First of all, let me apologize for having pretty much abandoned this place. I was out in San Francisco looking for new ideas, I played a game with Jane McGonigal, I met the guys of Playtime Antiboredom Society and all in all I had a great time. But, enough with personal statements.

I just discovered that finance managing service Mint is trying to make saving money more fun by implementing game-like features in the platform. That could really be a nice example of playful design, and it’s more important as it is applied to a very serious software. Raph Koster have some thought about the idea, and an interesting insight about Ultima Online status-symbols.

Unfortunately the new features are for now in private beta (and I cannot try them anyway, as Mint doesn’t support Italian banks) so if someone is trying it, I would be happy to hear comments about that.