cthos 🐱@aud Part of the reason it's literal shinies is because putting phone-home telemetry in an offline game is generally a bad call (and IIRC wasn't allowed on most platforms besides mobile) and you do really want to be able to infer things about how people are playing the game, and the dopamine popups are handy for that.
They're also fun to program, cause you can put in achievements that are just for funsies.
Related inverse operation: "Gameifying" more traditional web experiences.
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