We aim to have five people per team, but we rarely hit that number. Sometimes we play an exhausting three-a-side game. We once played seven-on-seven, which was like trying to move a ball around a crowded nightclub. Often one team will be bigger than the other.

All in all it’s a pretty non-competitive event. We don’t make much of an effort to keep track of the score, and even when we do we’re still very likely to give up on scorekeeping at the end and just declare “last goal wins” when we’re about to run out of time.

Our relaxed approach to the game means that we’re more likely to try a manouvre that might look cool—like a bicycle kick or a diving header—than to do something that will actually lead to scoring a goal.

Chatting after the game today we came up with the idea of ‘gamifying’ the game. Just like many parts of life are being ‘gamified’ these days—like unlocking points and badges for visiting certain places in Foursquare—you can imagine getting achievements for things that you do in a real football game.

Some badge ideas:

• Head boy: Score with a header. This is the achievement I spent most of today’s match trying (and failing) to unlock.
• BFFs: Set up the same player for a goal, or have them set you up for a goal, 3 times in a match.
• Poultry farmer: Be on the receiving end of a foul. (Is that too bad a pun?)
• Postman: Hit the post 5 times in a match.
• Greg Louganis: Take a dive!

Any other ideas?

The next step is to write the image recognition software to analyze video footage of a match and assign achievements (thereby earning the ‘Spent altogether too much time on such a silly idea’ badge).

It is not clear why we enjoy certitude so much – certitude being the subjective experience of feeling certain. In contrast – as Kathryn Schulz observes in her wonderful book Being Wrong – there is simply no psychological experience of “being wrong” at all, only the lurching realisation of having been wrong until a moment ago.

I’ve never been a huge fan of being wrong. Now I can claim that I’ve never experienced it.

I’ve always been bewildered yet faintly impressed that the rest of the world can survive with Fanta as its primary, and often only, carbonated fruit drink. I don’t think I need to point out to people who have tasted it that Fanta is the juice of Nazis.

]]> http://roryparle.com/2011/04/finally/feed/ 1 http://roryparle.com/2010/01/seven-years-on/ http://roryparle.com/2010/01/seven-years-on/#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2010 10:39:11 +0000 Rory http://roryparle.com/?p=1026 Continue reading →]]> While we’re still celebrating milestones, I have one of my own. I started this blog seven years ago, on January 7, 2003. Back then it was made of hand-coded HTML that lived on the servers of my university’s Internet Society.

I soon moved it to a self-made blogging platform on those same servers. From there it moved to a professional web host, on yet another custom blogging platform, and with its own domain. Most recently it moved to a new domain, and I finally gave up on maintaining my own software and migrated all the content to WordPress.

I’m quite happy that through all those software changes and server moves I still have every post I’ve ever written for this blog, right back to the very first one.

That first post was about the result of a little Web quiz that took details of my physical fitness, intelligence, education, and lifestyle and, through the twin magics of mathematics and making shit up, informed me that I was worth exactly $2,320,314. I would have hoped my organs alone could fetch that much or more, but I’m not the expert here.

Looking back on my first post I decided to see if that quiz was still online and, more importantly, if my value had changed at all. You’ll be delighted to hear that not only is the quiz still happily digesting humanity into currency, but I’ve gone up in value to an amazing $3,061,316. That’s an increase of nearly 32%. Maybe that’s not the biggest possible return over seven years, but at least it’s going up.