I randomly read about ChoreWars the other day on Twitter and told Doris about it. She loved the idea of giving XP for chores and having some great art in front of otherwise boring chores. The post on Twitter was about a person on NextDoor who asked for “side quests” in the neighborhood, which had a hilarious thread of Witcher-like quests for mundane stuff in the neighborhood. Someone called it “Karen-Wars”. But the idea stuck.
Today, as she asked me to add some things I started thinking about adding FOSS projects to it.
And then my head exploded.
What if we re-imagined GitHub itself as an RPG game. God knows it has the API for doing it all. Issues become worked as different kinds of quests. Bugs are killer monsters that have wandered into town. Enhancements are improvements. The direct parallels are astounding.
But it gets better.
What if we introduced such a thing through GitHub Education to those in the school system?
Rather than bore them with the details of setting up Git and GitHub and all the command stuff (at first) we introduce this game as a way to train them into thinking of FOSS development as a kind of find-the-quest-and-win-it challenge-based learning.
There have been a number of attempts at gamifying education and coding, but none the directly build on the GitHub API.
Another side-effect of this would be that even adults could have fun
with it. They would have the choice of the traditional GitHub Web or
command line gh API interfaces, or the dripping with RPG beautiful art
gamified interface.
I so want to make this. We could leverage all the Twitch game developers to help make it. But I’m thinking it would be better as a web overlay and native mobile app that adds in mostly the XP system with stuff to buy and shit.