Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)

austinhenley.com

125 pointsazhenley59 comments

Self-promo: If you're interested in the rise of gamification, how it works (and doesn't work), and how it's being used in workplaces, schools, governments, and social media, I published a book last year called You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All.

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adrian-hon/youve-be...

I've been designing games for twenty years, and I'm CEO at Six to Start, the co-creators of Zombies, Run!, one of the most popular examples of gamification to date. I also originally trained as an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist.

The most prevalent forms of gamification, including the ones mentioned in this link, are ultimately based on behaviourism as a theory of motivation. It's not that points and badges and levels don't work – clearly they do, particularly for some people – it's that there are other ways people motivate themselves and others, and the better forms of gamification harness them.

Love Zombies, Run. How Gamification can be used positively.

Self-promo successful - just bought your book on Amazon! ;)

I actually did Zombies, Run! over the pandemic and we had a great time doing it - honestly one of the few examples of gamification that works. Really it's so good that I didn't even think of it even as gamification, which is saying something. I also worked in the game industry for years and gluing on trophies or points onto some otherwise irrelevant task is not true gamification, it's just the most basic example of "if you measure it, they will do it".

Looking forward to reading your book.

Thank you!

> Books don't even have a progress bar on them (at least physical ones don't yet)

I find the idea that books don't have progress bars to be very amusing. Have the author never looked at a book with a bookmark in it from the side? :)

You don't even need a bookmark. Just open a book. It is a progress bar in itself.

My parents hated it when I just bent over the uper corners of pages. Still do, to mark progress, and to mark interesting pages for later reference in text books.

You might be interested in page points. They are little metals tabs folded over so you can slide them onto a page’s edge. I like them better than bookmarks because they point to the exact line where I stopped reading.

I've been making origami bookmarks since elementary school [1]. Recently I've been making them out of ephemera, e.g. old coupons, the receipt for the book itself.

[1] https://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Origami-Bookmark

Clearly someone who hasn’t read a book lately! They are the physical embodiment of progress bars and badges of achievement once you finish them and put them on your shelf.

There is so much other media to consume, I don't ever have the desire to reread any of my books.

So the thing I unlock when I finish a book is a gift for someone else.

Librera Reader and FBReader have discreet progress bars you can set at the bottom of the screen which, when clicked/tapped, will take you to that place/chapter in the book!

I know it's only semantics, but it kind of bugs me how the saying "level up your [regular life skills]" has become so prevalent the past few years.

Mainly because it give this illusion that once you've "leveled up" in something, you'll stay at that level forever - like in video games. But the truth is that all skills need to be honed and maintained, or else they will falter. Anyone that's been active in sports, music, art, etc. know that maintenance is the key, and that even then, you will not stay at the same level forever.

Gamification can be good for people that need structure, clear goals, and measurable progression. But it can also lead to sacrificing understanding for the sake of speed and execution - if that makes any sense? And also false expectations of what it takes to become the very best at something.

The leetcode/technical interview "grinding" culture is full of this.

Fun fact, not many games model the loss of skills and XP over time, but RimWorld does. Colonists need to actively use the skill in order to not lose XP and the level they already have.

Depends on the type of problem being solved. You need different kinds of ppl at different phases. Similar to the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff.

Once you find a gold mine in the jungle, you dont need undisciplined creative explorers, you only need people who dig. And dig well. Night and Day. Obediently. With nothing else going on in their head. The non diggers become excess baggage.

Then the system flips once the gold mine runs dry (Exploit phase completed). Its the turn of the army of mindless diggers to turn useless. And now you bring back the explorers to go search the deep dark jungles to find the next gold mine.

> Anyone that's been active in sports, music, art, etc. know that maintenance is the key

I agree with you, but would add some nuance. There are things that you'll keep a long time. For instance, sports, if you're a good skier for instance (or any technical sport), you'll always be a good skier (at least compared to a beginner which is years behind you). Same thing for music.

That being said, I feel the people who need gamification are also those who will not really learn any real, long-lasting, skills. Going back to the example of music or sport : you need years of dedicated practice to be more than a beginner. If you don't enjoy the process enough to be motivated for years, I doubt you'll achieve your goal.

I never really noticed it as a key component to their success, but some of my favorite games model the degradation of skill over time. Both CDDA and Rimworld do this, and as a result, you end up with characters that are more nuanced and specialized, but also moldable into the “next right thing,” whatever you think that might be. Maybe it is the thing that makes these games fundamentally compelling over a longer time span

CDDA stands for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world.

I imagine it as some sort of mix of Dwarf Fortress and Project Zomboid.

The crossover I never knew I needed.

Not to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelling-up_policy_of_the_Bri...

I think it's not just gamification but it's also commodification. It's substitute acquisition for the process and goal. This approach would have you believe that if you accumulate enough life Pro tips you will have a happy and productive life. If you accumulate enough hot takes and quips, it will make you a philosopher or intelligent.

It feeds into and propagates a consumerist mindset. Human Experience in learning reduced to a process of shopping and acquisition.

I think this article is written a bit like that cash register anecdote. There is no conclusion other than examples why you are this way.

Why do you think you are like this? Not everyone is - I’m not.

But I’m currently working on a rewards gamification system in a surgical-medical training device and we’re discovering in user-testing that while yes, medical students do fixate on optimizing their scores, the system doesn’t necessarily incentivize the sort of development we would like to see. Kind of like the cash register anecdote - some people get stuck. And then there are also people who are turned off by this perspective of having to perform like this.

I think it has to do with a certain set of rules that some people are exposed to, but not others. For me gamification turns some things into a slog.

I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark as a software developer, enterprise architect and later manager, and you wouldn’t believe the amount of gamification attempts that I have seen fail. I’m not sure where they come from. Ok, maybe I should clarify that. I understand how gamification is a very effective psychological tool to get people to spend a lot of time on things they wouldn’t otherwise spend time on. Which means they are great tools for making money on various things, but I never understood how gamification made its way into anything “positive”. Positive is maybe the wrong word, but I’m not sure how else to put it. The incentive to put gamification into public sector digitisation is basically always good. You did it because you wanted better surgeons. We did it because we wanted people to take their medicine, the jobless to get jobs, parents to take more interest in their children and so on. Basically all good intentions, but the tool isn’t for good intentions. It’s a tool to make people spend time on something they might not want to spend time on, so why did we ever think it would be a fitting tool for our good intentions?

The results were always somewhat similar to yours. Recipients engaged more on the whole. There were rebels, people who gamed the systems and a range of other outliners, but as a whole people engaged more. The process also failed to cultivate any of the developments that the process people had hoped for. I was never really surprised to see the attempts fail. I know I’m a little “special” in that I have ADHD, and that it manifests in a way where it’s basically impossible for me to engage in anything I find boring. So aside from being terrible at meetings (and yes, I quickly quit management), it also renders me sort of immune to gamification while also being weirdly inflicted by it as anyone with ADHD will likely attest to. Anyway, those systems, the ones that give you a “win-streak” for taking your medicine every day, they aren’t fun. I want the streak, but I also don’t care because it’s not fun, and so I forget to take my medicine just as much, and at some point, it becomes more fun to break the streak.

All of this is obviously very anecdotal, but my personal experience with these systems, and how they aren’t actually fun, seems to correlate with how they seem to fail to incentivise the development their creators want, unless that development is for people to spend a lot of money on video games. I do wonder if there is any actual science on the subject, it would be interesting to see if my anecdotal stories here are just silly stories. They likely are, there must be a reason “gamification” won the hearts and minds of good intended, highly educated and very professional people who want to use the methods for good things.

There is a good bit of research in the medical field. Eg here's a meta study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33128662/

I found this bit of the abstract interesting:

> However, most studies lacked well-defined control groups and did not apply and/or report theory to understand underlying processes.

This paper seems to be a good overview of the theories underlying gamification

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756322...

> Gamification can illustrate goals and their relevance, nudge users through guided paths, give users immediate feedback, reinforce good performance and simplify content to manageable tasks. Gamification mechanics can allow users to pursue individual goals and choose between different progress paths, while the system can adapt complexity to the user's abilities.

The above section is extremely interesting and matches my experience. Where gamification has really excelled in incentivising me to continue is when I had a path to follow, I can see progress and improvement.

A good example is the Odin project study paths, or Khan Academy courses. At their core they represent a skill tree that you progress through and use.

Giving me badges (github/SO), accomplishments (Steam)for the sake of magic points, are all in my opinion useless non engaging and shallow. In my opinion SO is the biggest culprit in shallow badges.

> A good example is the Odin project study paths, or Khan Academy courses.

One other example that has a few of my friends hooked is Duolingo.

Learning another language was something they'd wanted to do, and had tried to do in the past. They just had trouble sticking to putting the work in.

But Duolingo's particular brand of gamification has got them doing the thing they always wanted to do, but never got round to before, and they now compare streaks of activity of more than a year.

Gamification definitely works better when it's in conjunction with something you already want to do, or feel like you should do. It gives you an excuse to push a little harder to keep on task. It mostly seems to not work at all when it's for something you don't care about.

But that goes against @devjab's experience upthread:

> [gamification] isn’t for good intentions. It’s a tool to make people spend time on something they might not want to spend time on, so why did we ever think it would be a fitting tool for our good intentions?

> [gamification systems] seem to fail to incentivise the development their creators want, unless that development is for people to spend a lot of money on video games.

(Unless Duolingo counts as a video game? But even so, I don't think people spend a lot of (any?) money on it?)

While I agree with most of what was written by devjab, this:

> It’s a tool to make people spend time on something they might not want to spend time on.

I disagree with. It's a tool, its usage can differ wildly between orgs, people. I think it's clear that gamification can be used for good from the examples people have provided. Of course the opposite is also true.

Thank you for these - they will come in very handy!

I’m not so sure that it won everyone’s minds, more that it’s something that sounds like a generally good idea in a meeting. Like, who would go against making unfun things fun by making them toy-like!

I’m similar to you, ADHD and whatnot. I was generally weary of using gamification in our use case, but surprise surprise - med students aren’t the rebel type! Only problem is - we would have to invest insane resources and research into figuring out how to have them do exactly what we want. Currently we’re leaning towards keeping gamification parts but only sparingly sprinkling them in just several key moments of achievement.

> Basically all good intentions, but the tool isn’t for good intentions. It’s a tool to make people spend time on something they might not want to spend time on, so why did we ever think it would be a fitting tool for our good intentions?

This is a great quote - we want them to spend time practicing, and our devices are somewhat cool but get boring pretty quick. So it helps to activate them, but now we also don’t want them to fixate on just the devices to get the perfect score ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> For me gamification turns some things into a slog.

same for me. i admit it still feels nice to "watch the number go up", mostly on content platforms with a social component to it (hn, reddit, stackoverflow) as you feel whatever you've said has either been useful to, or at least resonated with someone. as social creatures it's only normal to seek some sort of validation.

i think the only gamification set of features i've fallen for in the recent years has been duolingo, which has me practicing every day, even if just for 3-5 minutes. the way they've done it is quite interesting as they have what i'd call different levels of gamification you can buy into. the most basic one being your daily streak but then you have stuff like daily quests, monthly badges, league standings, friend quests and probably more stuff i can't remember now.

the article does cover quite a few examples and i like how the author hints at the chance that, at times, he'd probably be better of not maintaining his streak as that alone ends up resulting in an output that's not desirable (eg. stackoverflow answers with little value). however he left out some cases where gamification is tied to a normally positive impact like step counters (ignoring the data collection).

I've been very skeptical of gamification ever since seeing a marketing agency constantly pitch it as a way to increase user engagement and sales. Now it's a red flag that makes me ask, "what are you trying to manipulate me in to buying or doing?" The experience has been impactful enough that even I stopped caring as much about "achievements" in actual games.

Duolingo is interesting because it shows me I'll still engage with gamification if my goals align, but all those mechanics become a bit heavy. When I want flashcards and grammar lessons, getting a game to manage pushed me away. Then, when I realized our goals didn't align due to Duolingo's ceiling, it didn't seem worth being pressed to such an uncomfortable degree. I won't let myself be mentally abused by a cartoon owl.

You are on point I think - 10-15 years ago gamification became a generally fashionable thing to pursue to drive engagement, consumption and market shit. But most of it doesn’t really work because it’s not usually implemented very well. This is what we had initially with our medical training example - the developers just slapped some trophies and achievements and expected it to just work. Of course when we started user testing we found that people agreed with the general idea but didn’t really use it and found the clutter confusing. We’re still working on having gamification because we really do just want them to feel like it is a game, but it’s no easy feat to do it well. Thankfully with hard evidence from all the user testing we have the arguments to dial it back.

It seems to me gamification is a feature in some situations, a bug in other situations and with no uniformity between two people.

I despise the upvote/karma bullshit when it comes to discussions. It completely changes how people think and interact. The "witty" mention from the author is so cringe to me. The average person is just not a comedian and it is really the main reason I never use Reddit. To me, Reddit is an engine of non-comedians trying to be witty and funny playing an upvote game. The worst part is I imagine many are like the unfunny person who thinks they are funny because people fake laugh at their jokes because otherwise the interaction is just uncomfortable given the volume of bad jokes from the non-comedian. It all becomes self reinforcing in an awful way.

That is so different than something like duolingo that is motivating just to do a little bit of work that you might otherwise would not have and keeps bad streaks from forming. I just experienced this using Anki where all of the sudden I haven't practiced my language in 2 weeks but my language of choice is not on duolingo.

> I think this article is written a bit like that cash register anecdote. There is no conclusion other than examples why you are this way. Why do you think you are like this?

Hints at the bottom, maybe: "There are Amazon affiliate links on this page."

I grew out of that stuff by age 23 or so but wasn't automatic. At some point I had an epiphany that it was the most ridiculous form of pursuit.

It's clear that the trend is about capitalizing on this addictive behavior, however. Is it possible to reject it without becoming depressingly jaded in the process? That's something I haven't been as successful with. Limiting Internet time is probably the best thing here, and you shouldn't base your self-worth on anything that involves fake Internet points.

I think the important thing is having real responses from real people, and genuine interaction and discussion, whether or not that takes place through the internet or in your local pub. You can find a lot of people on HN, for instance, who are happy to lose points or even risk bans just to say what's on their mind in the event that it's unpopular.

Meanwhile, broader society (read: 19 year old girls) are fundamentally very susceptible to simplistic ranking strategies. HotOrNot, a grossly misogynistic, shallow, frankly evil concept piece built around ranking people's appearances, actually paved the way for everything that came after it in social media and online dating. The reason they're so susceptible is that they haven't had the experience of living in an offline world yet where they're seriously listened to and treated as something other than an object, or worse, an Object().

>Schools do a terrible job with their gamification of grades so my GPA and attendance were terrible.

Well, it is simply another skillset since at some point you have to game the teachers setting the grades, which involves other kinds of (meta-)hacks. I remember one student who specifically asked every professor at the start of the semester what he had to do in order to get the best grade and then he meticulously kept track of the "progress", some teachers were very reluctant to do so in "specific" terms but in the end he "gamed" it successfully.

As a fun side note from the Old Continent: There is a kind of "ultimate achievement ring" of academia in Austria which dates at least back to the monarchy times under Ferdinand II and in its secularized form is now called "Promotio sub auspiciis Praesidentis rei publicae" and accordingly specified in Austrian federal law [0][1] which has to be followed by each Uni and kept updated[2].

The gist: perfect scores beginning from "Sekundarstufe II" (~ age 14-15) to the terminal degree "PhD/doctorate" achieved in regular time or better.

A fun side note of the fun side note: In 1910, Erwin Schrödinger who formally passed all the requirements for a "sub auspiciis" didn't get to put on the "ring of honor" because the University of Vienna at the time limited the award to only 3 candidates/year, he would have been the fourth one.

[0]https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/Dokument.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnormen&...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub_auspiciis_Praesidentis#Pro...

[2]https://senat.univie.ac.at/promotion-sub-auspiciis-praesiden...

It's pleasing that Schrödinger simultaneously did and did not earn that honor.

"Thankfully Netflix doesn't have achievements with a public profile."

Netflix is missing out.

Anime has that. See myanimelist.net, where you can sign up and check off episodes as you see them.

anime isn't a product but more of a category. you can also track shows you watch on netflix (or anywhere else) on platforms like trakt or even imdb. though i wouldn't be surprised if netflix at some point adds (or at least beta tests) a social profile like steam and notifications like "your friend is watching X" or "your friends are watching horror, see our great selection bla bla bla".

Yeah, but it's not like it's built in to a product like Crunchyroll. There are separate tracking apps available for non-anime media as well.

There's also several sites for anime. I personally use Anilist. It even implements the same kind of activity grid that GitHub has for commits. https://anilist.co/user/Mailia/

Honestly really powerful stuff… makes me think. I’m glad stuff like this gets posted on here, even though it’s not out to prove anything or convince anyone

I’m starting to feel like this recently with all the certification programs that are available.

AWS expert this, Microsoft that, and now the engineering regulatory body has micro-certifications and badges for CPD. I can get a micro-badge that says I’m good at project management, yay!

Replying to this more as a note to come back and read later, but it's been increasingly clear to me of late that the gold badges, awards, participation ribbons and similar don't really work for me, they poorly mimic the real feeling of solving a problem and fixing something. It's superficial. There's something irreplaceable about that that these things just miss entirely. The game is the puzzle you need to solve, it's an issue if treating things like a game rather than work, I guess. Once the puzzle is solved those awards feel like waste and don't matter. I guess that's why I find teaching myself how to code, as poor as I am at it, so addicting. You're constantly puzzle solving and addressing bugs. I don't need acknowledgement for it, they're often personal projects. I find that a lot of people need that sense of acknowledgement, though.

I like to make new HN accounts every few months to avoid falling into this trap (i.e. feeling an obligation to sink more time into HN or reddit because I'm proud of the amount of points I have).

I don't feel attached to that total score, but it is still gouge how good or badly received a response is and how much engagement it got.

I dislike systems like GitHub where some people obviously just farm stars. Really complex problems and good code has 10-15 stars and very little engagement compared to some js helper function that cuts yours string in half.

I have had a single job interview where I needed to give my HN account status to proceed.

I didn't, you know, do it, but it was asked

I have a userscript which among other things hides your score. I call this feature anti narcissism switch.

I've done this with reddit several times as well. It seems a positive thing to me to retain a level of detachment and not get too involved in building up the karma score or trying to build some kind of reputation. I've also taken to using the randomly generated usernames that it recommends rather than customizing them.

Don’t tell OP they can treat netflix shows as they do books…

I feel a kind of sadness for the author.

It's a very grim opening paragraph. I don't honestly know if I want to read further.

I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if Jokic would have enjoyed reaching global elite in CS:GO or Plat 1 (i guess it's called?) in LoL more than he did winning the NBA finals.

But this might just be a meme take based on how unfazed he was about being the MVP

Everyone learns differently.

I think the real problem is looking for a one size fits all solution, rather then adding gameification as yet another tool in our arsenal to teach the next generation.

When all is said and done, there is still an important metric to "gamify": the number of happy years lived. For me, all the others have to subordinate to that one.

My Jira ticket is blocked. No blockers. Please don't give me an F-, my Jira GPA is totally not inflated!

I am guilty of making some tiny commits I wouldn’t otherwise have to keep my github green box streak up…

I'm getting really sick of all the humble brag blog posts that make their way to hacker news.

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