I’m rather intrigued by the new social game, Mindbloom. I came across it via Dogwood Tales and while I haven’t had a chance to play with it fully, what I’ve seen of it so far is impressive.
You begin by planting a virtual tree.
Each branch of the tree represents an aspect of your life that you would like to prioritise, eg. health, creativity, finances or relationships. To earn points and level in the game, you complete tasks that help get you closer to those goals.
The visual interface is gorgeous – a delight to explore and navigate around and it changes as you play. Areas of your life that you spend a lot of time on has branches that grow and flourish. Those areas that are more neglected has leaves that turn brown!
Ironically, the one thing that makes me pause is the social aspects. I really can have some very inane and bizarre things on my to do list at times that I wouldn’t necessarily want to share with everyone. It is possible to choose which items are visible to your friends and make some branches private, but that does seem to defeat the advantages of getting support from other people.
On the whole, though, it’s a beautifully implemented idea and a potentially valuable motivational tool.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Sylvia // 22nd Jun 2011 at 12:05 am
I had a play but in the end, I’m not impressed. It seems to spend more time showing me photographs in slow motion than anything else. I can pay seeds to replace their music and photographs with my own (that doesn’t feel like a reward to me). But the final straw is having said that I do *not* want to receive emails, I received a daily digest, exactly what I was trying to avoid.
When I clicked on the unsubscribe button, I got taken to a webpage that showed me half a dozen mailing lists and asked me which ones I did not want to receive. I ticked the box to say I never wanted to hear from them again (it was slightly more polite than that) and was told I was put on their blacklist.
How to get my back up in three easy steps, eh?
2 Pewari // 22nd Jun 2011 at 12:55 pm
Ew, that’s annoying.
Also be warned it does spam your facebook page. It does ask your permission to post to your wall – as I was trying to add new friends at the time I said yes, but instead of a generic invite I could check before hitting publish, I had to invite individually (ugh!). Then I went back to find that it had spammed one of my achievements to my wall. Have removed the wall posting permission now.
Still playing with it, though I suspect what I really want is a virtual pet tree ;)
3 Nancy // 26th Jun 2011 at 1:41 am
I’ve had an entirely happy experience with it so far. I didn’t connect it to twitter or facebook, though – that never seems to turn out well! Also, I immediately unclicked all the mailings it wanted to send me, but I didn’t get scolded or blacklisted or anything. But of course I wasn’t also unsubscribing at the time.
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