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Comment by foxhop | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if we as tech creators can utilize these techniques to actually do good for the person, their life, and humanity as a whole, instead of begging for their attention in the virtual/simulated, could we help them with their real life goals?

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This reminded me of an IndieHackers episode from a few weeks ago, where they interviewed the founder of https://pioneer.app/, which attempts to use gaming mechanics to motivate people to work on interesting projects and be more productive. It's a really cool idea that has the potential to do a lot of good for the world imo, so I have hope that this _can_ definitely be done.

Highly recommend listening to the whole thing if you're interested in this stuff: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/080-daniel-gross-of-pio...

This happens a lot but usually picking the supporting extrinsic rewarding parts of game design like achievements and levelling rather than thinking about how game design can make activities intrinsically more rewarding.

Also I think that for a lot of people videogames really do have positive effects which enrich humanity.

People have been talking about gamifying productivity stuff for years now — Duolingo is one example.

And the vast majority of times I've seen attempts at that, it ends up being some combination of distracting, condescending, and irrelevant to what I was trying to do.

I'm sure it can be done well, it just isn't.

Well that just isn't true at all. Educational games span as wide a gamut in quality as any genre. You just need to know where to look. Sites like https://explorabl.es/ provide rich educational material in interactive form.

Is there a particular case you find lacking? What are you trying to learn?

I think we're considering very different categories, and I probably should have been more specific, sorry. I was thinking about "gamification" in products whose primary focus is not education - in the worst form of what I'm talking about, it substitutes for help or documentation.

After my comment I gave it some thought and figured that's what you meant in the context of Duolingo, which is a great example of this. I've tried in vain to convince others they're wasting their time (it could be spent more efficiently) but they feel like they're "winning" something so it's futile.

Gamification is usually meant for creating addictive behaviors but I think some of it was in earnest effort. I can see how the idea of "Nobody ever wants to learn, let's try to make learning a game" makes sense from above, but it's hard to actually implement correctly. And at some point, some new manager with ideas about gamification for profit's sake inevitably joins the company.

Neurofeedback therapy seems like a good candidate for that - helps train people to self-regulate/calm their brains by engineering a computer game that makes them feel good (by giving them rewards when their brain is in the right state).

Strava does a pretty good job of gamifying exercise (well cycling and running).

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