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[Voice-over] Previously on Charlie’s Blog, the family was trying to save up enough Dave & Buster’s tickets to exchange them for a brand-new Nintendo Wii Fit. The last episode ended on a cliffhanger. Did the family get the Wii Fit? Stay tuned to find out.

Nope. We never got the Wii Fit.

If you’re wondering why not, the answer is simple: time. By the time we’d saved up the thirty-thousand ticket purchase price, the item was no longer available in the Prize Area. Which actually turned out fine. As fate would have it, we’d gone out and bought one anyway a couple years prior.

But now we needed a new goal. Something else big to shoot for. Except there really wasn’t anything good to be had for less than one hundred thousand tickets. And at our current savings rate, that wouldn’t be for another two decades, at least.

Realizing this could go on forever, the kids decided to finally cash in some change for one of the few medium-sized prizes. Around 2011 or 2012, Sarah got a panini maker and Rachel got a snow cone machine. And they both used them! It was almost like this expensive, decade-long endeavor was paying off! The purchases put a dent in the savings, of course. The one hundred thousand ticket prizes were now likely thirty years away, but it didn’t matter because we really weren’t saving up for anything anyway.

About two weeks ago, we embarked on our most recent annual trip. Yep, everyone’s out of school, but for any family members and/or friends who happen to be in town in August right before school starts, it’s still an option.

But this year I finally started doing some of the math. To get a prize, you need tickets, and to get tickets you have to play games, and to play games, you have to buy a game card. So what was the exchange rate…? How close was all of this to one of my many favorite scenes from Steve Martin’s The Jerk?

Frosty, I’m no good at this.

Aw, come on Navin, you’re doing fine.

I’ve already given away eight pencils, two hoola dolls and an ashtray. And I’ve only taken in fifteen dollars.

Navin, you have taken in fifteen dollars and given away fifty cents worth of crap, which gives us a net profit of fourteen dollars and fifty cents.

Ah! It’s a profit deal! Takes the pressure off! Get your weight guessed right here! Only a buck! Actual live weight guessing! Take a chance and win some crap!

Calculating the exact ratio is going to be difficult. It’s like buying airline tickets. Maybe it’s $99 on one day, and maybe it’s $899 the next. But we can go with some reasonable averages.

A twenty dollar game card gives the player one hundred “chips.” Meaning, a single chip costs twenty cents.

A single play on an individual game can cost anywhere from one to seven chips or more. In real dollars, that’s maybe anywhere from a quarter to a buck fifty to play. The payout varies wildly, anywhere from zero tickets to 1,000 tickets for a big wheel-of-fortune type game. (Let me tell you, when you’re used to games spitting out 20 or 40 tickets after a play, winning a cool grand makes you feel like some sort of Vegas high roller.)

So at the end of a good evening, I would say the two twenty-dollar cards we bought fetched — oh, let’s call it — two thousand tickets. That’ll make the math a lot easier. In short, about two cents per ticket. Now! What kind of buying power do those two thousand tickets have?

Those top-tier, 100K ticket items are things like the Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch. All of those, new, cost around $300. So this is the figure I use for the exchange rate. If 100K tickets gets you $300 in real world booty, then you can multiply any prize cost by 0.003 to find the rough, real world dollar average. Let’s take a look:

Prize Ticket Cost Estimated Value
Playstation 4 100,000 $300
Ring Doorbell 50,000 $150
Cheap Headphones 4,000 $12
Mini Desktop Bowling Lane 1,000 $3
Stuffed Thing 600 $1.80
Plastic Thing 300 $0.90
Sugar Thing 100 $0.30

Wow. To think that huge, one-thousand-ticket payoff on the big wheel-of-fortune game (which probably cost $1.50 to spin) ends up being about $3 in the prize payoff. “Step right up and win some crap!”

And for the real kicker: that $40 in game play fetching us 2,000 tickets translates to $6 in buying power. “Ah! It’s a profit deal!”

Navin R. Johnson would be so happy here.

Now, the math I refuse to do is taking our current ticket balance of around 42,000 and figuring out how many game cards we bought to make that happen.

Oh, who am I kidding. Of course I did the math. 42,000 tickets at $0.02/ticket is $840. While seeing that total (which, in reality, is likely much more) comes with a small shock value, that really isn’t the point. Set aside that this is a seventeen-year total, the real point isn’t that the money is solely converted to crap-we-don’t-need. It’s to get out of the house, spend some time together, play games and have fun as we wander among the sounds and lights.

And, most of all, to make sure I get a blog post out of it.

Done!

It was August 2003, I believe, when our family began a tradition that is somehow still going on to this day. We took the kids to Dave and Busters™ for Food and Fun™ to celebrate the End of Summer™, on the evening before the First Day of School™.

If you’ve never been, Dave and Busters is kind of like Chuck E. Cheese’s, but for humans who are over five years old. If you’ve never been to Chuck E. Cheese’s, then just picture average food combined with overpriced, miniature arcade games — all set to a light and noise show that could rival a Harry Styles concert.

But it’s also fun, if you’re in the right mood and with the right people. And that’s what the family trip was about.

Always eager to try new places and sample new cuisine, we settled into our booth and opened the Book of Food Choices. While patrons are certainly allowed to just eat and leave, or skip the food and head right to the game floor, the Eat and Play™ combo is not a bad choice. For one thing, only a small subset of menu items are offered with this combo, which means the Book of Food Choices becomes much more manageable. For another, you save a few bucks on the game card.

After scanning the menu, we each settled on some variation of Breaded And Fried Thing With a Side of Additional Fried Things™. We wolfed down the food in order to maximize play time.

So what’s play time like? Well, I’m glad you asked. It’s doing the following for two hours: You find a large machine with bright flashing lights emitting loud sound effects and/or music. You swipe your card. You enjoy upwards of thirty intense seconds of play. Then you collect zero or more tickets.

At the end of the night, you take your pile of tickets to the Prize Area and exchange them for goodies. There are many prizes to choose from, such as:

  • Gum
  • Small plastic item
  • Alternate small plastic item
  • Small stuffed animal
  • Large stuffed animal
  • Sony PlayStation

I don’t get the sense there’s a lot of middle ground. Items are either small and useless or coveted and expensive, and only sparsely populated in between.

By the end of that first year, our ticket balance hovered around 1,000 tickets. At this point we could easily buy seven or eight pieces of gum or three small plastic items. The PlayStation was easily a century away at the rate we were going.

We returned the next year. And the year after that. And the year after that. The routine was the same: order four plates of Fried Fat, four diet Cokes, and game cards. At the end of the night we’d look around the Prize Area, and more often than not, leave without exchanging any of our tickets for plastic.

By about the fifth year of this, the kids discovered the Coin Pusher Games. You know the ones. You drop in a token. It lands in a pile of tokens. And then nothing happens. Until maybe the fifteenth time you do it, and then enough tokens have piled up that one or two will fall over. And when they do, those are converted to tickets.

But what the kids also discovered, is these games came with a higher coin->ticket payout ratio than any other game. In that one year alone, I believe we doubled our life savings. Our cumulative balance handily rolled over into five figures.

Laura also gained a preference and a talent for the wheel-of-fortune class of games, where you push a button or pull a lever at just the right time to stop a spinning wheel or a flashing light at just the right time for huge payouts: up to 1000 tickets per win.

Me, I would waste my money on flight simulator games which would pay out, on average: nothing.

But our growing balance suddenly made some of the higher ticket items suddenly feel not so out of reach. One caught our eye: a full Wii Fit system for the low, low price of — I want to say — like thirty thousand tickets. And right then and there we made the decision to continue banking our winnings and aim for the stars.

Did we ever get that Wii Fit? Well, you’ll just have to tune in next week for the Exciting Conclusion™.

Wake up.

What was I dreaming about? Something weird again. It’s always something weird. What was it?

Oh well. It’s gone.

What day is it? Thursday? No, yesterday was Thursday. Today’s Friday. How is it Friday again already? It doesn’t seem possible. I mean, last week when I looked out at the week ahead it felt like I had all the time in the world. Then I blink twice and seven days have evaporated.

Anyway, gotta get up. Lot’s of work to do today.

Oh. It’s Friday. I’m supposed to write a blog post on Friday.

Open browser, navigate to wp-admin.

Check Drafts folder. Anything in there? Yes, of course. There’s always stuff in the Drafts folder. I mean, anything viable? No.

Did anything fun or interesting happen this week? Hmm… Not really. Probably nothing worth writing about.

Politics? I have, after all, solved all the world’s problems. This would be a great platform to tell everyone about them. And why I’m right and all seven billion of you are wrong.

Or I could write some real, timely, attention-grabbing content. Let’s see…

  • 9 Facts About Cupcakes That Will Keep You Up at Night
  • 13 Ways Cupcakes Can Make You Rich
  • Worst Cupcake Mistakes and How to Fix Them
  • SHOCKING VIDEO: When Cupcakes Go Bad!!!
  • She Baked Cupcakes for Her Boyfriend, Then THIS Happened!!!
  • Gut Doctor Urges Americans To Throw Out Cupcakes
  • Doctor Oz Tells The Truth About Cupcakes
  • Cupcakes Warn: Don’t Listen to Doctors

No. That’s not me.

I could dial it back and perhaps wax poetic on some random topic. The weather? Music? Candles?

Or post a recipe for my famous vegetable soup? Except it’s technically not famous.

I could do another movie review. No, what am I thinking. That would take days to prepare.

Checks the clock.

Rats. It looks like the twenty minutes per week that I get all to myself are up anyway.

But don’t worry, I’ve got seven whole days to come up with something really good for next week. Plenty of time. Now I just need a topic. Hmmm. Maybe something about cupcakes.

This is a post of mine from about six and a half years ago on a more different blog, but it felt like a good thematic follow-up to last week’s post. Also, I have nothing prepared for this week and only about three minutes of free time. So enjoy the rerun. Unless you’ve never read it before. Then enjoy this brand-new, never-before-seen post which I slaved over until the wee hours of the morning writing.

I’ve been hearing a fair number of wannabe authors lately all asking variations on the question, “How’d that get published?” The typical scenario goes something like this:

  • Author spends an entire day forging breathtaking prose out of white-hot metaphors.
  • Tired, yet satisfied over an honest day’s toil, Author decides to take a trip to the bookstore for a hot cup of coffee and a peek at the latest Garfield calendar.
  • A wall in the color of, oh, let’s just call it “more than four dozen shades of a color not quite black nor white” smacks Author in the face.
  • Not without a wince, Author picks up one copy, slowly peels it to a random page and reads, “The muscles inside the deepest, darkest part of me clench in the most delicious fashion.”
  • In utter despair, Author returns home and burns manuscript-in-progress.

It makes sense, of course. After all, if badly written books can not only get published but become — gasp — popular, what hope does someone like Author have?

This sense of frustration is normal. For in spite of piles and piles of evidence to the contrary, we all still believe life is supposed to be “fair.” And it’s patently NOT fair that someone who only but recently learned how to hold a pen now receives daily FedEx trucks full of money while we — we who type until our fingers bleed, perfecting each loving sentence whilst passion for the written word visibly drips from our under-appreciated pores — can’t get the time of day from even the most hard up, entry-level employee in Acquisitions.

What we seemingly forget, in spite of piles and piles of evidence to the contrary, is that there is absolutely no correlation between “level of artistic merit” and “commercial success.” None whatsoever. I’m sorry about that, but it’s true. Highly related: we also forget that the publishing industry does not solely exist to ensure that only the finest quality writing ever reaches the hallowed shelves of Barnes & Noble. No, the publishing industry is a business, and that isn’t a bad thing. It is not run by ignorant, malevolent, money-grubbing primates with nothing but disdain for the fine arts. It is run by people who are responsible for running a responsible business. This means creating products, shipping products, marketing products, and selling products. If they accomplish this monumental task successfully, then they get to pay the tens of thousands of people who make up this supply chain. Plus, as an added bonus, they’re allowed to remain in business one more year.

Deep down Author knows this. Yet she remains despondent that crappy books contribute to this business model and can’t understand why fine work (such as her own) never sees the light of day. It’s easy to forget that fine work does get published. And, yes, it’s very easy to forget that for every unexpected hit like Twilight, one hundred thousand equally crappy manuscripts are turned away. It’s not as if only crappy books are published.

Author also forgets that “it takes all kinds.” These books sell for one and only one reason: because a market exists for them. And it honestly doesn’t matter if you personally disagree with the tastes of this market. I’m sure there are aficionados of classical music who simply cannot figure out why anyone would listen to jazz. The jazz devotees cannot figure out why anyone would listen to pop music. The Top Forty fans don’t appreciate country music. Country music fans will never, ever figure out heavy metal. And the headbangers can’t for the life of them understand why anybody would listen to anything as mind-numbingly boring as classical music.

So what’s Author supposed to do? Quit writing? Give up? Chuck her manuscript into the river and never write again? To that I respond with a most emphatic yes. Because that just means MY crappy manuscript has one fewer author to compete against.

Whether you’ve seen the remake of The Lion King or not, you’ve definitely heard about it. Commercials, trailers, reviews, articles, and now — this blog post. Intermingled in the media onslaught is the recurring notion that the film felt flat, unnecessary, and represents nothing more than a money grab for Disney. Some seem indifferent to this notion, others feel offended at the very thought: that a remake of a classic film is somehow an affront to nature.

I guess I don’t understand this. For one thing, it’s just a movie. Disney came up with this idea, thought about it, gave it the green light, produced it, distributed it, and released it to theaters. Disney did not round people up at gunpoint to product it or force audiences to pay $1500 per ticket. We, as consumers, are free to see it or free to pass it by. And again: it’s just a movie. If it’s good, it’s good. If it’s not, then that’s fine too. It happens.

But the main thing that gets me is people calling it a “money grab.” This may come as a shock to some, but Disney is a for-profit, publicly held company. They employ upwards of two hundred thousand people. Millions of others own shares in the company and have a financial stake in their fiscal well-being. Disney is a successful product of a capitalistic society, and I mean that in a good way.

So to that end, every single product they sell is a “money grab”: an attempt to earn more money than it costs to produce. And it should be obvious by now that this isn’t just a Disney phenomenon. Show me the film produced where people said, “Boy, I sure hope this tanks!” I can bet no one ever uttered, “Let’s pour one hundred million dollars into this project and if we’re lucky, no one will come see it. We’ll lose everything!” Nope. Every single major motion picture by every single major production company over the last century has had the goal of making money.

I think the idea of a money grab is only introduced when there’s no redeeming artistic quality to the product. The Godfather turned a profit. Gone with the Wind did as well. I could list The Wizard of Oz, Schindler’s List, Forrest Gump, Star Wars, Titantic, and pretty much all twenty-or-more films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So why this critical hate directed at The Lion King? Was there inherently no redeeming artistic quality to it? I hardly think so.

As a fun thought experiment: consider if this just-released remake is what they released in 1994. The planet would’ve lost its collective mind at how spectacular it was. And if twenty-five years later they did a “cartoon remake,” we would’ve called that version unnecessary.

But okay. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that this remake is a soulless, unnecessary money grab. Let’s follow that money, because I feel like there’s a popular perception that one hundred percent of the box office receipts go solely into the CEO’s personal coffers. Why, we can almost picture Robert Iger dressed up like Scrooge McDuck in a room filled four feet deep in cash (complete with a diving board, of course).

Here’s the thing. Every large budget, Hollywood production like this employs upwards of 15,000 people. Some of those people are very young: college students landing their first, career-making internships. Some are production assistants: over-the-moon happy to be fetching bagels for the crew. There are junior artists on their first big production. There are seasoned old-timers for whom this is their swan song. You’ll find human beings working in cinematography, production design, the art department, and sound recording and editing. Visual effects up the wazoo. Technical directors, casting agents, location managers, storyboard artists, musicians, script supervisors, software developers, continuity specialists. I won’t list all fifteen thousand, but for most of these people, I bet this was a dream gig.

And I don’t mind some of my $10 ticket going toward that.

In fact, a lot of that money that Disney so soullessly grabbed from us went to these very people. And each of them got to add The Lion King to their resumes and their demo reels, and this one project will help them continue to do what they do. Sure, Donald Glover got paid more than the bagel assistant, but they were all part of something cool: not just the film, but the making of the film.

Granted, Disney has made more money on this than it cost to produce and market. It’s a hit. But again, it doesn’t go into a pool of cash for the execs to swim in. Every box office smash helps pay for the films that don’t do so well. John Carter, Mars Needs Moms, Home on the Range, Treasure Planet, and many more. We tend to forget that movies that turn tens of millions in profits have to help cover movies that lost tens of millions.

So that’s my take on the money grab. Good job to the fifteen thousand on this monumental production. And best of luck on the next one. Because there will definitely be a next one due to the success of this one.

At this particular point during vacation, the evening group was made up of me, Rachel, Biz, Brian and my mom. We’d just finished playing a “real” game when Brian placed the full deck of cards face down and asked my mom to guess the top card. “What are we playing?” she asked. “Just guess.”

What happened next is we made up a new and very fun card game called “Tens,” named for the card my mom did not guess correctly: the ten of spades. If you’d like to play yourself, here are the Official Rules:

  1. First player tries to guess the top card. As there’s only a one-in-fifty-two chance of doing this, you probably won’t guess it.
  2. Play moves to the left, where the next player makes up the next rule.
  3. Repeat step 2 until all the cards are gone.

Due to the random and fast-and-free nature of the game, I couldn’t begin to tell you how it was actually played. What I do remember is that everyone genuinely tried to make up a real rule on their turn and — and this is the truly fascinating part — how quickly made up rules became rules. When someone tried to make a play that was incongruous with the general vibe of the game — or contradicted an earlier yet completely-made-up rule, we’d all shout, “You can’t do that!”

After Tens, we then made up a second game. It followed the exact same rules as ten and, therefore, was a completely different game. We called this one “I Want Them” because part of the game was a very Go Fish-like, in that you could ask someone if their hand contained a certain face value. If it did, you would then say, “I want them,” and that player would give you those cards. It was around this point I wondered if it would be possible to create and market a game framework that would help people to make up their own party games the way we seemed to do so effortlessly.

Still going strong, we then moved onto game number three. This one fell to me to kick off. I decided to grab three of the dice from Things, which we’d played earlier. In Things, the dice do not have numbers, but colors. Three sides are green, two sides are yellow, and one side is red.

After pondering it for all of ten seconds, I decided that the player got to roll their choice of one, two, or three dice. The color of each rolled die helped determine what cards to play. Now, I won’t go into all the details here because — let’s face it — reading detailed rules isn’t fun for anyone. But if I wanted to go into great detail about this game, I actually could.

Why? Because unlike Tens and I Want Them, Tropple (a working title) quickly got real. The rules became both simple and rigid and by the end we all were thinking it: this could be a real game. But all games like this require lots of play-testing. You have to find out if the play is even and not lopsided, if it lasts the right amount of time, if it’s fun.

So early the next morning, I popped open my laptop and began coding the game as software. I figured it would be fun to run thousands of games in seconds and examine the results. I could then tweak things: number of players, number of dice, kinds of dice, how many cards to begin with, and so on.

It took a couple days, working on it here and there, mostly when everyone else was asleep, but I got it working. At which point, vacation came to an end and so did my interest in the card game.

But we’ll be back in 2021 and unlike every other game we’ve made up, I’ve got these rules nailed. The software won’t forget.

Memory is everything. If an event isn’t remembered, then — for all intents and purposes — it didn’t happen. Maybe back in 121,594ʙᴄ Thorg Jones built a hang glider and became the first person to fly. Maybe back in 74,338ʙᴄ Kraatia Smith first discovered Florida. Maybe last night I had spaghetti for dinner. It’s hard to say. But it doesn’t take much to realize there’s almost no effective difference between “didn’t happen” and “it happened but no one remembers.”

We certainly count on memory for everything. It pretty much drives every aspect of our lives. Everything from language to our careers to the Triple Dent Gum jingle. And it definitely falls into that “don’t know what you got till it’s gone” category. At least until the point where you can’t remember you can’t remember, and then everything is fine again.

Memory is strange. This “everything” aspect that we cherish so dearly is nothing but a giant mass of cells crammed into our head bone. They arrange themselves however they decide is best . . . and pretty much without any cognitive control on our part. It’s a mystery why after decades I can spout of obscure Yes lyrics (“Dawn of light lying between a silence and sold sources chased amid fusions of wonder in moments hardly seen forgotten. Colored in pastures of chance dancing leaves cast spells of challenge. Amused by real in thought we fled from the sea whole”) but why seriously I can’t remember if I had spaghetti last night.

It’s no mystery that the further we go back, though, the fuzzier things get. Fragile and spotty as mine is, I could still tell you far more about 2018 than I could about 2008. And more about 2008 than 1988. The further back we reach, the more memories turn into flashes of images, with sound and color fading like leaves in the autumn. Memories that used to have a billion neurons devoted to storing them now have maybe one hundred million. The other nine hundred million being repurposed to store the Triple Dent Gum jingle.

My earliest memory is pretty much what you see pictured here with this post. It’s a black and white television screen in a darkened room. And it’s on its side for some reason. No. Wait. I’m on my side. I’m on a sofa, lying down and trying to stay awake. I have no idea what time it is but it feels late to my three and a half year old self.

And that’s it. I cannot, in my memory, see any images on the screen. My brain only retains the basic scene: a dark room and this glowing, blueish-tinged light. But I do know for a fact that this was the live broadcast of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon. Something about the moment was impressed upon me: this is historic. Don’t forget this. Ever.

And I guess I didn’t.

It’s hard to belive that much time has come and gone since. I’m sure back in 1969 that the year 2019 was filled with flying cars and Jetsons-like cities. We would certainly have McDonald’s restaurants on the moon and space planes could take us there in hours. Oh well. At least we got the internet.

So here’s to the fiftieth anniversary of humans first setting foot on another planet.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering, my second oldest memory comes from the very next day. We had spaghetti for dinner.

We just got back from our biennial family trip to Virginia. Every other year we spend about a week at my aunt’s vacation house. It’s primarily a time when we try our best to do as little as possible — in my mind, the very definition of vacation. We wake up, we eat, we sit around and talk, we swim in the river. Oh, then we eat again. Sit around again. Then eat again.

But when we’re not engaged in any of those intense activities, it’s a fair bet that we’re playing games. Some old family favorites include Bananagrams, Hit or Miss, Balderdash. We brought along two new games this time: a dice game called Toss Up and another game called Things.

But when we’re not engaged in any of those, it’s a fair bet we’re playing cards. Sometimes the card games we play are real ones and sometimes we (literally) make them up as we go along.

Back during our 2005 trip, we did just that. We began by dealing out hands to players and then as we went around the circle, we simply created rules on the fly. At one point during one of these rounds I had the thought: what if at some point you had to just give your hand to someone else? Like, let’s say all your hand-building and scheming and strategizing just went out the window the moment the game forced you to pass your awesome hand to the person on your left and take the crappy hand from the person on your right?

Long story short, we spent hours and hours playing, fine-tuning, and — dare I say — perfecting this game. We had more fun developing it and playing it than any other game in a long time. We even came up with a good name for it: given the fact that building a hand to harm others could suddenly be used against you, we called it Kardma.

Want to play it?

Well, so do we. I tried to write down the rules as we went — full knowing that none of us would remember them. But the development of the game was too fast and too furious and I couldn’t (or didn’t) keep up. Worse, the paper I used to scribble down the half-rules went missing for over two years. But then one day, while cleaning, I found it. And in 2009, we tried to resurrect it. Alas, the magic was gone. I guess there was something about that original moment four years earlier that we couldn’t — and might never — reproduce.

But that didn’t stop us from trying something new this year. But for that story, check out the next post.

Featured image by jalil shams from Pexels

About a month ago, I wrote that I was using Duolingo. I wanted to not only brush up on my French but to — gasp — actually learn more of it. I was only three days into it at the time and already mired down in repetitive monotony. It was so bad, I wondered if I was doing something wrong. “It can’t be like this,” I thought. To that end, it wasn’t just me. I ran across this forum post:

With the latest update the course has become repetitive and boring. to get your 5th crown even in basic which I am sure will become far worse in the higher levels. It takes answering 384 questions that are virtually the same from beginning to end in order to get your 5th crown on that level.

Yes! Exactly! Except that by my estimate, there were more than one thousand questions required to get that fifth crown. I got curious about the actual number one day, so I began to meticulously record stats while completing the “Habits” skill.

Each Duolingo skill is made up of six levels (zero through five) and then each level has an increasing number of lessons (from five to twenty five) and each lesson contains a varying number of questions (from around ten to sixteen). I have not yet finished this meticulous test, which is why I can only estimate there were more then one thousand. If I ever post Duolingo Part Three, hopefully I’ll have an answer.

But it did confirm that repetition is, indeed, repetitive.

Each day I watch TV.
They watch TV every day.
Every day they watch TV.
She watches TV every day.
He watches TV every day.

I continued to read the forum post:

The real problem with this switch over to Crowns is the gamification aspect to it all. So many people seem to view duolingo as a game rather than a tool to learn a language.

Yes! Exactly! Granted, no one installed Duolingo to simply play a game. We all came here to either brush up on a language or — gasp — actually learn a language. But once we arrive, the “game” is hard to ignore. You get a Crown for each skill level you complete. As you complete all five levels, the app displays your progress in a ring, a la Apple Watch. (And everyone knows if you don’t close your rings, you’ve fallen short as a human being.) You’re also rewarded with an in-game currency which you can use to buy stuff.

And best (or worst) of all, there’s a leaderboard. When you begin using that app, you’re placed in a Bronze group with 49 fellow Duolingers. If you do well, you move up to Silver. If you do well in Silver, you move to Gold or back down to Bronze if you do exceptionally poorly. In my first week, I came in first place:

While having a leaderboard is likely meaningless to some people, for me, this is now a competition. I can’t just answer questions about French. I must win French.

“So how’s that bad?” you might ask. “Isn’t wanting to score more points going to get you to use the app more and therefore learn more?”

I’m glad you asked. The answer is yes and no. Sure, I’m definitely using the app more to maintain my so-called status. (I also finished in first place my second week; I placed second in both my third and fourth weeks.) But, ironically, “using the app” and “learning a language” are not synonymous terms. More on that in a second.

In that same forum post, someone else sagely added:

So strange to me that people are complaining [ . . . ]. If you don’t like the crowns, just ignore them. If you start a lesson and it is too repetitive, for goodness sakes, just go on to the next one.

A bright yellow lightbulb appeared in the air over my head. Just go on to the next one. Brilliant. Why answer the same one thousand questions over and over and over? Getting five crowns is absolutely meaningless. When it begins to painfully repeat, just go on to the next one.

So I did. Three crowns was about 40% of the work of five crowns. And two crowns was less than 25% of the work for five! This meant I could now build XP faster and more easily keep my top positions in the leaderboard. And this is why using the app and learning a language are not equivalent. Because I started finding ways to game the system and to forget why I was here in the first place.

In that vein, someone else even more sagely replied:

Strange as it may seem, [ . . . ] I’m here solely to learn Spanish as a language.
Lingots, Crowns, Streaks, XP are all meaningless to me.

This guy gets it. I understand why Lingots and Crowns are in the “game.” Prizes give users a feeling of progress. Heck, who doesn’t love a trophy? But when the pursuit of the trophy causes you to stray from the path, then it’s time for the trophies to go.

Unfortunately, I can say these words but I haven’t yet internalized them. I’d talk more about it, but I’ve slipped out of the #2 spot this week and I have to go figure out how to build XP faster. Bye!

In last week’s post, I talked about how even the simplest of projects can turn into an ordeal, if you let it. Of course, for me, that describes every project I’ve ever worked on.

Well, in this week’s post, I’m happy to announce that I finished the project. It was fun at times. It was not fun at other times. And, in the end, I just wanted it to be over. It followed the Standard Project Lifecycle Graphic to a tee:

One of this project’s goals involved getting input from others. During a conversation about a particularly pesky Microsoft Word behavioral change, I wrapped up the exchange with:

It’ll be fun posting it someday only to get six “likes”, one reply of “I might try that” and a dozen replies of “I hate Microsoft!” 😉

That “someday” came on Monday of this week when I made the official announcement over on Scribophile. My prediction was wrong, though. I actually got two likes, no replies, and not a single download out of it. Which is fine: I really made this for myself and sharing it with others was secondary. Plus, that was one single post. I’ve not exactly made an aggressive push to get this into people’s hands.

That said, I feel compelled to announce it here. Why? Because when I started this latest and greatest blog of mine over three years ago, I had it in my head that this would be the first place I’d announce all my finished projects. It’s both refreshing and cathartic to say “It’s Done!” once in a while instead of the endless whining about how things never get done. 🙂

Plus, this was really three projects in one:

  1. Developing the template itself
  2. Producing a feature/how-to video about it
  3. Refreshing my Technitivity website and brand

And, in the end, getting that all done felt refreshing and cathartic. You can get to all three projects from a single link: www.technitivity.com

And if you’re not a writer or you have no interest in such things, enjoy this YouTube video instead!

unsplash-logoPhoto Credit: Sunyu