OP here, happy to answer any questions on it!
3,054 karma · joined February 20, 2012
tl,dr: It looks incredible, like no other game you'll see today, and it grapples with deeply interesting themes – but it's extremely annoying to play and suffers from a serious lack of editing. There's just too much friction to become truly immersed. Still, other games can only wish their failures were this daring.
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.
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!
Writing about games and technology, with the occasional sci-fi short story and politics thrown in.
https://adrianhon.substack.com
I play a newish game every week and talk about its mechanics, game design, and what makes it interesting.
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.
I think I have a unique perspective on the topic as CEO of a games company (Six to Start), designer of a fitness game with 10 million players (Zombies, Run!), and being a former neuroscientist.
Gamification is significantly more widespread and influential than commonly thought. We’re aware of it in our own corners of life and work, but less aware of how it’s being used on, e.g., truck drivers, gig economy workers, school students, video game players, and more.
So it doesn't seem at all silly to criticise the Olympics for degrading an already-existing development plan.
TED was practically unknown back then because the founder wasn't interested in publicising it widely and because we didn't have good streaming video yet. As a result, my uni was extremely unimpressed by me taking time off to visit it (but there's a TEDxCambridgeUniversity now). It also meant there was less incentive to play to the crowd, so while there were still some "inspiresting" talks like mine, you'd also see Matt Groening show off a preview of the Futurama pilot and complain about the laughable notes he received from Fox executives.
But that didn't mean there was no incentive. I arrived a day early and didn't have anything to do, so I wandered to the lobby and saw Sergey Brin and Larry Page. We went out to get a sandwich with a couple of other people and talked about games and tech and shit. When we walked back we saw Jeff Bezos in a Subway. And if I recall correctly, my talk was after a Nobel prizewinner and before Herbie Hancock. The point is that with such an influential audience, it almost seems wasteful not to hype up your shit in the hopes of getting investment or making connections or whatever.
I was too young to realise this. If I had, I should've just begged the Googlers for a job and rode that rocket to the moon. But what I did get out of the experience was something far more valuable: the realisation that even the richest and most famous people are just people. And events like TED? They're fun in a way. I wish everyone had the chance to see what it's like. But there's no point in organising your life around trying to get in, as many seem to do. It's just not worth it compared to the other things you can do with your life. Even doing a successful TED talk is inferior to making a successful career or building a worthy app or writing an important book.
I barely remember any of the talks at the conference. Maybe that's because I was knocked out by a deadly combination of jet lag and my first and only ever migraine, but frankly, they just weren't that impactful. What's had a more lasting effect on my life was the thing that got me to the conference in the first place: Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and his later books, which converted me to socialism. Of course, there weren't any 18 min talks arguing for socialism at TED11.
I also received an email for a domain that I had absolutely nothing to do with. It seems their system identified my email's domain (i.e. not my email!) because it was in the last link on that domain's homepage – something that a human would have spotted easily.
Six to Start is looking for a senior iOS developer to join our existing engineering team of six mobile and web developers.
Our flagship apps - Zombies, Run! and The Walk – combine innovative real-world interaction and gameplay with captivating stories and design. In short, we make exercising fun for over ten million people. We want to find people who can help us maintain and improve our existing apps and develop new experiences that are just as revolutionary and innovative.
Here's the US App Store featuring Zombies, Run! as App of the Day recently: https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1296360463
This is a fully-remote position open to all locations, but you will need to overlap with at least 9am-12pm UK time
Apply here: https://www.sixtostart.com/onetoread/2021/senior-ios-develop...
Six to Start is looking for a web developer and mobile developers (iOS and Android) to join our existing engineering team of two web developers and two mobile engineers.
Our flagship apps - Zombies, Run! and The Walk – combine innovative real-world interaction and gameplay with captivating stories and design. In short, we make exercising fun for over ten million people. We want to find people who can help us maintain and improve our existing apps and develop new experiences that are just as revolutionary and innovative.
Here's the US App Store featuring Zombies, Run! as App of the Day last week: https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1296360463
This is a fully-remote position open to all locations, but you will need to overlap with at least 3 hours of 9am-5pm UK time (e.g. 9am to 12pm, or 2-5pm, etc.)
- Senior Web Developer: https://www.sixtostart.com/onetoread/2021/senior-web-develop...
- Senior Mobile Developer: https://www.sixtostart.com/onetoread/2021/senior-mobile-deve...