Why everything is becoming a game | Hacker News Reader

Why everything is becoming a game

gurwinder.blog

180 pointsjger1577 comments

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!

Hey Adrian, I read your book a couple weeks ago and thought it was great!

Thanks!

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?

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.

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 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.

> but the ones that are most concerning that those we have little choice but to play

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...

> 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 don't think clear metrics to optimize would be bad. I mostly find work to be entirely opaque in what it wants from me.

The only time I know clearly is when the deadline looms. But the majority of the time everyone around is me cosplaying productivity.

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.

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?"

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.

Are there other ways? Like sure there's other systems that assign numbers differently and have different ceremonies but is there any way that works that doesn't involve assigning numbers to stuff?

The basic premise of people being simultaneously really good at estimating work and at the same time absolutely garbage at it when you make them use real dates naturally evolves a number system. Make up an arbitrary unit, have people estimate tasks in that arbitrary unit, and behind the scenes without telling them determine the conversion factor for that person so you can plan accordingly. Everything else is just flavor around the core gameplay loop.

Are there ways to work without quantifying things? Sure. However, anytime you want to systematize something, you need to quantify them.

Still, the GP wants to know if there are ways of working without assigning “arbitrary” points to stuff, i.e. systematization for its own sake. You can certainly quantify things in a meaningful way for your problem.

While scrum and SAFe may be the right approach when working to find a technical fit to a customer problem, where estimates of “complexity” linearly map to some unit of time (conversation factor). These agile implementations fail completely whenever there are non-trivial, system level, non-functional requirements to satisfy. If you don’t have a platform supporting your work, and you’re in the act of building it, you’re no longer doing programming, you’re doing engineering.

In this case, the “systematization” that can be adopted are knowledge based approaches. DoD systems engineering has adopted “knowledge points” as an approach, which ties work to capabilities, which can be utilized at a program level. Which capabilities you have achieved is a metric that demonstrates work, and ties to things you actually want, as opposed to made up metrics, like points, which really tell you how good you are at estimating, but nothing else.

Other approaches are priority based. If you’re in a more service based environment, where work capacity is constant and goals change, a kanban board can be used to limit work in progress and prioritization can be set by either a risk based approach or a using cost of delay.

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.

> which led to the addiction economy...

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.

Where do you come up with stuff like this?

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 agree. I stopped at the Kaczynski worship.

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?

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.

It's been many years since I last read it, but I seem to recall Kaczynski defined surrogate activities as those beyond what one would feel substantively deprived should they be without. He gives the example of pursuit of social fulfillment like romantic affection to be not a surrogate activity, since we're programmed to feel deprived without any at all, but being a sex addict to be one.

If you combine this with his notion of the power process, surrogate activities ultimately unsatisfying in the context of that. Modern man lacks the ability to fulfill the power process, and surrogate activities is the result. Kaczynski draws arrows from the fact that that man lacks autonomy and fulfillment of the power process, to surrogate activities, then to various societal problems (of which he enumerates many).

So, the point isn't that surrogate activities is the terrible end state to be avoided at all costs, it's what results when they're load-bearing at a societal level.

But the power process is just a game, or perhaps more accurately a built in biological addiction to games that caused us to pass on our genes in the past. Why is it truly metaphysically better than, say, racking up Reddit karma?

What I really think is that most humans have never had meaning. They’ve just been too busy surviving to stop and think about it. When societies get rich enough to afford time to think and universal literacy to discuss then we start noticing that life is “meaningless” and discussing the metaphysical emptiness that was always there below the surface.

Huxley’s brave new world is accurate but is neither brave nor new.

You always get a faction that thinks the absence of such discourse in the past meant we had meaning back then. They’re wrong.

Going back in time to when we were still deeply embedded in the “power process” or whatever you call it is no different from drowning yourself in TikTok or MMORPGs. It’s just another way to stop thinking about big deep questions that in fact have never been solved.

We do not truly know what we are, where we came from, if we truly have any “purpose” beyond just catalyzing the dissipation of energy, whether consciousness ends at death or has some eternal component, etc. We can have various religious and spiritual faiths but these do not come with proof. The honest ones tell you that up front.

Becoming too busy to care, whether in the old traditional way or some new way, does not change this.

"But the power process is just a game, or perhaps more accurately a built in biological addiction to games that caused us to pass on our genes in the past. Why is it truly metaphysically better than, say, racking up Reddit karma?" Because it gives us psychological fulfilment. We are conditioned through millions of years of evolution to find it psychologically fulfilling. That's the point. His argument is that living a life that may be less physically secure, but psychologically fulfilling is a better life to live. That's why it's better.

>> 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.

I think yogic/buddhist enlightenment or nirvana is freedom from constraints due to nature.. the solution (as far as I understand) is essentially a state like death or physical non-existence but somehow still fully conscious and absolutely blissful

"But why is the struggle for survival better? Isn’t it just another game?" The reason why the struggle for survival is better is because that is what we are psychologically predisposed to be fulfilled by. Millions of years of evolution have created reward pathways and we get deep fulfillment from these goals, and community. Not all games are the same when it comes to how it affects us psychologically.

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.

> 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 think this might be a part of what Ted was talking about.

Ted was actually a very interesting thinker, very underrated in my opinion, and definitely misrepresented.

The fact that he is a murderer is completely irrelevant to the discussion, nor was he insane. A genius mathematician, actually

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.

See also: war, and the various Just So stories we tell about it.

Truly shocking; that sounds like a plot line that Black Mirror rejected because it sounded too implausible.

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 don't think life has no sense of progress.

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.

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 didn't mean my comment to come across as a criticism (my apologies), just an observation. I would agree that gamification seems to have confined itself to immediate and facile activities.

> Nobody is going to be able to [find progression and meaning] for you and it takes a conscious effort rather than just expecting it to happen.

I believe you've just given the tl;dr for Existentialism.

Ha ha - imagine that the secret of true happiness is something like noticing you got better at something you enjoy. It can't be that simple, right?

>Comparison is the thief of joy

With the existence of that statement, and the truth it seems to hold, I don't think it's just about getting better but also not above overly comparing yourself to others. Of course this is why I think a lot of engagement based social media sucks because it's just a bunch of people saying how perfect their life is so they feel good.

> noticing you got better at something you enjoy

Everypony needs to get (and develop) their cutie mark?

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!

I love this idea but I hate gardening. It just seems like such a grind to keep the weeds down and whatnot. I do forget that planting things is like an investment in your own satisfaction.

> to keep the weeds down

Heh, you need to level up your mulching skills.

Especially in growing non-vegetable plants your choice of species and spacing can quite often self manage the weeds. Watching someone really good at growing is the same as watching a really good programmer to me. Little choices they make early on handle error conditions months later with little effort.

> If it was a video game the progression would be marked by the prestige of the vehicle but it isn't a game.

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 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.

The information bit seems irrelevant to this imo.

The article title promises to reveal how everything is becoming a game.

Spoiler alert: turns out that is just clickbait. It's not everything. Just ... you know, apps. Mostly multi-user, social ones.

Maybe the author really has his head so far up his apps that they look like everything.

No, he specifically referred to things such as eg China’s social credit system, the gamification of certain workplaces and the Unabomber. I wouldn’t trivialize his overall point.

Really good article! I guess that the key is to turn things that I hate to do into a game!

Also, is this also why people go through schools and university because of the system has grades as a scoring system and the "promise" of a good career and life at the end of it?

The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects. -Adam Smith

>First: choose long-term goals over short-term ones. >Second: choose hard games over easy ones. >Third: choose positive-sum games over zero-sum or negative-sum ones. >Fourth: choose atelic games over telic ones. >Finally, the fifth rule is to choose immeasurable rewards over measurable ones.

I am afraid these are as effective as telling obese people not to overeat.

These are situations where people cannot help themselves and that's precisely why gamification works.

this article is all over the place. At one point it even starts admonishing actual video games, with the usual granny complaints.

The article sounds like alex jones style of piecing things superficially together. The worship of ted kaczynski is also bothering, since his views are so banal and not even accurate. (technology is making human a creature of society? not really. We always was. Ask jesus what happens when you go against the grain).

Assassin’s Creed.

Go play the latest ones and tell me that Ubisoft doesn’t have a team devoted to “retention”.

It’s game on top of game on top of game.

The main missions are spaced out in a way that they are not too close or too far apart. The “collectables” (an insult to the word) are spaced between “oh look at that” and “wtf, this region isn’t 100% yet, where the hell is that thing!?”, achievements are an absolute abuse of psychology to keep you playing long after the game stopped being fun, the loading screens, the “quick” travel, the “crafting” and component systems that have you doing the least fun repetitive tasks usually involving the decimation of wild animals.

The grind is out of control.

Seriously, go play Outer Wilds, then play an AC or other grindfest.

The only non-abusive games that are left are indies.

It isn’t Alex Jonesy to rip apart modern video games for their exploitive tactics.

I actually think 'playtime' is a great metric for game developers to optimize for. It incentives a lot of good design decisions. But like you said, also incentives a lot of bad ones, especially if your decisions are made by suits, like Ubisoft, who doesn't have any respect or faith in people.

The MBAification of the world man… it’s all suits.

Your farmer’s market stall gets big enough and you eventually get a suit telling you to “run lean” and “net30, we can push that to net60”, etc

On other gaming boards "Ubisoft" has become a catch all phrase for describing when said game has descended into hollow unfun busywork to pad out the game / ensnare players in that hamster wheel.

Most recently FFVII Rebirth's critics have described the game as going "full Ubisoft" which definitely resonates.

I've found that while I am very susceptible to that loop of chasing loot etc a game sticks when it's mechanically fun (YMMV) which is why Monster Hunter and Souls/Elden Ring are my kryptonite. Ditto for Destiny which had quite fun gunplay

He didn't worship ted kaczynski by any means. Terrible low effort comment

Our CEO was musing about gamifying our scheduling software to get more "engagement" - aka. people accepting more open shifts, aka. working more overtime.

It was so disgusting to me I nearly quit over the suggestion.

Just wait, next you have to buy your daily work tasks as a dlc, being at work itself is f2p tho. :)

You can earn cash shop points by doing a lot of grinding.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification has citations for that word and trend as early as 2013.

It was a big thing even before that.

The Xbox 360 with Gamerscore gained through Achievements launched in 2005.

Lilely the first globally-synchronized and overt system designed for gamification.

I think gamification is a reflection of the whole edutainment push in the mid nineties which puts a leaderboard on the whole, "collect all the gold stars" that was popular in the mid 80s.

I’ve always wondered what the solution is now that we’ve opened Pandora’s box.

Is it simply to regulate against dark patterns when gamification is being used to manipulate users for profit?

Gotta violate the magic circle. Or establish a new one.

Brilliant writing.

Very long-winded article for no apparent reason to me. Why many things become a game is because there is a cultural shift in exercising power, at the current time the carrot is more often used than the stick.

And then, I'm especially put off by what I can only see as right-wing populist talking points:

"Religion is dying out, Western nations are culturally confused, people are getting married less and having fewer children, and many are losing their jobs to automation, so the traditional pillars of life — God, nation, family, and work — are crumbling, and people are losing their value systems"

This paints the same kind of revisionist past that the modern conservatives paint (among others): that there were some good old days where the values I like were more widespread than now, and so, society is in decadence, we need to restore. No we don't, there's nothing to restore. The only way is forward.

Because games are fun!

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