5 ms·

For example, she found a puzzle game on her phone that she would play obsessively Actually an interesting observation on how difficult it is to draw the line b

• geoka9 13y ago
  Yes, that's what I thought, too. If only she could bring herself to getting hooked on a creative endeavour, she would achieve remarkable results.
  • larrys 13y ago
    Well anything that goes to this type of excess will be a problem though: "a puzzle game on her phone that she would play obsessively* -- forgetting to eat, sleep, show up for work, having basic human interaction and even requiring physical therapy at one point for the muscle strain of sitting in the position to play the game for hours on end." What we are probably dealing with here is more than a simple addiction (to which your suggestion is good and would definitely be in the right direction). What we have is a mental problem that includes addictive traits. After all the DSM is fairly arbitrary (as are medical definitions).
  • svantana 13y ago
    The problem with that is the delayed gratification - most productive endeavours these days require months on end of hard work before any reward can be expected - especially if you start out as a non-expert. Reminds me of the famous toddler marshmallow experiment - how kids able to endure delayed gratification tend to be more successful later in life.
• guerrilla 13y ago
  To me, this and the parent post are the most interesting thing here. I find myself to be quite like the parent's family member in that all that I do is obsessive, often to the point of self-destructive results. It's always been this way with work and hacking (to the extreme) and certainly for other less productive things like alcohol, food, news (ctrl-R) and especially television/films. What I'm wondering is if we could extract some positive gain from this. Maybe there's a way to gamify certain activities so that people could hook themselves on something positive. I know this has been done for certain types of exercise (I can't recall any webapps right now but a simple search for mobile apps should show a hundred or so.) I'm curious if it would work for such things as meditation, self-study, diet, social activity, etc. I get the feeling there's a lot of research out there about gamification, but I wonder if there are any webapps out there allowing people to gamify <whatever> in their life so as to allow the person to more efficiently build positive habbits. If it hasn't been done, maybe this is a new market niche to be taken advantage of. If anyone finds anything or is interested in potentially collaborating, let me know. I'll be looking into it myself in the meantime. EDIT: After reading a bit, I just remembered https://chains.cc/ https://chains.cc/ was posted to HN a while back.
  • jjsz 13y ago
    An example is: 7min for iOS has badges and achievements. You should look at the companies that Badgeville or someone similar has worked on. Amazon has the layer of highlighting and the percentage you've read and that can be gamified and sold to them. Watching TV shows and series has been gamified by apps like GetGlue. Civic participation is already being gamified. It's highly saturated.
  • codesuela 13y ago
    habitrpg.com
    • juretriglav 13y ago
      Great and free. Thanks for this, I'm giving it a try. I was _this_ close to building something similar myself, glad I found a really good version already built. :)
  • lotyrin 13y ago
    https://www.superbetter.com/ https://www.superbetter.com/
• bane 13y ago
  I almost agree with you, but there's a qualitative difference between obsession and focus just like addiction vs. dedication. Focus/Dedication is something you can choose to do, it's a tool you can use (though some people's tools work better than others). When you need to stop you can and then move onto other things. Obsession is something that controls you, you are the tool being used, and when it's time to move on the obsession continues to control you keeping you under its thumb.