How gamification took over the world MIT Technol

🎀 Highlights

What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow be applied to the real one?

Gamification took the world by storm by applying video game elements to real-life activities to increase engagement and productivity, but did it really deliver on its promises?

championed by figures like Jane McGonigal, suggested that through integrating game design principles into education, work, and health practices,

gamification promised to turn life into a fun game where we'd happily fold laundry, file taxes, or do push-ups for points. But surprise! Instead of soaring to new levels of productivity, we ended up collecting virtual trophies for just getting out of bed.

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its lasting power hinges on how effectively it evolves to truly motivate and engage participants without becoming a mere gimmick.

“There’s a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 22 hours a week,”

“My goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games.”

Instead of liberating us, gamification turned out to be just another tool for coercion, distraction, and control.

We stand up and move around to close colorful rings and earn achievement badges on our smartwatches; we meditate and sleep to recharge our body batteries; we plant virtual trees to be more productive; we chase “likes” and “karma” on social media

the more hopeful and collaborative world that gamification promised more than a decade ago seems as far away as ever.

gamification turned out to be just another tool for coercion, distraction, and control.

gambling mechanics that now encourage users of dating apps to keep swiping, the “quests” that compel exhausted Uber drivers to complete just a few more trips,

people would come up to me afterwards and be like, ‘Yeah, bad gamification is bad, right? But we’re doing good gamification,’” says Hon. (They weren’t.)

Gamification is about the opposite—the known, the badgeable, the quantifiable. “It’s about ‘checking in,’ being tracked … [and] becoming more regimented. It’s a surveillance and discipline system—a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Beware its lure.”

Margaret Robertson, has argued that gamification should really be called “pointsification,” writing: “What we’re currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience.

“All of a sudden you had VC money and all sorts of important, high-net-worth people showing up at game developer conferences, and it was like, ‘Finally someone’s noticing. They realize that we have something to offer.’”

Gamification did not save the world. Climate change still exists. As do obesity, poverty, and war.

Gamification is, and has always been, a way to induce specific behaviors in people using virtual carrots and sticks.

Sebastian Deterding, a leading researcher in the field, argues that gamification can work, but its successes tend to be really hard to replicate.