At lunch yesterday, i noted that a local sandwich shop introduced a new loyalty program where you would earn points. Sign up, and you get 25 points. Eat sandwiches there and you score more points. And for every 100 points, you get an additional $10 worth of points, implying you can buy points.
Only they never tell you what you can use those points for.
Previously, they had a classic sandwich punch card which was basically Buy 10 get 1 free (which is surprisingly easy to figure out). One can presume that it was much the same, where 1 sandwich == 1 point with the goal of earning 10 points so you can acquire the reward. Apparently, that system wasn't complex enough for today's Game Driven Entrepreneurship™.
Needless to say, i remarked that it's rather silly to have a game where the sole objective is to acquire points. Even old arcade games had the benefit of letting you reduce your name to three letters and storing them for the adulation of passers by. My lunch companion pointed out that in the current OCD driven society, you don't really need that. Just provide points and folks will do whatever you want.
So, 100 pts for reading this post, then.
i kind of hope that's not true, but i'm still oddly tempted to create a game where you perform meaningless tasks in order to gain points (wait, no, that's *ville). i know, how about a game where you perform utterly repulsive tasks solely to acquire points.
- kill and deglove the steer: 10 pts
- muck out a stable: 5 pts
- pull hair clogs out of a drain: 2 pts
- Watch 8 hours of FOX news (real time): 1 pts
- and so on…: 0 pts
No real reward system, except for that every 2000 points you get a star. (Which, really, is nothing more than a different type of point.)
i wonder how well that game would do?
