Earn Points for Watching TV with Miso

With Miso, and its $1.5 million in new funding by investors including Google Ventures, you can actually earn points and badges for watching TV. What do you get for these points? Most likely: nothing.

Gamers have been dealing with this for years. We play games and try to gain “Achievement Points,” at least on Xbox, but you really get nothing from it. The points create new challenges, which make the games more fun, but you don’t actually get anything for the points.

I’ve always been waiting, and hoping, that Microsoft might let its Xbox users trade in their hard-earned achievement points for things that actually have some kind of monetary value, but it will never happen.

Now, you can gain these pointless points for watching television. With Miso, you can “check in” to the TV show you are watching, allowing your friends to see what you are watching. You can also “Like” certain shows and even comment on them, much like any post you see on Facebook. You can even earn special “badges” for watching certain featured shows.

It is hypocritical to say that offering these types of points and badges is a bad thing when I spend hours trying to get certain achievements on Xbox, but at least video games are interactive. Offering worthless rewards for doing something like watching TV will only make the obesity epidemic worse, right?

I don’t know. Nowadays, you can gain achievement points from playing a sweat-inducing soccer game on Kinect Sports, actually improving your mood, your looks, and even your blood pressure. I can also break a sweat with Nintendo Wii and Playstation Move. Unfortunately, the closest I come to improving myself as a human being when watching TV is learning about the behavior of serial killers on Criminal Minds.

If I feel the desire to accomplish a certain achievement on Kinect Adventures, at least I am doing something good for my body. I can’t say as much for more hardcore games like Halo, Call of Duty: Black Ops, or Fallout: New Vegas, but I have to say that they make you critically think more than an episode of Oprah’s new “Your OWN Show: Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star.”

By the way, if you use Miso to check into that new Oprah show, you will get a special badge you can show off to your friends. Yikes. At least in Black Ops I have to figure out a way to incinerate 10 bad guys before I’m rewarded.