[swozey]

Why do tens of millions of video gamers work to get to 100% completion and various goofy achievements in their games? Why does Spotify Rewind get posted every year?

Some of us find it fun and neat to see certain things/statistics we've achieved/ruined over time.

[bawolff]

But life is not a game. You cannot get 100% completion of creating open source software. These statistics (as well as the real githu badges) are bad and not correlated with what the whole point of it all is.

[swozey]

There is no way that you can objectively state that "These statistics are bad."

These badges literally do not affect my life at all. Nor do they affect probably 99% of github users other than being an interesting thing to look at when they accidentally click the profile button.

I posted a screenshot on how to disable them if you'd like to.

What is the "whole point of it all?" Who are you to determine that, anyway? Maybe the point of it for some people is to code and have fun :)

[lagniappe]

I find myself wondering what the point of it all is. If anybody knows, holler.

[prepend]

The purpose is to maximize hours played on civ6 as measured by Steam.

[nologic01]

I know the point of it all, but make a point of not revealing it. Which points to its recursive nature, if you catch my drift.

[swozey]

lol your username is perfect for this comment

[prepend]

Obligatory reference to Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse [0] as some say, and I think it’s a pretty pleasant way of looking at it, that life is indeed a game.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games

[slily]

It's easy for it to devolve into an unhealthy distraction from real life. I know a few people who are out of school and unemployed and spend their days grinding in MMOs or collecting achievements. At least with GitHub you're presumably doing something productive to earn them.

[swozey]

Yeah I honestly find people going for 100% achievements to be absolutely strange to me. Same with New Game+ people. A lot of the time you have to play the game over and over again or do something horribly repetitive to get to 100% and people just do it. There are very few non-strategy games I ever want to play again as much as I enjoyed the first play through.

I feel like the people who don't like "gamifying" github think that that's the similar style of github badges. Someone even mentioned that "you can't 100% life" or some form of that. That is the furthest thing from the point of it in my opinion and experience.

But there are definitely a small portion people who go for that, I'm sure.