Interesting piece! I’m co-creator of Zombies, Run! so I’m glad to see it mentioned here - we designed it to be in the best interests of players, which is why it doesn’t feature streaks or leaderboards or other ways to manipulate you into overexercising or playing more than you want to.
That said, I’m more sanguine about gamification than the author. There are indeed many games to choose from, but the ones that are most concerning that those we have little choice but to play, whether they’re from our employers or in our schools and colleges, or built into devices and platforms like the Apple Watch and iOS.
If you’re interested in this subject, I wrote a book critiquing gamification called “You’ve Been Played” - the NYT called it illuminating and persuasive!
I share the concerns about excessive gamification. I should look up your book. Just the other day I noticed how instances of "level up" and "unlocked" are increasingly common ways of describing achievements and I dislike it because it implies your success is measured inside of structured constrains designed by others to control your behavior.
Question: what / how were the were the discussions on to not include leaderboards, streaks, etc? What what was the primary motivation behind the game? From your comment, it seems play to play rather play to win?
The goal of a fitness app, including gamified fitness apps, should be to help users achieve healthy fitness goals.
Theoretically, streaks are a way to encourage and recognise commitment – often people will use streaks to motivate themselves in writing a book or completing chores. However, it's inadvisable for people to exercise every single day for weeks on end. Of course, apps could build in rest days and lower-impact exercises to make streaks easier to maintain, but very few do and even then, it's hard to know the user's context – perhaps they've been ill and they need even longer to rest. It's pretty clear to me that streaks, as commonly implemented, are merely a way to boost retention at the expense of the user's interest.
I think leaderboards are fine in some circumstances. We use them in our own one-off virtual race events so people can benchmark themselves against others. However, we don't maintain weekly or monthly leaderboards for fitness in general because they end up being boring or even demotivating. When I had a Fitbit, the rankings were always the same, the walkers in London always trouncing the drivers in the US. I expect the only effect was to make the people at the bottom of the leaderboard depressed. For everyone who feels great ascending a leaderboard, there's someone who feels bad descending it.
My career in fitness gamification is based around the idea making exercising genuinely fun is the best way to motivate people. Competitive sports do that for a lot of people, but it can be relatively inaccessible. Zombies, Run! uses immersive audio storytelling and actual gameplay rather than just badges and XP and levels to make things exciting. It's not for everyone but it works for a lot of people.
I can’t answer for OP and I hope he does. I can say I’m designing a product at my company and have our team a set of golden rules for it.
Among them is we will respect the user. From being fair on pricing to data collected. If I get a hint of someone not in line with that, they would be off the team, no debate.
We’re lucky that the thing we’re building is not our core business, and it only has to be successful, not MBA-milk-everything-you-can-all-the-time successful.
For me, I have the power to make this a reality. For someone that doesn’t, do what you can.
> Most of the feedback loops in employment — from salary payments to annual performance appraisals — were torturously long. So Coonradt proposed shortening them by introducing daily targets, points systems, and leaderboards. These conditioned reinforcers would transform work from a series of monthly slogs into daily status games, in which employees competed to fulfil the company’s goals.
My first thought was that working for such a company would be torture.
My second thought was that this basically describes Agile/Scrumm and has taken over the entire industry.
I like Rich Hickey's description of Scrum: "We've learned the secret to tricking developers into constantly running races... You just fire the starting pistol over and over, right?"
It really depends on the nature of your work. Creative work that goes in stages would be frustrating, since your day to day is never the same.
On the other hand, if your work is a bit more repetitive, it can be a nice way to actually see your contribution change.
On the other other hand, there's the obvious drawback of competition undermining coordination and cooperation among team members, making the experience more toxic, or sacrificing quality for quantity.
Short feedback cycles are good. An employee shouldn't wait 3 or 12 months to find out that they aren't doing something right- it's bad for them and for the company. It isn't a silver bullet, though, and there are better ways to get there.
Does anyone actually run things like that? Where the goal of work is to earn arbitrary points?
Sure there are story 'points' for describing complexity in an int and daily check-ins but I thought counting tickets was up there with lines of code produced?
It might be up there but it's all that an overly analytical and literal population can get their heads around. They literally can't think of any other way of making decisions. If they don't stick numbers on things they become essentially blind to it.
I felt like the stuff about Kaczynski, while interesting, was a diversion. The meat is the beginning and the end: Skinner, how conditioning led to gamification which led to the addiction economy, and then strategies for turning the tables and take charge by choosing what games to play and how to play them.
An evolved and condensed version of the closing with practical examples and practice exercises should be taught in schools.
If people had fulfilling lives, consumed by work, family, community, and culture, there'd be little room for such addiction. The real story is a loss of meaning; it's a crisis of nihilism, more than gamification.
All these attention traps aren’t the only cause but they don’t help. They suck up a lot of time and time is precious.
At the very least once people get into them it makes it less likely that they will do… anything else.
Some of the stories I hear about younger peoples’ addiction to Instagram and TikTok are incredible. We’re talking many hours per day.
It’s easily worse than TV especially since the latter is frequently a social experience. People like to watch shows together. Social media, ironically, is usually consumed alone, making it possibly less social than TV.
Humanity is a history of addiction. Most often when you see parts of history that were not, it's because humans spending there energy in staying alive. Whenever humans start having excess capability to live you start seeing all forms of addition return. And yes, building your church 10 feet taller than the other one in town is a form of addiction that feeds egos and the sense of self. There was no great meaning behind doing it.
I read Kaczynski long ago and saw a huge hole immediately.
So surrogate activities replace the authentic struggle for survival. I can get that. But why is the struggle for survival better? Isn’t it just another game?
Kaczynski like many other romantics rails against the system, but isn’t nature just another system? It’s an older one that we didn’t design, but didn’t we learn in the end that the matrix was inside an even older matrix which was inside an even older one…?
What would it even mean to escape the “system?” How can you do that except death? If you are breathing you are playing some kind of game.
Instead the question is: can we exercise some choice over what systems we give our energy to and can we influence these systems? I do think we give our energy to a lot of dumb pointless or even evil systems today, so how do we turn our attention elsewhere?
For the natural system of subsistence hunting and gathering or farming the answers to these questions are “no” (little choice, play or die) and “no” (the system is billions of years old and isn’t even ours). We have more choice today in our complicated mesh of systems, or at least we have the potential of choice.
This is ultimately a big part of why I am not a primitivist, reactionary, or traditionalist. Sure what we have sucks sometimes. Are we sure it was better back then? Or was it just different? I always want to ask “trads” of various types if they are sure they would be happy in the traditional state they imagine.
Maybe the people who railed against nature and sought to command it with science to escape its constraints were malcontents not entirely different from Kaczynski in their emotional and personality structure. Send Ted back to 1400 and you might have an enlightenment radical materialist.
The blog doesn't condone the bombings or the violence. It talks about Kaczynski writings. For you, this is equivalent to glorifying a murderer. Wow, this is some poor comprehension.
I listen to all sorts of music and I love them. More often than not the artists are degenerates and drug addicts. I hate it but I can still enjoy the genius of their music. For example, Nirvana. Kurt committed suicide but his music is genius. Does not mean i gloirfy suicide or worship Kurt.
It seems weird to me that the article lists several gamified apps without mentioning advertising. It seems obvious to me that gamified apps like Duolingo are incentivesed to keep eyeballs glued to screens mostly because advertisers pay per view, and strange not to mention this as a reason why we see so much of it in this space. Maybe the author thought it was too obvious to mention.
Advertising makes up only 9% of Duolingo's revenue and is also usually a small part of the revenue of most mobile games. Mobile games rely on "whales" (people who pay a lot, like a casino) and Duolingo makes almost all of its revenue on subscriptions. Both require sticky retention but advertisers don't drive the business model or executive decisions at these companies.
Absolute percentage of revenue (or for that matter, profit) is irrelevant. If employees are able to justify their salary/promotion by increasing a metric such as ad impressions or "engagement", you're gonna see more advertising, even if it affects long-term profitability or even kills the product.
> This strange quirk of human behavior can even cost lives. In South Korea, a young couple became so addicted to raising a virtual baby that they let their real baby starve to death. The parents prioritized what they could quantify — levelling up their virtual baby — over that which they couldn’t — the life of their real one.
This is so sad. Such incident indeed confirms technology is pursuing people into forgetting real meaning and values of life. I am worried about the generation which has born in this gamification era. They need to be repeatedly taught about life meaning and values to differentiate between what's real and what's imaginary.
I would add a sixth rule: Gamify walking away from games or at least randomly walk away from them. Maybe it‘s time for me to try using a feature phone and a dumb watch.
I think conditioned reinforcers can actually be beneficial for pursing long-term goals. Let's say someone's purpose in life is to have a positive impact on the world, metrics such as audience reached provide a tangible interface for this abstract goal. Similar to using your credit card, gamification mechanisms like chasing metrics lets you experience the rewards of your efforts prematurely, which motivates you to work harder to achieve more.
And this whole loop can be part of a positive-sum game too. Metrics is a straightforward way to demonstrate how you can achieve your sense of purpose. When you share your strategy on maximizing those metrics, you incentivize and guide others to start their own journeys. If what you did inspire even one person to start acting, you've already added value to the system.
>“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”
I think a huge part of gamification in the modern age is quite often a large number of the goal are not being chosen for your benefit, but to your detriment instead. This becomes problematic when gamification is part of a system that you can't opt out of and/or may not understand the metrics of well.
Think back the the early to middle facebook days. They gamified getting other people to sign up for facebook/facebook games by making a meta game where you get useful items in game by sending out those invites.
We're always taught 'actual' games are fun and have little side effects. Dangerous games were we sell our soul to the devil or some other negative consequence have been relegated to fairy tales. And because of this general line of thought that games are harmless we've been pushing more and more potentially dangerous actions into games, such as mass information gathering by companies, and what is effectively gambling in kids games.
So, yea, we play games in the first place because they give us positive feelings, but just blindingly accepting any game as good is dangerous because it will bypass our internal safety checks on if doing something is a bad idea.
I don't agree with the positive feedback loop being THE thing about games. It's the fact that games offer a sense of progress that life does not.
The skinner box implies animalistic pleasure associations that we just want to keep hitting. The progress wanting is simply desiring structure and context to your effort. They're similar but not the same.
I've been fiddling with motor vehicles on and off over my lifetime (mid fifties now) and progressed from simple tune ups to now re-building engines. It took a long time to get the "feel" of what's right and one outright failure. But I can see the progress I've made over that relatively long space of time in that I understand much better what I'm doing and why, what is OK and what needs replacing. This progression has always been confined to the vehicles I could afford (and sometimes by necessity for that reason) but it's still there. If it was a video game the progression would be marked by the prestige of the vehicle but it isn't a game.
I can see progress in my work. I'm a much better programmer now then when I was 20. I write a lot less code, it's more readable and structured in a way that makes sense rather than just works.
I guess these things are elaborate Skinner boxes in themselves, but there is no reason you can't find progression and meaning at a meta level even though you have a boring job and can't afford to play with Ferraris. It's just that you have to find it for yourself. Nobody is going to be able to do that for you and it takes a conscious effort rather than just expecting it to happen.
I feel similarly with gardening. Try growing a food forest -- it expands your mind's time horizon to try picturing your six inch tall hazelnut seedling as a 20 foot tall tree. Each year is a new feeling of progress as everything starts to bear fruit!
That's fair. I should have said "little" sense of progress. Practice and mastery is certainly a thing you can observe progress on. But the things people are gamifying tend not to be those things.
I think it's really about some of our biological processes which helps keep us alive. I mean, our brains are hardwired to try and keep us alive. Seeking out old information you already know is not beneficial to improving your survival. New, particularly beneficial information can be. Thus, in order to help us survive, our brains evolved a reward system to motivate us to seek new information... to learn essentially. In other words, our brains motivate us to learn, as learning helps us to survive. Thus, novelty = fun and repetition = boring.
But the brain is obviously imperfect. Games and many addicting things in modern life, can hijack and play on this particular process (even harmful things).
No, that's what I disagree with. The hedonic treadmill and all that crap is real. But it's not why we find games rewarding. Structured progress and achievement is a higher level construct. Gameification is largely about taking a long, possibly unending task, and trying to reframe it in a way that has structured goals. It's about mental organization. Not rewarding blips to please the monkey brain.
Readit News
That said, I’m more sanguine about gamification than the author. There are indeed many games to choose from, but the ones that are most concerning that those we have little choice but to play, whether they’re from our employers or in our schools and colleges, or built into devices and platforms like the Apple Watch and iOS.
If you’re interested in this subject, I wrote a book critiquing gamification called “You’ve Been Played” - the NYT called it illuminating and persuasive!
And boy are they ever increasing! For anyone interested in other good gamification resources I recommend C. Thi Nguyen [0][1].
[0]: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/the-philosophy-of-game... [1]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/55-games-against-human...
Theoretically, streaks are a way to encourage and recognise commitment – often people will use streaks to motivate themselves in writing a book or completing chores. However, it's inadvisable for people to exercise every single day for weeks on end. Of course, apps could build in rest days and lower-impact exercises to make streaks easier to maintain, but very few do and even then, it's hard to know the user's context – perhaps they've been ill and they need even longer to rest. It's pretty clear to me that streaks, as commonly implemented, are merely a way to boost retention at the expense of the user's interest.
I think leaderboards are fine in some circumstances. We use them in our own one-off virtual race events so people can benchmark themselves against others. However, we don't maintain weekly or monthly leaderboards for fitness in general because they end up being boring or even demotivating. When I had a Fitbit, the rankings were always the same, the walkers in London always trouncing the drivers in the US. I expect the only effect was to make the people at the bottom of the leaderboard depressed. For everyone who feels great ascending a leaderboard, there's someone who feels bad descending it.
My career in fitness gamification is based around the idea making exercising genuinely fun is the best way to motivate people. Competitive sports do that for a lot of people, but it can be relatively inaccessible. Zombies, Run! uses immersive audio storytelling and actual gameplay rather than just badges and XP and levels to make things exciting. It's not for everyone but it works for a lot of people.
Among them is we will respect the user. From being fair on pricing to data collected. If I get a hint of someone not in line with that, they would be off the team, no debate.
We’re lucky that the thing we’re building is not our core business, and it only has to be successful, not MBA-milk-everything-you-can-all-the-time successful.
For me, I have the power to make this a reality. For someone that doesn’t, do what you can.
My first thought was that working for such a company would be torture.
My second thought was that this basically describes Agile/Scrumm and has taken over the entire industry.
On the other hand, if your work is a bit more repetitive, it can be a nice way to actually see your contribution change.
On the other other hand, there's the obvious drawback of competition undermining coordination and cooperation among team members, making the experience more toxic, or sacrificing quality for quantity.
Short feedback cycles are good. An employee shouldn't wait 3 or 12 months to find out that they aren't doing something right- it's bad for them and for the company. It isn't a silver bullet, though, and there are better ways to get there.
Sure there are story 'points' for describing complexity in an int and daily check-ins but I thought counting tickets was up there with lines of code produced?
The only time I know clearly is when the deadline looms. But the majority of the time everyone around is me cosplaying productivity.
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An evolved and condensed version of the closing with practical examples and practice exercises should be taught in schools.
If people had fulfilling lives, consumed by work, family, community, and culture, there'd be little room for such addiction. The real story is a loss of meaning; it's a crisis of nihilism, more than gamification.
At the very least once people get into them it makes it less likely that they will do… anything else.
Some of the stories I hear about younger peoples’ addiction to Instagram and TikTok are incredible. We’re talking many hours per day.
It’s easily worse than TV especially since the latter is frequently a social experience. People like to watch shows together. Social media, ironically, is usually consumed alone, making it possibly less social than TV.
Humanity is a history of addiction. Most often when you see parts of history that were not, it's because humans spending there energy in staying alive. Whenever humans start having excess capability to live you start seeing all forms of addition return. And yes, building your church 10 feet taller than the other one in town is a form of addiction that feeds egos and the sense of self. There was no great meaning behind doing it.
I don’t understand why people are so fascinated with talking about the ideals of insane serial killers.
There are plenty of other highly intelligent individuals with the same ideologies to discuss. Why glorify a murderer?
So surrogate activities replace the authentic struggle for survival. I can get that. But why is the struggle for survival better? Isn’t it just another game?
Kaczynski like many other romantics rails against the system, but isn’t nature just another system? It’s an older one that we didn’t design, but didn’t we learn in the end that the matrix was inside an even older matrix which was inside an even older one…?
What would it even mean to escape the “system?” How can you do that except death? If you are breathing you are playing some kind of game.
Instead the question is: can we exercise some choice over what systems we give our energy to and can we influence these systems? I do think we give our energy to a lot of dumb pointless or even evil systems today, so how do we turn our attention elsewhere?
For the natural system of subsistence hunting and gathering or farming the answers to these questions are “no” (little choice, play or die) and “no” (the system is billions of years old and isn’t even ours). We have more choice today in our complicated mesh of systems, or at least we have the potential of choice.
This is ultimately a big part of why I am not a primitivist, reactionary, or traditionalist. Sure what we have sucks sometimes. Are we sure it was better back then? Or was it just different? I always want to ask “trads” of various types if they are sure they would be happy in the traditional state they imagine.
Maybe the people who railed against nature and sought to command it with science to escape its constraints were malcontents not entirely different from Kaczynski in their emotional and personality structure. Send Ted back to 1400 and you might have an enlightenment radical materialist.
I listen to all sorts of music and I love them. More often than not the artists are degenerates and drug addicts. I hate it but I can still enjoy the genius of their music. For example, Nirvana. Kurt committed suicide but his music is genius. Does not mean i gloirfy suicide or worship Kurt.
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This is so sad. Such incident indeed confirms technology is pursuing people into forgetting real meaning and values of life. I am worried about the generation which has born in this gamification era. They need to be repeatedly taught about life meaning and values to differentiate between what's real and what's imaginary.
And this whole loop can be part of a positive-sum game too. Metrics is a straightforward way to demonstrate how you can achieve your sense of purpose. When you share your strategy on maximizing those metrics, you incentivize and guide others to start their own journeys. If what you did inspire even one person to start acting, you've already added value to the system.
I think a huge part of gamification in the modern age is quite often a large number of the goal are not being chosen for your benefit, but to your detriment instead. This becomes problematic when gamification is part of a system that you can't opt out of and/or may not understand the metrics of well.
Think back the the early to middle facebook days. They gamified getting other people to sign up for facebook/facebook games by making a meta game where you get useful items in game by sending out those invites.
We're always taught 'actual' games are fun and have little side effects. Dangerous games were we sell our soul to the devil or some other negative consequence have been relegated to fairy tales. And because of this general line of thought that games are harmless we've been pushing more and more potentially dangerous actions into games, such as mass information gathering by companies, and what is effectively gambling in kids games.
So, yea, we play games in the first place because they give us positive feelings, but just blindingly accepting any game as good is dangerous because it will bypass our internal safety checks on if doing something is a bad idea.
The skinner box implies animalistic pleasure associations that we just want to keep hitting. The progress wanting is simply desiring structure and context to your effort. They're similar but not the same.
I've been fiddling with motor vehicles on and off over my lifetime (mid fifties now) and progressed from simple tune ups to now re-building engines. It took a long time to get the "feel" of what's right and one outright failure. But I can see the progress I've made over that relatively long space of time in that I understand much better what I'm doing and why, what is OK and what needs replacing. This progression has always been confined to the vehicles I could afford (and sometimes by necessity for that reason) but it's still there. If it was a video game the progression would be marked by the prestige of the vehicle but it isn't a game.
I can see progress in my work. I'm a much better programmer now then when I was 20. I write a lot less code, it's more readable and structured in a way that makes sense rather than just works.
I guess these things are elaborate Skinner boxes in themselves, but there is no reason you can't find progression and meaning at a meta level even though you have a boring job and can't afford to play with Ferraris. It's just that you have to find it for yourself. Nobody is going to be able to do that for you and it takes a conscious effort rather than just expecting it to happen.
ca. 300 BC, Aristippus (returning from a dinner party at the palace) passes a student of Diogenes eating lentils:
— You know, if you'd just learn to say what the King wants to hear, you wouldn't have to eat lentils.
— How about: if you'd just learn to eat lentils, you wouldn't have to say what the King wants to hear?
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8SVYDvMVzY
EDIT: unfortunately (unlike the Alexander/Diogenes story) there's insufficient overlap for Aristippus/Diogenes to be plausible; added "a student of".
I believe you've just given the tl;dr for Existentialism.
But the brain is obviously imperfect. Games and many addicting things in modern life, can hijack and play on this particular process (even harmful things).
The information bit seems irrelevant to this imo.