From games to reality: How "gamification" changes our behavior.

This is the "Future of Gaming" series from MIT Technology Review, which tells the story of how artificial intelligence is changing the way we play games in many fields, from gaming to sports. Did you know you can surf in the desert? New swimming pools make this possible, but at what cost? Learn how artificial intelligence brings unprecedented scalability to computers and video games, and how high-tech super running shoes help athletes run faster and safer. In addition, gamification has always been a dubious concept, so how did it sweep the world?

This article is the cover story of the July-August issue of MIT Technology Review, with the original title:

How gamification took over the world

This is a thought that every video game player will have at some point: Can the strange, highly focused state that enters when playing in the virtual world be applied to the real world in some way?

People often have such thoughts when performing particularly challenging or tedious tasks in the real world (such as writing papers or paying taxes), which is a very reasonable question. After all, life is tough. Although video games are also tough, they can promote sustained attention and determination, which is very magical.However, for some people, this phenomenon has sparked interest in immersion. For others, it's just a reason to play more games. For a few consultants, entrepreneurs, and game designers in the late 2000s, it seemed to become the key to unlocking human potential.

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Game designer Jane McGonigal referred to this state of immersion as "happy productivity" in her 2010 TED Talk, "Gaming Can Make a Better World." "There is a reason why World of Warcraft players play an average of 22 hours a week," she said, "because we know that we are happier when we are fully engaged in playing games than when we are relaxed or strolling around. We know that as humans, we are best at doing hard and meaningful work, and game players are willing to work hard all the time."

Jane McGonigal's fundamental point is that by making the real world more like a video game, we can harness the "happy productivity" of millions of people and use it to solve the difficult problems facing humanity, such as poverty, obesity, and climate change. However, the specific details of how to achieve this goal are a bit vague (play more games?), but her goal is clear: "My goal for the next ten years is to work hard to make saving the world in real life as easy as saving the world in online games."

Although the term "gamification" never appeared in her speech, by then, anyone who had been paying attention to the big idea circles (TED, South by Southwest, DICE, etc.) or using the new Foursquare app would be familiar with this basic concept. Broadly speaking, "gamification" is the application of game design elements and principles to non-game activities, such as points, levels, missions, badges, leaderboards, etc. Gamification has been touted as a revolutionary new tool that can change education, work, health and fitness, and every aspect of life.

Considering that the theme of "saving the world" is ubiquitous in video game storylines, it was inevitable to add it to the "potential benefits" list. But it also reflects the basic premise of gamification: the real world is somehow flawed. Jane McGonigal and other gamification advocates believe that the real world is not attractive and motivational enough, and often fails to make us happy. Gamification is expected to remedy this design flaw by designing a new reality, transforming the dull, difficult, and frustrating parts of life into something fun and inspiring. There is no limit to the tasks of studying for exams, doing housework, flossing teeth, exercising, learning a new language, and so on, which can be transformed into games, making everything in real life better.Nowadays, it seems we are living in a "gamified world." We stand up and walk around to earn achievement badges on smartwatches; we meditate and sleep to recharge our bodies; we chase "likes" on social media. However, despite all the crude game elements that have been integrated into our lives, the more hopeful and collaborative world that gamification promised over a decade ago still seems far away. It turns out that gamification has not liberated us from drudgery and maximized our potential, but has become another tool for coercion, distraction, and control.

Game Deception

This is not an unforeseeable outcome. From the beginning, some journalists and game designers have warned about the fairy tale thinking in the concept of gamification and their superficial view of video games. Adrian Hon is one of them, who recently published a book called "You've Been Played," which records the dangers it brings.

"As someone who was developing the so-called 'serious games' when this concept emerged, I know that many claims about games being able to change people's behavior and change the world are exaggerated," he said.

Adrian Hon is not a blindly radical debater. This trained neuroscientist later turned to game design and development. He is a co-developer of one of the world's most popular gamified fitness apps, "Zombies, Run!" Although he still believes that games can enrich our lives and benefit from them, he believes that a one-size-fits-all approach is doomed to fail. For this reason, he strongly opposes the superficial addition of points, leaderboards, and tasks in daily activities, as well as the more coercive forms of gamification that have invaded the workplace.Ironically, it is precisely these broad and diverse applications that make criticizing this approach difficult. As Adrian Hon pointed out in his book, gamification has always been a moving target, undergoing tremendous changes in scale, scope, and technology over the years. As the concept evolves, its applications continue to expand, whether you think of the "gambling mechanisms" that now encourage dating app users to keep swiping, the "quests" that force exhausted Uber drivers to complete more trips, or the utopian ambitions of using gamification to save the world.

Similarly, the lack of a clear definition of artificial intelligence today makes it easy for any criticism to be easily dismissed, as it does not address the other potential definitions of artificial intelligence, and the same is true for the various interpretations of gamification. "I remember giving a speech criticizing gamification at a gamification conference, and then people would come to me and say, 'Yes, bad gamification is bad, right? But we are doing good gamification,'" said Adrian Hon.

For some critics, the idea of "good gamification" itself is repugnant. Their main complaint about the term and practice is that it has almost nothing to do with actual games.

"Games are about play, subversion, creation, ambiguity, and surprise," wrote the late Jeff Watson, who was a game designer, writer, and educator teaching at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. "Gamification is the exact opposite, known, marked, and quantifiable. It's about 'punching in,' being tracked... and becoming more rigid, a surveillance and discipline system, a wolf in sheep's clothing. Beware its allure."Another game designer, Margaret Robertson, believes that gamification should actually be called "pointification." She writes: "What we currently call gamification is actually taking the least important thing in games and making it the core of the experience. In fact, points and badges are no more related to games than they are to websites, fitness apps, and loyalty cards."

For writer and game designer Ian Bogost, the whole concept is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. In a widely acclaimed article published in the Atlantic in 2011, he compared gamification to moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt's definition of "bullshit," which is an opinion aimed at persuading or forcing others to accept it without considering the truth.

"For me, learning from or drawing on game design experience and applying it to other fields has never been a problem," Ian Bogost said. "More precisely, the issue is not whether I have done so. I acknowledge that there is something mysterious, powerful, and fascinating in games, but the problem is not whether I work hard, but that I have done nothing, with this form of 'spiritual escape.'"

Game Systems

So, how did this misleading term permeate every aspect of our lives? There is no simple answer. But when you look back at the era when this idea was born, the rapid rise of gamification begins to make more sense.As many have pointed out, the late 2000s and early 2010s were the peak of technological optimism. There was a feeling among people both within and outside the tech industry that humanity had finally solved a series of problems, and technology would help us find some solutions.

The era also gave birth to the 10,000-hour rule for success, the long-tail theory, the four-hour workweek, collective intelligence, nudge theory, and many other highly simplified (or often completely wrong) theories about how humans, the internet, and the world work.

Adding to this exciting optimism, video games brought the gaming industry something it had long sought but never achieved: legitimacy. Even though games were thriving in popular culture and were expected to surpass the film and music industries in revenue, they were largely still seen as a frivolous, unproductive, and violence-encouraging form of entertainment. It seemed that gamification changed all that overnight.

"There is definitely this 'black sheep' mentality in the game development community, where what we have been doing for decades is just a joke in people's eyes," said Ian Bogost. "Suddenly, venture capital funds and various important high-net-worth individuals appeared at the Game Developers Conference, and it felt like finally someone noticed us, and they realized we could offer something."

This was not just flattery, but a compliment. It was intoxicating; gamification reshaped a maligned target into a force for positive change, a way to make the real world better. Although the call to "build games on top of reality" may sound dystopian to many of us today, this sentiment did not necessarily have the same ominous connotation in the late 2000s.Combining the reshaping of gaming culture with a series of cheaper and faster technologies (including GPS, ubiquitous mobile internet, powerful smartphones, Web 2.0 tools and services, etc.), you could say that all the elements needed for the rise of gamification are in place. In a real sense, the reality of 2010 was ready to be gamified; in other words, gamification was a very fitting idea at the time.

Gamified Behaviors

Well, you might ask, does it work? Of course, if there were no evidence of the effectiveness of this strategy, companies like Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Strava, Garmin, and others would not have gone to great lengths to gamify their products and services. Unfortunately, the answer to this question is tedious: defining the job.

Because gamification is so widespread and diverse, it is difficult to address its effectiveness in any direct or comprehensive way. However, we can confidently say: gamification cannot save the world, climate change still exists, as do obesity, poverty, and war. Generally speaking, most of the power of gamification lies in its ability to use competition (challenges and leaderboards), rewards (points and achievement badges), and other sources of positive and negative feedback to drive or guide us towards or away from certain behaviors.

In this regard, the results are mixed. In 2022, a meta-analysis of previous research concluded that, after correcting for publication bias, there was not much evidence to suggest that nudging theory had a significant effect on changing behavior, and thus nudging theory lost a lot of its influence in academia. Nevertheless, there are still many ways to nudge, and many behaviors that can be changed. The fact remains that many people claim to have a strong motivation to complete their exercise rings, earn sleep badges, or reach or exceed some increasingly absurd number of steps on Fitbit.The chief researcher in this field, Sebastian Deterding, believes that gamification can play a role, but its success is often difficult to replicate. According to him, scholars not only do not know what methods, when, and how they work, but also "we have almost no data or empirical tests to support our stories."

In fact, gamification followers always draw inspiration from old scripts, which can even be traced back to the early 20th century. Behaviorists like John Watson and B.F. Skinner believed that human behavior (including thoughts, actions, feelings, and emotions) is not a product of internal psychological states or cognitive processes, but the result of external forces that can be conveniently manipulated.

If B.F. Skinner's theory of operant conditioning (reinforcing certain behaviors through rewards) sounds very similar to Amazon's "fulfillment center games" (forcing employees to work harder, faster, and longer through rewards), it is no coincidence that gamification has always been a way to induce specific behaviors in people using virtual "sticks and carrots."

Sometimes it may work, and other times it may not. But in the end, as Adrian Hon pointed out, the issue of effectiveness may not be the point. "If your life is always gamified, there is nothing to compare before or after, and there is no static form of gamification to measure, because the design of coercive gamification is always changing, which is a constantly moving target, only leading to greater and more detailed 'intrusions'." He wrote.The Game of Life

Like other forms of art, video games offer a range of astonishing possibilities. They can educate, entertain, foster social connections, inspire creativity, and encourage us to view the world in different ways. Some of the best games can even accomplish all of these at once.

However, for many, the current feeling is akin to being trapped in "a game we did not choose to play, an exhausting one." The assumption of this game is that our behaviors can be altered by shiny numbers, endless artificial competition, and meaningless prizes. More insultingly, this game seems to exist for our benefit, promising to make us healthier, happier, and more efficient, when in reality it only serves the commercial interests of its creators.

Metaphor may be an imperfect but necessary method for understanding the world. Today, we often hear about upgrades, having a god mode mindset, gaining experience points, and adjusting (or lowering) the difficulty settings of life. But the metaphor that resonates most with us is NPC (Non-Player Character), which seems to perfectly embody our current predicament.

NPCs are the "Sisyphean machines" of video games, programmed to forever follow a set script without ever questioning or deviating. They are the background characters in someone else's story, usually responsible for advancing specific plots or performing some manual labor. Calling someone an NPC in real life is to accuse them of merely going through the motions, lacking independent thought, and being incapable of making their own decisions. For us, this is the true end result of gamification. It is the submission to power disguised as empowerment, stripping away the unique essence of games—"agency"—and then attempting to cover this up with crude substitutes.So, what can we do? Considering the influence and ubiquity of gamification, criticizing it at this point might seem as futile as attacking capitalism. However, its own failed promises might point the way for a possible respite. If the gamified world has already turned our lives into a "bad version of a video game," then now might be an excellent time to rediscover why real video games were great in the first place. Perhaps, borrowing an idea from Jane McGonigal, we should all start playing better games.