Ars technica just posted a hilarious review of Microsoft’s attempt to gamify software development. The achievements offered by Microsoft Visual Studio are actually pretty fun. It seems like an offshoot of code inspections, or maybe code quality tools like JSLint or FlexPMD. I just hope that developers don’t get wrapped up in trying to get all of the Running with Scissors/Don’t Try This At Home achievements when they are working on an actual project! That would be horrifying.
I think it gets at the idea that software development is a lot of fun, and is much less repetitive than most other jobs involving a computer, although I disagree with Ars’ comparison to a keyboard-based text adventure game. I think that writing a program is more like completing a very complicated puzzle. Of course that doesn’t make for very exciting copy.