State of Gamification pt. 1

Corporations have discovered that there’s a profit to be made in giving away points and turning behavior into a game. Frequent-flyer miles, Peloton standings, and Duolingo streaks all exist to make us feel as though we’re doing something significant.

As Adrian Hon points out in You’ve Been Played, it’s all gamification now. The real argument to be had is the difference between good and bad gamification, between useful and manipulative, between magical and banal.

Nguyen calls this phenomenon “value capture.” When we stamp a simplified scoring system on an activity, we begin to fixate on the scoring system and chase points rather than experience the activity’s original goals. “Those metrics take over our motivations,” said Nguyen. “We get satisfaction in exchange for shifting our goals along engineered lines

EZRA KLEIN: [C. Thi Nguyen] believes games are a unique kind of not just art form, but just form, medium, because what they manipulate is our agency. You can think of visual arts, like painting, as manipulating what we see. You could think of music as manipulating what we hear. But games— games manipulate what we do, how we do it, why we do i