Format: iPhone
Developer: Booyah Inc.
Direct App Store download

Sometime, in the distant future, when I am weary, creaky, and wattle-skinned, and I spend my hours staring mournfully at falling leaves or struggling to recall the significance behind the name Wolf Blitzer, there may come a day when young people knock on my door clutching notepads and voice recorders, itching to hear from someone who experienced life in the early days of the twenty-first century. I’ll take them into my trophy room where, behind my singed spacesuit from that night I saw attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, I’ll point them towards a dusty cabinet filled with hundreds of tiny square pictures: daguerreotypes of soldiers, stylised rockets, and full-face studies of Templar Knights. "And these," I’ll say, breathless after the short trek across the parlour, "these are my Achievements. This one is for kicking a chicken a good distance. That one over there?" – enigmatic wink – "Let’s just say I drove rather a lot of cars through some unique stunt markers."

Except I won’t, of course, because, although I chase after them as much as almost everybody else does, and although they’re supremely effective in the hands of a skilful developer (or even an unskilled yet profligate one) there’s something rather embarrassing about Microsoft’s brilliant meta-compulsion. That delightful unlock sound often carries a hollow ring with it, while the very name - Achievement - seems to be quietly mocking me. Learning to be a gastroenterologist is an achievement; obtaining 15 or more gold badges in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand arguably belongs at the other extreme of human experience (although, infuriatingly, both probably take the same amount of time).

Borrowing the language and associations of the real world in order to add an extra incentive to messing about in imaginary ones, Achievements are now coming full circle, with a free iPhone app that aims to turn your real-world activities into virtual trophies. Despite the fact that it’s called Booyah – a noise commonly made by hairspray-sniffing teens engaged in the business of tipping cows over – I’ve tried it, and, as expected, it’s darkly compulsive, if problematic to explain to any adults who might be nearby. You know, a bit like Achievements.

Booyah’s not really a game then, except so far as it suggests that everything else is one: your life, your health, your degree of willingness to get on an aeroplane. By implying this, it’s nothing special: Facebook, MySpace and a million other socially-inclined cobblings of code already got there first. What Booyah does is make it a little more explicit - you dictate your day to it in measured chunks, and it, in turn, transforms your very existence into awards.

It’s a simple business. Alongside a shiny robot avatar who’s always ready to greet you with a friendly bit of blather, Booyah is currently a retroactive calendar. You use it to post notices detailing things you’ve just done (you can, this being the historical sweet spot between 2007 and, oh, let’s say 2010, sync them to Facebook status updates and Twitter at the same time), logging them under one of nine categories, ranging from Food & Dining through Fitness and Travel to – rather disconcertingly – Passions, which hopefully refers to the thrill of 00 gauge model railways rather than anything too boudoir-specific. Most of the ensuing Achievements are unlocked depending on the frequency of your posts, and the reactions they receive. You can also track the progress of friends and get ready for updates like GPS challenges, virtual items and the terrifyingly unspecific prospect of 'Mini-Games'.

The product of a start-up heavy with ex-Blizzard staff, Booyah is slick, smart and – initially – a tiny bit troubling, its website’s easy optimism sounding a little like cult-speak in the current climate (although, actually, lines like "This release is our FIRST step in our vision to create the first Achievement system for Life" might have sounded slightly creepy back in the days of grape shot and Napoleon Bonaparte). One miserly interpretation of Booyah is that we now need to be tricked into doing real things with the promise of imaginary trinkets – and, while that’s only a half-step away from the promise of most religions, it’s still a little hard to bear. However, after a week or so of patiently logging the tedious minutiae of my own life, I discovered the result was not necessarily self-improvement so much as a welcome degree of self-knowledge: Booyah has effortlessly pointed out the drab palettes of my fixations, as well as alerting me to malignant tendencies to laze around eating bananas and watching BBC Parliament, and lie about visiting the gym. Thanks for the memories.

In the end, then, despite the cheery presentation and the shiny robot, this can be a mirror reflecting your present life as much as a window onto your new one. Uncomfortably utopian and utterly addictive, Booyah slyly suggests that, even as we retreat into the virtual, we often find that we’ve only gone and brought our old world preoccupations along with us.