最近Baydin推出了一款鼓励用户及时回复邮件，培养良好的工作习惯的“游戏化”邮件应用The Email Game。当用户将其与Gmail或Google Apps帐号绑定后，就会进入自己的收件箱页面，然后有90秒的时间决定自己下一步是否要将文件归纳、回复邮件、设置标签还是“boomerang”（游戏邦注：这里是指归纳邮件后，自动在特定时间中返回该邮件页面）。

The Email Game

用户每采取一个积极行动，就会得到相应的积分，并将其引下一封邮件的页面。但如果不能在90秒内完成这些操作，或者未采取行动就“跳过”邮件，就要扣分。假如你想回复邮件，那就有3分钟时间编辑邮件内容，如果超过了这个时间限制，也还是要丢分，不过你可以点击“延长时间”这个按钮，以便回复长篇邮件时免遭扣分。但要注意的是，默认状态下的The Email Game会在你的邮件签名处添加它的链接，这一点却有些让用户不快，但你可以通过调整该应用的设置将其移除。

The Email Game

The Email Game并非首个“游戏化”的邮件应用，之前已有oboxer电邮应用也采用了类似的方法，为完成邮件任务的用户提供积分奖励。不过The Email Game却是首个以时间限制方法，促使用户提高效率的应用，但它与obxer和InboxScore的不同之处在于，它没有任何社交功能，所以你在这个过程中无法与好友分享在线积分排行榜的成就，该系统也不能记录每个环节的积分情况。这并不是一款适合用户在忙碌时体验的应用，但却是有助于培养你快速清空收件箱这种习惯的应用。

“让工作更加游戏化”的创意已被一些企业广为采纳，例如Rypple就使用游戏机制增加员工反馈应用的黏性。虽然这种理念究竟是否有助于提高员工积极性和效率仍然有待观望，但已有观察者在最近的博客中指出，游戏者所具有的不达目的不罢休、对繁琐任务的宽容、喜欢多变的情况、乐于学习、对探索新事物的热情等优点，也应该能够运用到职场环境中。

不过免费版的The Email Game仅能绑定Gmail和Google Apps帐号，其企业版本还可以兼容Outlook/Exchange或IMAP帐号，但价格不菲，每月收费20美元。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

The Email Game Wants to Make Achieving “Inbox Zero” Fun

Can making email into a game make you more productive, encourage you to develop better habits and make email more fun? That’s the idea behind Baydin’s The Email Game, which applies gameplay mechanics to the process of working through your inbox.

After authorizing the app with your Gmail or Google Apps account, you’re presented with the top email in your inbox and have 90 seconds to decide what to do with it: Archive, reply, label or “boomerang” (which archives the email, but will bring it back into your email automatically at an allotted time). Each positive action taken adds points to your score and moves you to the next email. Take more than the allotted 90 seconds, or “skip” the email without deciding to take action on it, and you’ll lose points.

If you decide to reply to a message, you’re given three minutes to compose your reply. Again, if you delay, you’ll lose points, although you can always click the “add time” button if you have to compose a particularly long email. Note: By default, The Email Game adds a link to itself in your email signature, which I found a bit annoying; you can remove it in the app’s settings page.

The Email Game isn’t the first app to try to turn email into a game; we’ve previously written about 0boxer, for example, which also awards points for completing email actions, although The Email Game is the first app I’ve seen that adds time limits to discourage procrastination. Unlike 0boxer and  InboxScore, however, The Email Game doesn’t have any social features, so you can’t compete with friends using an online leaderboard, and it also doesn’t seem to be able to keep track of your scores between sessions; it’s probably not something that you’d want to use on an ongoing basis. However, it’s certainly a fun way to motivate yourself to power quickly through your inbox in order to achieve “inbox zero.”

The “gamification of work” is something that’s attracting the attention of a few companies recently. Rypple, for example, is using gaming mechanics to increase engagement with its employee feedback app. While it remains to be seen as to whether gaming mechanics really can improve worker engagement and productivity, as Jessica noted in a recent post, game enthusiasts do tend to display the kind of traits — being bottom-line oriented, tolerant of diversity, comfortable with constant change, happy to learn, and intensely interested in innovation — that should also be advantageous in the workplace.

The free version of The Email Game works only with Gmail and Google Apps accounts. An enterprise edition is available that works with Outlook/Exchange or IMAP accounts and costs a rather pricey $20/seat/month.（source:gigaom）