The Dieting Game: Manage Your Resources Online
Posted by goodmind on August 21st, 2008
She must be on weight watchers
Awhile back, we wrote a post on how multi-player online role playing games, like World of Warcraft, have become their own economies thanks to practices such as gold farming (paying someone else to rack up points and virtual items for your character). These virtual games have real world implications, and now it seems that real world concerns (like losing weight for example) can be solved with a virtual game interface;
Weight Watchers is an RPG.
Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers’ points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you’ve used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up — by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren’t apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I’ll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat! (via Wired)
Gold farming wont work in this instance, and paying someone else to use your points for you wont help you “level up.” However, Wired makes the Weight Watchers interface seem like so much fun. The “elegant online tool” allows you to easily calculate points for pretty much any food, or ingredient, so you can easily budget your resources for the day. Maybe the financials could learn a thing or too…
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