Art by Valy J. ThunderBeast ( https://www.furaffinity.net/user/valery91thunder/ )

"'Santa Claus is a state of mind.' That's the motto of one of the weird second-economy groups I've signed on with. It's a lot like one of the modern French-African 'tontine' micro-lending schemes, where everyone drops, say, ten bucks into the kitty every week, and each week one of the members gets the whole kitty. For the Santa group, a lot of computing goes on as part of the background, invisible infrastructure, looking for ways in which each member can do little things that improve other peoples' lives - and, occasionally, all those little things will add up to a pleasantly surprising big thing.

"These robo-swarms? They're obsolete tech, depending on a lot more supervision than the modern stuff needs, so the Santa group was willing to send me a pile of it, costing me only a very small number of points. But hey, I grew up on command-line interfaces, and can type faster than most people would believe, even without using VR tricks, so I can wring /almost/ as much use out of these things as the up-to-date ones can do.

"And hey - I get to wave my hands, and put together a surprise that's going to make a certain little girl's eyes light up when she gets here. Well, kind of a little girl - I think she convinced her parents to let her be some sort of bipedal pegacorn. Anyway, she'll be happy, and I'll be happy I got to do that, even without counting how it'll improve my stats or build towards one of the group's badges or medals. That's one thing I like about The Future - they really know how to build positive-sum deals.

"Of course, that's not to say that I approve of everything. Take those badges and such I just mentioned. Sure, gamification can be used as an incentive to get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do, like go on hikes for games where your physical location is tracked. But it can also alter the incentives, so that such actions no longer provide the benefit they originally did - like the peace and quiet and lack of pressure that allows a wilderness hike to be a form of moving meditation.

"I was once part of the Scouts Canada program, long before I died, and some of the requirements for their various merit badges are things worth doing in and of themselves - for example, learning more about civics. So I've taken some of the original boy-scout manuals, and without any external gamified incentives like social-group points, I'm working through those badge requirements.

"... Hunh. And now I've just got an instant message, apparently based on the fact that that was the first time I mentioned my little personal project aloud, and I now have an invitation to install a 'Lone Scout' software package to track badge requirements passed, an offer of a waiver of standard age requirements for the Scouting program, and a general invitation to integrate myself into the current Scout social-group system. ... I suppose it's not the /most/ obnoxious such invitation I've gotten, so far...

"That honour would probably go to The Future's version of steampunk fans. I can live with the fact that they don't see much difference between a Babbage Engine and a Commodore 64. I don't see that as sufficient reason to rewrite my voice to match the 'SAM' speech-synthesis software that ran on a Commodore 64, and was a notch less human-like than Stephen Hawking's voice, while wearing a top-hat with gears glued on."