How about some arcade style challenges or record keeping for those that would find it interesting or fun to bring out the competitive nature in all of us.

I just completed an unusually long run of successful pinyin reviews and finally missed one. I was curious about how many I got and how that compared against previous records. To be honest, what with my recent discovery of the "eccentric" toggle, I half expected a high score/combo hit count, a la Street Fighter. Then, I thought, hey, that would be pretty cool.

Then I thought how fun a larger Arcade style set of games might be.

Any thoughts, suggestions, brainstorms?

The competition idea is a great one and one which has come up many times, but I hadn't heard the idea of a streak competition. One issue is that, when I study character writings there are always some marginal cases where I could mark them right or wrong based on some fairly minor errors. If we were competing on correctness, I'd worry I'd feel pressured to start marking all those cases correct.

James

Hmm, a Skritter "Killtacular"... Interesting concept - the scoreboard/leaderboard idea has been long-discussed and seems to be high on the team's list of priorities, but the idea of high scores for stuff like that on such a micro scale sounds fairly new to me.

I've gotta say that James has a pretty compelling point that it might be counterproductive for a lot of more-competitive Skritterers who might put the desire to log a high score ahead of the kind of personal integrity that makes Skritter an effective study tool. Like how I used to change to a later time zone if I missed a day on 750words.com to keep my streak going, or how I once just copied and pasted something into the text box there instead of doing my writing for the day... In the end, I felt like I had too much riding on my hundred something day streak so it became an exercise in maintaining the streak rather than an exercise in writing and self-discipline. I haven't been back on that site for almost 4 months now and I don't miss it. All that to say that sometimes tapping into the competitive or obsessive instinct motivates someone to do the right thing, but it often falls apart after a while if there isn't a stronger and deeper motivation underlying it, and even then it occasionally undercuts and sabotages the better motivation in the end.

I like it!

FatDragon: fair enough ... there is the detriment of sacrificing the purity of the practice for racking up points ... but there are also tons of other ways to sacrifice the purity of it, if you're not careful about it. i always find it tough to give thoughtful and meaningful practice to any discipline after the novelty. or on the other hand, it's like a game, and the reward in the long term is learning chinese and having habitual jam sessions, and in the short term you get a little jolt of whatever achievements or continual quests do for you.

Those little achievements can be fun and can make it more addicting, but I agree it's not for everyone. I don't even think I'd like it all the time, if it wasn't subtle enough. But it works with Nike+ and their running program. But now I'm thinking about it, I do sort of like feeling like I'm doing something more constructive with my time than playing a video game or a flash game (one and the same now? I'm behind on that). Why make it like everything else? I also like that Skritter is essentially just an elegantly simple but extremely intelligent study tool, without too too many flashy bells and whistles to make it like farmville. If you're devoting hours and hours to this (per day? per week?), any little idiosyncrasy will probably eventually start to chew on you. Guess you just toggle it off then.

You've really cleaved my brain open on this one.

Also, I didn't really articulate it, but my idle thought was more for a streak feature as just something that sort of just notes more data about you as a user--like your longest streak. And when you set a new high or something like that, maybe a phrase flashes on the screen unobtrusively, like those silly phrases do when eccentric mode is on. Maybe it'll say something also silly and tell you your longest previous streak.

I still think about these sorts of features every time I use Skritter. It would be so awesome. I trust the devs to do it at some point though. 加油！

I really do like this idea. But, I'm never really in favor of competing against other people, for reasons already brought up in addition to my own personal reasons, like the inferiority complex I get when I see how many people are beating me. But I quite enjoy the idea of combo streaks and time trials and other silly features like that. Maybe when you put on "eccentric flavor," it enables a couple things like that.

I use the eccentric flavor and really like the milestones when you pass 5, 15, 30 minutes etc. I really wish it had an animation with dragons and fire bombs exploding, but whatever...

James

Or after 100 successful consecutive reviews you're awarded the Super "Skritter" Suit. All you have to do is talk to Chow in Monstro Town to receive it.