The trend of gamification — applying elements of game play to other areas of life — is the apex of the neoliberal fantasy, rendering both work and our leisure time outside of it into a series of games that we supposedly enjoy playing for their own sake.
I’m not sure I agree with the premise that gamification is bad. Many people need a push to do things that improve their lives.
The Fitbit example is one that jumps out in that it is there to motivate people into exercise. While I personally don’t respond to comparisons to others, I do respond to data where I can compare my results and recognize that my watch telling me I did a good job feels good about the exercise I just did.
Kahn Academy is gamification of a form of education. Earning points for learning many subjects.
I think there is merit to the argument that Duolingo went a bit overboard with trying to guilt you into continuing, but I don’t think it can reasonably be argued that trying to motivate people into language study is bad.
I think mentally, the author is probably just one of those like myself that doesn’t respond well to gamification overall but the majority of people definitely do and it can help in self improvement.
That said, I totally agree about a gamified workplace. That strikes me as a slippery slope to an unhealthy relationship with work.
Agreed with you there about gamification and how it can be useful for some people.
I do think that the latter half of the article that tries to present the difference between “gamification” and “play” is fascinating, and I wish they dove into that a little bit more. I understand that they’re trying to say that having this endless churn of “goals” in “gamification” is potentially harmful, but then what’s the alternative look like when it comes to Fitbit, Duolingo, etc.?
It can definitely be a problem.
MMORPGs suffer from over gamification in that way. It’s a video game that has daily/weekly/monthly goals to keep your engagement. I stopped playing FFXIV because it was feeling like work. But the game Wild Star was the worst offender I ever came across. I couldn’t go 10 feet without an announcer yelling about a new goal that I could take part in. It was a shame, too, because the gameplay was actually very good in that game.
It’s important to have downtime to just gather ourselves and we have a tendency to ignore that need. It’s very easy to get over engaged. “What’s today’s Wordle?” “Did you run your miles today?” “The owl misses you!”
I think maybe the biggest issue is that they ask want your attention every day. Maybe it would be better if they only said something a couple of times a week each.
Gamification in your personal life can be a useful tool to motivate yourself to complete a chore you don’t want to do, to build a habit that you have trouble forming, to otherwise increase the hit of dopamine you get when you do something if you’re someone who has trouble creating reward cycles in your life (shout out to !neurodivergence@beehaw.org). When a corporation does it to increase your addiction to their platform, as so many do with phone platforms, social media platforms, or content consumption platforms, or with their employees, it is definitively exploitative.
Yeah, as someone with ADHD I find the idea that gamification is inherently exploitative to be outright offensive. It’s an absolutely necessary accessibility tool for many people with executive function issues. Hell I need gamification to remember to brush my damn teeth every day.
Sure some corpos can take it too far, but this article is way off the mark.
My ADHD brain also craves the dopamine hit.
However, I recently watched a video on how a Chinese shopping site gameifies itself to entice users to spend money with literal “spin the wheel for a chance at a huge discount” then “refer a friend to spin the wheel again!”
When gameification becomes a gamble, that is when it is exploitive.
you can also just turn push notifications off for any app including duolingo, and like any app it asks up front whether you want them
i dont get the authors point on a gamified workplace
it really seems like they repeatedly just forget that the alternative to a gamified workplace is a non gamified workplace as opposed to no work
they complain about the focus on creativity as something useful or profitable, and seemingly see this focus as some all encompassing issue infecting every facet of life
ignoring that this is in the context of work, either an employer paying you to achieve a specific goal or you yourself trying to achieve a specific goal through apps like duolingo
the parts of their life being infected by this focus on productivity and profitability were parts that were already explicitly focused on those things, and would continue to be focused on those things without gamification
complaining about creativity not being seen as good unless its productive of profitsble is entirely misplaced, because its only happening within these settings that are already by definition focused on productivity or profitability
gamification of work can be effective and a good thing for workers, the issues arise when it increases stress rather than decreasing it, for instance by introducing serious repercussions for falling behind