sf0

[xela]

nuclearpolymer is really into this game called SF zero, a peculiar and hard to classify beast in which participants do various tasks in the real world, post documentation of their performance, and receive points by other players voting for their performance. I have never much been into games, and am always leery when someone goes on about how cool this new game they're playing is. But when she sent me the URL of her performance of the "Get a reply from a stranger" task, my reaction was Well, damn, that really is cool, and I signed up.

Monday night I participated in my first collaborative task — Make Someone's Day; Tuesday evening we collaboratively drafted our report (for values of "we" that are mostly nuclearpolymer); early this morning one of the other participants submitted it, and I logged into the site this morning to find out I had leveled-up:

(I suspect I would find the text of the dialog much funnier if I had experience playing computer games, but I found it amusing anyway.)

So I'm thinking Oh, that's cool, participate in one task with players above my level, and I get enough points to level up myself. And then I go off and do stuff mostly offline all day. Sit down an hour or so ago with my laptop, check my mail — and find my mailbox stuffed with SF0 vote notifications, which I've turned on mail forwarding for.

One of the interesting things about the game, which I had not realized until today, is that points for collaborative tasks go to all the collaborators: if four people collaborate on a task that's worth 20 points and gets 16 5-point votes, each collaborator gets 100 points. Which is exactly what has happened (so far) today.

This is so the perfect game for me. My interest in games has always been about the social aspect. I like winning as much as anyone, but my reason for being there is to hang out with people, and if a game requires so much concentration that you can't chat, I'm just not interested. And this is a game that totally rewards being social. I fully expect to have a blast playing it on an ongoing basis.

If this sounds like fun to you, I highly recommend checking it out.