with little road centre lines. It’s like helping my 2 and ½ year old daughter with her colouring book (or dot-to-dot)… (ok so she’s watching TV and I’m colouring)

Yes! 5000 points for snapping!

Then it struck me what if little clicks and noises (perhaps even a rumbling mouse) would happen every time I laid a vertex or snapped to a feature? You could even have a score table each vertex and snapping got you a point. Every time you came to move an existing vertex a point was deducted! Wow, you could even get a bonus for using complicated analysis

“Congratulations you’ve just earned the Geostatisical Analyst Interpolation badge”

Would it annoy me or spur me on? I had to look in to this….

So apparently this concept is called ‘Gamification’ (I know I looked it up on Wikipedia so it must be true… ) a stupid sounding word that covers the idea of using the psychology of rewards to encourage the adoption of technology.

Yay! Let us treat people like idiots & encourage them to work by rewarding them with arbitrary numbers non-existent prizes….

erm…

… except I might quite like aspects about that, of course I absolutely rule out sharing my scores on facebook or twitter with other geo-professionals… I know I would be last and I’m pretty sure @cageyjames would win…

Come on ESRI (or QGIS I don’t mind) gamify my work … and integrate it with Facebook and Twitter I DARE you …. just don’t share my scores with Klout (hey OpenStreetMap sort of does it)