The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal

The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal - Real-Life Levelling

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January 9th, 2007

08:40 am

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Real-Life Levelling

montykins wrote about the fun he was having in World of Warcraft, and then mused upon the reasons why levelling in real life - which is far more useful - isn't nearly as fun as levelling in WoW. Which is something I've thought about before.

The answer that Mister Monty gives is that there are no numbers in real life, and that's definitely a part of it. I don't know why we're all so trained to think of numbers as an important thing - is it cultural conditioning or just something innate? - but birthdays (an arbitrary number-rolling) are nearly always a big thing, and we love the New Years' Eve, and there are tons of communities devoted to measuring progress. How many pounds did you lose? How many books did you read? Did you run 500 miles this year? Do you have your black belt yet?

Videogames have tapped straight into this lust to get bigger and better numbers. And, as the Montmaster notes, it's a lot more satisfying to go, "I went from 25 to 30!" than it is to say, "I'm now some immeasurable amount better at quilting than I was the day before!"

The other problems, however, are time and accounting. The time thing's a big one; I can level up three or four times on Diablo II in an afternoon (and get the requisite number of Happy Points to distribute), but I can spend a whole day programming and not be sure that I've progressed at all. There are some days where I'm just refactoring or tweaking the way something displays on a page, and I know damn well I'm not learning a thing.

Videogames give us a quick fix of level power - that's why they're so insidious.

The other aspect, accounting, is also troublesome. Videogames monitor your progress transparently and automatically, and they tap you on the shoulder when you've vaulted to the next level. Thus, you can spend all of your time concentrating on the game, looking at the status bar only when you have some down time. In real life, however, you're the only one monitoring your progress - and thus to level up you must, annoyingly, do the math and checking to verify that you're getting somewhere. And even then, you can level up without the immediate (and surprising) DING! of gratification.

You can, theoretically, do a little objective levelling, but that usually involves fees and outsiders getting in. For example, there's a PHP Certification Test by Zend that I could pass to prove that I am at least some level at programming PHP. But that would involve a lot of extraneous studying to make sure that I'm passing their merits, and the time and effort required to go to the test hall and spend half a day filling out the test form. Compare that to what I want, which is to be sitting in my room hammering on my IDE when a thunderous voice shouts, "YOU HAVE LEVELLED!", telling me that it's time to do a little dance, and you'll see how bad that is.

I think that's why I want to publish a novel so badly. That's a guaranteed level.

Being a lover of systems, I think there are probably ways to solve both the time and measuring problems (and to minimize the bookkeeping issues). If I had sufficient time, I'd probably ask around and come up with a Programming Levelling Guide - which would be several hundred quick and easily-verified aspects of programming, each of which could be learned in under an hour. Each of the stages would be split into several levels, ranging from the ludicrously simple Level 1 tasks ("Write a 'Hello World' program that prints the words 'Hello World' to the screen") to the intermediate ("Write a useful object-oriented program that utilizes the Observer pattern") to the truly difficult ones that might require a four-hour commitment (or even a full eight hours, but no more than that). But it would have to be quick, because the whole point is that you should be able to make measurable progress in a single afternoon.

Each level would consist of probably twenty of these tasks, so it would take awhile to get to become even a Level 1 programmer, but you could measure your progress daily. Once you finished all of the tasks in each level, you'd have beaten the level. Furthermore, each additional level would be sure to go back and build upon previous tasks (or even repeat them outright) just so that the important bits would become further wedged in your head.

The important thing would be to make sure that you could never ever use this on a resume. The problem with a lot of external tests (particularly in the computing field) is that they're designed to be impressive to employers, which requires a certain level of rigorousness in its attempt to measure quality, which means that you wind up checking for a lot of measurable things as opposed to actual quality. The whole point of levelling is that it's to inspire you to be good. If you wanna hack the system and try to make a power run through all of it? You won't learn much, and you'll remember even less, but sure, give it a whack. But ideally, it's self-driven because you want to improve yourself.

I'd probably make it open-source, just to get as many eyeballs in as possible. And then we could all joke about where we were as we crawl through the levels, facing the hideous Recursion Question of Level 5 that trips up a lot of novice programmers. Discussing the Uni-Hack, a single program which, when written, would satisfy all the requirements of all levels. And the people who'd completed it could help out the lessers while writing the dungeons of the other levels.

This is just for programming, of course, but you could easily adapt it to whatever self-improvement program you're working on. The Belt system of martial arts already does this, to some extent; they just test you on all of them at once. But it wouldn't be too hard to adapt it to quilting, or editing, or pretty much any job or hobby you could think of (though some would obviously be harder than others). The whole system is just having a bunch of tiny tasks, each easily doable and self-measurable, that when accomplished in sequence will build actual skill in whatever you're trying to do.

I'm too lazy to do it. That would require levelling up in levels, which is a bit much. But if anyone else wanted to spearhead the attempt, I'd definitely pitch in.

After all, I do love being a dungeonmaster.

(Tell me I'm full of it)

Comments

From:	andrewducker
Date:	January 9th, 2007 02:18 pm (UTC)

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Your system of small chunks of easily measured knowledge is actually how I think the education system should work. Each part would feed on previous parts (you could draw a tree of them all), and there wouldn't be grades for each of them - either you'd understand it, or you'd keep at it until you did.

One of your examples doesn't work for me, by the way:
"Write a useful object-oriented program that utilizes the Observer pattern"
because you can't measure usefulness. I'd prefer a choice of different things to do. "Write an OO program utilizing the Observer pattern that either (a) keeps track of who has borrowed all your CDs (b)organises the class parrot-cleaning rota or (c) updates your default friends filter whenever someone posts a picture of their cat."

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From:	scifantasy
Date:	January 9th, 2007 02:41 pm (UTC)

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Each part would feed on previous parts (you could draw a tree of them all), and there wouldn't be grades for each of them - either you'd understand it, or you'd keep at it until you did.

This idea scares me.

Speaking of levels

Re: Speaking of levels

Something Completely Different.

Martial Arts Tests

Re: Martial Arts Tests

Re: levelling