Arcade Berg Game Designer

Cleaning Game?

There's been previous talks about how to implement gaming into the everyday life and activities and let me tell you one thing. I'd love to have a cleaning game.

Every day after work I start going trough my stuff (read: shit I've collected over the years), keeping some, throwing some away, trying to sell some of it and packing the rest. I would be enjoying the whole thing a whole lot more if there was a system monitoring my choices and giving me points for every item I donate to the poor, etc.

Heck, if there was such a system, I wouldn't let my place turn into the mess it has in the first place!

It's all about the Theory of Fun which I link a video about in:
http://arcadeberg.com/causerie/highscore-hurts/ (26/4/2010)

And talking about games and the real life working together, I found this today on Gamasutra. There's a company that's launching a thingymajing for the NDS that's suppose to help people work hard on handling their diabetes. Since I'm a diabetic I find this very interesting. It's not something I'll use, but it's interesting nonetheless.

[...]DIDGET converts blood glucose test results into reward points.

Players can redeem these points to unlock new levels, minigames, and items[...]

- http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28234/Bayer_Launches_Diabetes_Management_Game_for_Nintendo_DS.php

Here's the problem I see with this. The games unlocked in this package are probably gonna... Well... Suck... Hard... So very, very hard. I really hope I'm wrong.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that in a product like this you really have to create a strong incentive to actually wanting to unlock more stuff and I'm not sure they can do that. Great idea otherwise though.

But being a diabetic is not the only reason why I found this interesting. Dun dun dunnn! Stay tuned!

Captain Novolin; an old SNES-game about Diabetes.