Of Die: UFC Personal Trainer, Achievements, and the future of personal ratings.
Die as in dice, as in symbolic of games, in my case, of all sorts; RPG, board, electronic.  In this case, my wife and I were playing UFC personal trainer which is really growing on me.  It has some punishing excercises; punishing in that they are unforgiving if you can't complete them and the trainer gives you a pretty blunt assessment of your failure, but hey, your body isn't going to sculpt itself, right?  Making this stuff into a game or score of some kind isn't that crazy; are you doing anything different with a pedometer, or a cycling computer, or a scale even?  I think what "achievements" do is try to put a quantitative value on otherwise difficult to quantify tasks(ahem, achievements) and for people who love feedback loops(I'm blue by the way if you've ever taken one of those tests for work; data driven) very very good in terms of providing meaningful data and encouragement.  I'm impressed with the potential of achievements associated with fitness and can't help but think of the possibilities here, especially with articles floating around on the web now about Kinect being integrated into laptops; the idea of a personal trainer in your hotel room?  Given that I am already a big believer in the idea of body weight excercises being the right way to go and that a lot of what you get at the gym in terms of equipment is props and gimmicks, this seems great, and a realization of what we saw with the movie Total Recall and Sharon Stone's virtual tennis trainer.  The fact that I'm living in a time when that is kind of here...in fact now that I think of it its kind of creepy that other elements including the body scanner tech from that movie, seem to be here too.  Anyhow, this game certainly has some faults but holding the "trainee" to a high standard isn't one of them, and the achievement I got today is, ridiculous as it may seem, a great way to keep motivated about it.  Maybe this really should have been an "of circuits" entry...I'll be curious to see if this sticks:  maybe we'll be in a future where all sorts of activities we don't associate with "scores" today get tracked for at a glance sharing with friends, etc, and become as much a part of our profile as height, weight, etc.