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It’s bad enough that gamification has become the twenty-first century’s most advanced form of behavioural control, but there’s even worse news: it’s also deadly boring. It turns out that wrapping a veneer of missions and points and challenges around the job of a warehouse worker doesn’t change its crushing repetitiveness, though Amazon continues to try.
Chikzekmihai Flow
Self-determination theory, one of the most popular frameworks for understanding motivation, sees three factors as key to the very best forms of motivation: autonomy (ability to determine one’s own path), competence (experiencing mastery), and relatedness (interacting with, and caring for, others).
You can see those three factors shining through in the most popular and beloved video games, games that people don’t regret sinking their time into, as I do with my hundreds of hours wasted on FarmVille. Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, widely acknowledged as one of the best games of all time, combines competence and autonomy by removing all the customary artificial barriers of similar action adventures, allowing players to venture literally anywhere in the vast game world. Every time you acquire a new skill or encounter a new kind of enemy, you’re always given an opportunity to safely learn before you’re faced with more fearsome and complex variations of that enemy. Never do you feel the game is treating you unfairly or subjecting you to the vagaries of random-number-generated “luck”—instead, your progress is earned out of your mastery of the world
Effectiveness = gameplay quality * accessibility * pre-existing intrinsic motivation
In other words, effective gamification has fun and engaging gameplay that’s easy to get into and, crucially, addresses something that the user is already motivated to do. This would explain why a language-training app like Duolingo is so popular. Its gameplay is extremely generic, but it’s very accessible and its users are already highly motivated to learn, perhaps because they’re moving to another country for work, or they’ve fallen in love with someone who speaks a different language.
As Neil Postman argued in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, educational TV often succumbs to the need for constant drama and spectacle to keep audiences engaged.22 The form drives the content rather than the other way around.
Another TED talk, this time at its main conference in California, was far sunnier: gaming can make a better world, argued Jane McGonigal, an ARG designer.28 McGonigal said that while people spent three billion hours a week playing online games, “if we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week, by the end of the next decade [i.e., by 2020].” How? By motivating gamers (“super-empowered hopeful individuals”) to play games, including World Without Oil and Urgent Evoke, that she’d designed. These games would channel energies previously spent inside virtual worlds toward improving the real world.
McGonigal’s talk was viewed by millions, striking a chord among those who self-identified as gamers. Their hobby had been marginalised and demonised for decades; being told they could be the literal saviours of a broken world was a welcome change of tune. The following year, her book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World continued in the same vein, promising utopian gamification would allow people to feel more empowered and satisfied in the real world. For example, if we played Chore Wars, a game awarding points and treasure for doing household tasks, we would enjoy the tasks more and have a cleaner home to boot. Reviewers from the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, and the Independent applauded the book’s optimism, with its echoes of the growing positive psychology movement.29 “It’s difficult not to feel like there’s a real power and potential out there waiting to be unlocked by gamer-think,” said John Booth for Wired.30
Mcvonigal sucks. Horrible ideas. Omega schill
One of the few negative reviews of Reality Is Broken came from Heather Chaplin, a frequent commentator on games for Slate: “[Gamification advocates] are trafficking in fantasies that ignore the realities of day-to-day life.… McGonigal, whose games are filled with top-secret missions in which you get to play the superhero, says ‘reality is broken’ because people don’t get to feel ‘epic’ often enough. This is a child’s view of how the world works.”31 But overall, few in the games industry wanted to cast a shadow on a good news story, and any criticism from outside the industry was rejected as uninformed scaremongering.
In retrospect, it’s perplexing that anyone believed the world’s problems could be solved by games that had between them attracted barely a thousand committed players. But the numbers didn’t matter—in true Silicon Valley fashion, it was the dream they bought into, not the reality.
Ames credits this feat to the OLPC being a powerful instance of “charismatic technology.” “A charismatic technology derives its power experientially and symbolically through the possibility or promise of action what is important is not what the object is but how it invokes the imagination through what it promises to do. The material form of a charismatic technology may be part of this but is less important than a technology’s ideological commitments—its ‘charismatic promises.’ This means that a charismatic technology does not even need to be present or possessed to have effects.”34
It didn’t matter that the OLPC’s specifications were disappointing, or that it lacked the originally charming hand crank that would recharge its battery, or that software updates would regularly delete children’s data. The OLPC’s charisma transcended such material concerns through its promise to transform education for the world by literally airdropping millions of cheap laptops around the world. These laptops would disintermediate teachers from the educational process, allowing children to achieve their full potential, just in the same way that the OLPC’s founders and funders reached their own potential: by learning how to programme computers at home. Ames calls this “nostalgic design”: “Key features of this laptop—focused on play, freedom, and connectivity—were based on how a number of OLPC developers nostalgically remembered their own (often privileged and idiosyncratic) childhoods rather than on contemporary childhoods in the Global South. Moreover, they smoothed away the messiness in their own experiences by understanding their childhoods through the social imaginary of the technically precocious boy, at times unreflectively treating their experiences as universal.”
Ames notes charismatic technology is inherently conservative: “Charismatic leaders confirm and amplify their audiences’ existing ideologies to cultivate their appeal, even as they may paint visions of a better world. A charismatic technology’s appeal likewise confirms the value of existing stereotypes, institutions, and power relations. This unchallenging familiarity is what makes a charismatic technology alluring: even as it promises certain benefits, it simultaneously confirms that the ideological worldview of its audience is already right—the charismatic technology will simply amplify it.”37
Gamification’s conservative nature is manifest in how its most common, generic implementations—layering points, badges, levels, and competition on top of existing activities like call centre work and driving taxis—completely fail to overcome the limitations and problems underlying those activities. As we’ll discover in later chapters, it isn’t only utopian gamification that made claims it couldn’t deliver. Workplace gamification promises productivity and employee satisfaction improvements that rarely, if ever, come to pass. Yet gamification, by saying that leaders need only apply this one weird trick to make everything and everyone work better, faster, and happier, without any real institutional change, is deeply conservative. Even if you make driving for Uber more fun, you’re still driving for Uber.
Ai is a charismatic technology
In the absence of scrutiny, new forms of gamification have flourished. Some are harmless, aimed at helping you learn a new language or play the piano. Others are coercive and abusive, like those monitoring millions of workers in warehouses and taxis. But while gamification lives on, its utopian spirit has died.
Once, gamification aimed to save the world. Now it’s just about saving yourself.
In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game.
—“A Spoonful of Sugar,” Mary Poppins
It’s hard to find fault with apps and hardware that consumers freely choose to download. Why shouldn’t they take a spoonful of sugar with their medicine to make it more fun to learn French or get fit or play the violin? But it’s not quite that simple: sometimes the spoonful of sugar contains no medicine at all, or medicine cut with poison. Gamified apps routinely overclaim their benefits, some otherwise well-behaved apps inadvertently lead their users to damaging behaviour, and many contribute to an unhealthy culture of constant self-monitoring and competition.
? a lot of sentences out of context seem odd
Strava can hardly be blamed for our competitive nature. An epigram from over two thousand years ago records one Spartan girl’s proud achievement: “I managed one thousand jumps in the bibasis [a challenging “rump-jump”], more than any other girl.”39 Another Spartan rite of passage, the diamastigôsis [“flagellation”], saw young Spartans competing to win a prize for withstanding the most beatings. Plutarch and Cicero reported seeing Spartan boys so driven to win honour, they died during the competition.
Gamified fitness apps contribute to the wider drumbeat of competition in society today. A recent study of almost forty-two thousand students found that perfectionism has been increasing among young people since 1989.40 “Today’s young people are competing with each other in order to meet societal pressures to succeed and they feel that perfectionism is necessary in order to feel safe, socially connected and of worth,” note the authors. “The increase in perfectionism may in part be affecting the psychological health of students.”
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said, “Blood flow in the brain increases when one is playing Brain Age. In other words, it makes the brain work.”48 Dr. Kawashima added, “We have proven that if older people play Brain Age, improvements can be seen in a number of their brain functions.”
Other neuroscientists, to the extent that they paid any attention to brain training games, were not convinced. A 2008 French study on forty-nine students found the game produced barely any improvement compared to a control group of students practicing with pencil and paper puzzles.49 The authors conclude, “Dr. Kawashima joins the long list of dream merchants, his program is a game and nothing more.”
Nevertheless, the game continued to sell millions more copies. It also provided a formula for future brain training apps and games: pull together a battery of puzzles and minigames; recruit a neuroscientist to run enough experiments to get a positive result; make a game employing similar puzzles and minigames, now being played by different kinds of people in different contexts than the original experiments (thus arguably invalidating their results, but never mind); and finally, incentivise said neuroscientist to vigorously extoll the game’s supposed scientific foundation, but not in a way that would get you into legal trouble.
An extensive review in 2016, for example, found that brain training does make you better at the specific tasks it trains you on, but evidence for improvement is limited when it comes to “closely related” tasks, and there’s little evidence that brain training improves everyday cognitive performance.
Crucially, the review’s authors counsel consumers:
Time spent using brain-training software could be allocated to other activities or even other forms of ‘brain training’ (e.g., physical exercise) that might have broader benefits for health and well-being. That time might also be spent on learning things that are likely to improve your performance at school (e.g., reading; developing knowledge and skills in math, science, or the arts), on the job (e.g., updating your knowledge of content and standards in your profession), or in activities that are other-wise enjoyable. If an intervention [e.g., a brain training game] has minimal benefits, using it means you have lost the opportunity to do something else.59
Brain training games are yet another charismatic technology.
Overclaiming benefits is not a victimless crime. Like false advertising, it leads people to buy things they shouldn’t, to spend time on activities that could be more fruitfully or enjoyably spent elsewhere, and to expect improvements when there may be none.
These games epitomise the chasm between the glittering promises that gamification makes and the disappointing reality it all too often delivers. As a former neuroscientist, here’s my advice: if you want to stay sharp, skip the brain training apps and pick up Into the Breach, Her Story, and Return of the Obra Dinn instead. I can’t guarantee these video games will increase your intelligence, but I can guarantee you’ll have enormous fun while you’re puzzling them out.
Shigeru Miyamoto is perhaps the world’s greatest video game designer, having created Mario, Donkey Kong, F-Zero, Star Fox, and The Legend of Zelda for Nintendo. Miyamoto’s games are often inspired by his own life and hobbies. Nintendogs came from his experience with his family’s Shetland sheepdog and meeting other dog owners; the idea for Pikmin, where you control a horde of plant-like creatures, arose after he turned forty and vowed to spend more time gardening.60
His fiftieth birthday also brought about a new game idea: “I started weighing myself every day, and I of course track that and create my own graphs to watch my weight. I found that to be very interesting. So, when I first started weighing myself, my family thought that was kind of fun, and so they bought me a very nice scale. And, so then I started creating the graphs. I’d always wanted to try to find a way to make a game out of that, and I felt that with the Wii, that’s something that I would normally do in the bathroom is weigh myself.”61
And so Wii Fit was born.
50 year old designing games for himself instead of for kids
In 2020, Ala Szalapak logged her daily activities at fifteen-minute intervals across the entire year, partly to “hack [her] monkey brain to increase productivity” through gamification.68 Szalapak gave herself points for activities she wanted to do more of (four points per hour for work, self-improvement, exercising; two points for listening to podcasts; minus four points for procrastination, etc.), eventually declaring the experiment a success and mulling over improvements for 2021, such as giving herself points for “spending time with people” or “going on walks.”
The corporatized quantified self of today is far cheaper and more polished than the homegrown patchwork of sensors and apps used by early enthusiasts, but that accessibility comes at a cost. Enthusiasts had complete control over the way their personal data was stored and presented, but your average smartwatch wearer may have their data stored on corporate servers and has little choice whether their device comes with unwelcome advice or gamification. The gamification serves two purposes—increasing user engagement with devices and apps, and promoting the idea that corporations are serving users’ best interests. However, the execution of that gamification has been deeply generic, relying on the assumption that numbers represent the only truth that matters. Walking less than ten thousand steps per day? Then you won’t get a shiny achievement. Exercised for ten days in a row? Why not get to eleven?
This is a conceptual mistake called the “scalar fallacy,” the belief that things in the real world (e.g., hotels, sandwiches, people, mutual funds, etc.) have a single-dimension ordering of “goodness” such that a hotel with a high customer rating is obviously “better” than one with a lower rating.72 But when you collapse the complexity of these things into just one dimension, you lose a vast amount of context and make an awful lot of assumptions on behalf of your audience. Take Robert Parker’s 100-point wine grading scale, which made wine culture accessible to more people beginning around 1980, as an example: “Consumers intimidated by the mystifying language of wine labels now had an easy way to decide what to buy.… Vintages receiving a perfect score could quadruple their prices—which meant that there was strong financial incentive to make the kind of jammy and oaky high-alcohol wines that appealed to Parker’s palate.”73 But Alice Feiring, a critic, said of his top wines that they “had no sense of place,” were “stupid,” “emasculated,” “the vinous equivalent of bottle blonds,” “airbrushed,” and “dead.”
media rating systems. Failure to convey complexity adequately
Self-improvement gamification can be a useful tool, if you enter into it willingly, if it’s designed with your interests in mind, if its mode of monetisation and operation is transparent (e.g., it isn’t selling your location to advertisers without your knowledge), if it doesn’t exaggerate its benefits, and if you find it engaging and fun. Many of the apps and games I’ve mentioned in this chapter have no problem meeting most of the criteria. Chore Wars and Habitica don’t misrepresent their benefits, and it’s perfectly clear how they make money. Beat Saber is enormous fun, and while it doesn’t pretend to be a full exercise regimen, it can still get you sweating.
It’s the first point that’s the real problem: “if you enter into it willingly.” These apps and games don’t exist in a vacuum. They’ve become popular for the same reason self-improvement books and courses and TV shows are so popular: our increasing sense of economic insecurity and precarity. For many, the job for life has been replaced by the gig economy, and even if you’re fortunate enough to have a job at a successful company, stasis is not an option—constant improvement is essential if you don’t want to end up being replaced by the younger, faster, fitter, hungrier competition. According to historian Jürgen Martschukat, our modern “age of fitness” dates back to the 1970s, at least in the US.77 That’s when the rise of neoliberalism and its obsession with individual responsibility and the market melded with a counter-cultural focus on individualism and self-fulfilment, pushing self-improvement and fitness directly into the mainstream. So if we feel urged to optimise ourselves—an urge fanned by corporations spending millions on advertising and PR for the latest app or tracker—what choice do we have but to use the tools made available to us?
In Emily Guendelsberger’s book On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, she describes the reward Amazon warehouse workers get if they make a hundred picks in an hour: one or two “vendor dollars” valid in some (but not all) of the vending machines in the building
In 2019, Postyn Smith, another former Amazon warehouse worker, described the more sophisticated FC Games (after “Fulfillment Center,” Amazon’s name for its warehouses) he encountered on screens in stowing and picking stations, the department with the highest attrition rate at his warehouse: “Most of the games involve some aspect of competition. You might race one-on-one as flying dragons against a nearby worker or compete as a floor against another floor for your Amazon mascot to run faster around the course. In another game, you attempt to complete missions that have you work faster and faster for longer periods of time. They also provide incentives that boost your score for returning from break faster. The programs have finely tuned tricks to tap into your mind so that we work harder, faster, and longer.”4
There’s another way to describe workers labouring longer for the same pay: it’s called cutting their wages.
Nevertheless, by 2021 Amazon had deployed FC Games in at least twenty US states, The Information reported, with names like CastleCrafter, MissionMaster, Dragon Duel, and PicksInSpace.6 The company claims it doesn’t monitor game results or punish workers for not participating, which is fortunate given their reception. Workers interviewed by The Information had mixed feelings: some avoided the games out of fear of injuring themselves from overwork, while another admitted, “The games aren’t particularly good, although some people do like it because it helps make the mind-numbing boredom of a 10-hour shift better.”
Flow
None of these quests and bonuses and promotions would matter if gig economy workers’ overall pay wasn’t so low. As it is, a few six-dollar bonuses offered to you multiple times a day could make up a substantial proportion of your income, at which point they’re not bonuses any more—they’re just pay contingent on following orders. It’s coercion of a different kind. And Uber doesn’t feel any need to play fair, as Harry Campbell, owner of the Rideshare Guy, told The Verge: “They encourage drivers to go to certain places during certain times but there’s no guarantee that you’ll get a ride.”15
There is a guarantee Uber will take drivers for a ride, though.
Are workers stupid for participating in a rigged game? No. They have no choice but to play. Companies like Amazon can be a dominant employer in some regions, attaining a monopsony status, where a single employer can control the market as the major purchaser of labour.17 In an economy where employment has become increasingly precarious, it’s hardly surprising that McDonald’s and Amazon can dictate terms to workers.
In 2020, Dirk Jandura, managing director of an electrical parts company, spoke to the New York Times admiringly of a Covariant robot recently deployed in their warehouse: “It doesn’t smoke, is always in good health, isn’t chatting with its neighbors, no toilet breaks. It’s more efficient.”20 Later, we hear of a Covariant robot that has filled more than two hundred orders in an hour, “enough to receive a bonus if it were a human.” When Amazon deployed robots at one facility in Tracy, California, the serious injury rate quadrupled from 2015 to 2018, the Atlantic reported; other Amazon facilities with robots also have high rates of injury.21 One worker at Tracy told the Atlantic: “Before robots, it was still tough, but it was manageable.… [Afterward] we were in a fight that we just can’t win.”
When you’re in that fight, the work only gets harder and harder. As Amazon workers told Josh Dzieza at The Verge, “It’s the automatically enforced pace of work, rather than the physical difficulty of the work itself, that makes the job so grueling. Any slack is perpetually being optimized out of the system, and with it any opportunity to rest or recover.”22 And if people do get injured, they’re incentivised to not report it, according to Reveal. Austin Wendt ran the first aid clinic at Amazon’s warehouse BF13 in DuPont, Washington, in 2016 and recalled warehouse leaders offering pizza parties as a reward for a streak of injury-free shifts, “so some pickers kept quiet about their injuries to avoid costing their coworkers pizza.”23 People of colour carry a disproportionate risk of injury because they made up 68 percent of Amazon’s warehouse workers in 2018.24
Robotization similar to the effect of AI elsewhere
Perhaps aware that his company’s warehouses had a serious injury rate almost twice that of the rest of the industry in 2020, or stung by the criticism that “our employees are sometimes accused of being desperate souls and treated as robots,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced in 2021 the company was “developing new automated staffing schedules that use sophisticated algorithms to rotate employees among jobs that use different muscle-tendon groups to decrease repetitive motion and help protect employees from [musculoskeletal disorder] risks.”25 This may improve matters, though it also illustrates the total control the company has over its workers’ very movements, as if they were, indeed, computer-controlled robots made of meat. One member of a Reddit community for Amazon fulfillment center workers complained of a screen instructing them to perform “Savoring,” in which they were told to “close your eyes and think about something that makes you happy.”26
Companies’ constant technological surveillance of their workers isn’t an incidental part of their operations—it’s their very foundation, the method by which they can remain nimble and responsive to customer demand while cutting labour costs to the bone. And once you combine that unending waterfall of real-time data with the ability to give workers feedback without any humans involved, it’s easy to deploy gamification to place a smiling face on that feedback loop.
To bridge the gap between Foucault and Uber, we need to go back to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the godfather of “scientific management.” In 1881, Taylor sought to pierce the mystery of why some factory workers were faster than others by timing their every motion and measuring their exact output.34 Armed with this knowledge, he would devise the “one best way” to accomplish their task, then extrapolate the maximum theoretical output per worker. That maximum output would become the target for all workers and the basis for their compensation. His theory was so influential around the world, it became known as Taylorism.
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault described the “carceral archipelago” or carceral state, a network of discipline that seeks to control human behaviour not only through the judicial system but also through medicine, psychology, education, and social work.33 In his view, the carceral state massively expanded its powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during which “the workshop, the school, the army were subject to a whole micro-penality of time (latenesses, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behaviour (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body (‘incorrect’ attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency).”
Such violations of normality had to be punished. Foucault wrote, “A whole series of subtle procedures was used, from light physical punishment to minor deprivations and petty humiliations. It was a question both of making the slightest departures from correct behaviour subject to punishment, and of giving a punitive function to the apparently indifferent elements of the disciplinary apparatus: so that, if necessary, everything might serve to punish the slightest thing; each subject find himself caught in a punishable, punishing universality.”
It’s not hard to draw a line from these micro-punishments to the points-based disciplinary systems used in modern companies. But there is one major difference between Foucault’s carceral state and gamification. For all its fixation on the “slightest departures from correct behaviour,” the carceral state’s surveillance was based on that most unreliable of sources: human perception. Only that which could be seen could be punished, and many of its judgements such as “irregular gestures” and “negligence” were often surely subjective. No doubt that was seen as a virtue amongst many of those doing the judging, but it’s very different from gamification, where judgements are mechanical and replicable, if still not wholly objective.
Workers hated Taylorism, and they had good reason to.35 Scientific management was anything but scientific, frequently relying on incomplete and biased measurements whose errors were magnified by spurious methods of extrapolation. They complained of exhaustion and they disliked feeling in competition with each other. “No tyrant or slave driver in the ecstasy of his more delirious dream ever sought to place upon abject slaves a condition more repugnant,” bellowed the American Federation of Labor.36
The Digital Taylorisation and gamification of the trucking industry didn’t magically occur thanks to smartphones or because corporations wanted even higher profits. It’s because legislation, crafted by elected politicians, led to regulations that were undoubtedly moulded by corporate lobbyists. Fleet telematics and gamification would have spread across the trucking industry eventually, but it’s possible the ELD mandate accelerated that process, if only through economies of scale for ELD manufacturers.
Was it all worth it? According to the FMCSA, compliance to hours-of-service rules has significantly increased following the introduction of ELDs in December 2017.80 Mission accomplished!
But wait: compliance with hours of service isn’t necessarily the same as reduced accident rates. A study published in 2019 analysed data from the Department of Transportation that confirmed the FMCSA’s findings of increased compliance, but the researchers found no evidence that the number of accidents decreased.81 In fact, “drivers for small carriers appear to have increased their frequency of unsafe driving (e.g., speeding) in response to the productivity losses caused by the mandate.”
In other words, the ELD mandate may have failed to achieve its principal goal of improving road safety. The study concludes, “Drivers are heavily incentivized to avoid accidents, and were so even before the mandate. Given the legal liabilities involved with being in a crash when outside hours-of-service limits, drivers are incentivized to be extra cautious when driving beyond limits. The ELD mandate has not done much to change the driver calculus in this respect, and so it is perhaps not surprising that we fail to uncover significant accident reductions.”
Having consumed the industries with the most repetitive and classifiable tasks, Digital Taylorism cannot rest. Like the interests of capital it serves, it must continue growing by harnessing new technology that can reach smaller industries with more narrowly classifiable tasks. A legion of services have sprung up that pay people to transcribe audio, write copy, design artwork, test applications, and even conduct research—all without hiring those people, meeting them, paying them directly, or even being aware of their individual existence.84
In the early days of the internet, APIs saw websites chattering to one another without humans having to do much work at all, but when Mechanical Turk and its followers introduced their own APIs, it became possible for apps to request humans to do their bidding. The ultimate cause of any request would be another human, but now the distance to that human could be very, very long.
This has led to the notion that jobs exist either above or below the API.87 If you’re an Uber driver, a flight booking agent, or an Amazon warehouse worker, you exist below the API. You might still meet clients and customers in person, but your lasting relationship is not with them. Instead, it’s with the machine that brings those customers to you, tracks your tasks, pays your salary, and ultimately fires you.88
If you have a job above the API, life is very different. You control humans by issuing commands—not face to face, but via APIs that give you unprecedented scale. And because APIs necessarily flatten all tasks into a stream of data, you can motivate these humans to work harder and faster via gamification, which helpfully reduces both your management burden and your labour costs.
Put simply: if you live above the API, you’re playing the game, and if you live below it, you’re being played. You’re an NPC—a non-player character.
Few people live fully above the API. Even though I run my own company, part of my job exists below the API because I’ve answered literally thousands of Zombies, Run! customer emails via our API-enabled online support system, Zendesk.
Jared Nelsen, a software engineer based in Boulder, Colorado, caused a stir amongst the programming community in 2020 when he revealed what he called the “horrifically dystopian world of software engineering interviews.”93 In a blog post, Nelsen described how after typing some obscure code into Google’s search engine, the website faded to black and showed this text:
You are speaking our language… Would you like to take a challenge?
Yes
No thanks
Nelsen had fallen into the rabbit hole of a Google programmer recruitment game. He typed “1” and was given an algorithmic programming challenge to solve within twenty-four hours: “Given an array nums containing n + 1 integers where each integer is between 1 and n (inclusive), prove that at least one duplicate number must exist…” Five challenges followed, with the ultimate prize being… a phone interview. He was rejected the next day.
Today, it feels like there are murky forces pushing the entire economy below the API with only a few superexecutives remaining above to pull workers’ strings with gamified control panels. Some argue this all began in the 1960s, long before APIs were a twinkle in the internet’s eye, when management consultancy firms like McKinsey became obsessed with corporate “reengineering.”99 This process inevitably resulted in downsizing (or in their words, “overhead value analysis”), with middle managers bearing the brunt of the pain, being cut at twice the rate of nonmanagerial workers. Since the Internet Revolution, many of the surviving managers have been gradually replaced by APIs, but don’t worry: CEOs have been rewarded handsomely for these changes. In the 1960s, a US CEO’s income was a pitiful twenty times that of a production worker; today, they earn almost three hundred times as much.100
Others have described a global drive, starting from the 1980s, to replace organisations with networks of contracts; APIs are arguably yet another iteration of this trend.101 The idea that a company is basically a collection of contracts originates from economist Ronald Coase’s 1937 essay “The Nature of the Firm.”102 In it, he wondered why we have firms with full-time employees rather than loose groups of independent, self-employed contractors. His answer was that while using contractors would, in theory, be cheaper due to market competition driving the price of labour down, companies would suffer significant transaction costs if they took that route—everything from constantly arguing about costs and worrying about losing trade secrets to spending too much time looking for (and keeping) good workers. Companies that opted instead to employ workers might pay more for their labour but would avoid a lot of those transaction costs, so they’d come out on top in the long run.
In the 1980s, management consultants argued Coase’s theory no longer applied, since computers—like those that now tell Amazon warehouse workers what to pick and where to walk—could magically reduce or even eliminate those transaction costs. Whether or not this was true, it was a great story, and in any case, dismembering big firms was a tried-and-tested way of boosting stock prices. And so in the first two decades of the 2000s, venture capitalists and investors eagerly poured billions into startups that were designed from the ground up to be powered by loose groups of independent, self-employed contractors. Those startups included Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, and innumerable other “sharing economy” and “gig economy” businesses which have no workers and own no property but instead use APIs to outsource all front-line functions that require a human.
The deliberate conversion of employees into contractors has allowed these companies to externalise labour costs to the rest of society, giving them an edge over every competitor. Amazon now accounts for a staggering 40 percent of all US online commerce; Uber handles half of all taxi rides in New York City; and as of 2020, in my own city of Edinburgh, there are almost as many Airbnb listings as there are hotel rooms.103 The traditional Chicago School belief is that this concentration of entire industries into just a few companies is an inevitable result of technology and economies of scale, and that if it benefits the customer, all is well. Antimonopolists like legal scholar Tim Wu, however, blame the political lack of will to enforce antitrust law, and argue that even if Amazon’s scale helps it lower prices in the short term, its crushing of competition stifles innovation in the long term.104
Either way, whether you want to sell goods online or advertise on social media, you have fewer and fewer options.105 And if those companies decide to push you below the API with only gamification to distract you, there are fewer and fewer places to go.
A few years ago, I played a VR game called Ship It that simulated the experience of being a warehouse worker.106 Made by Think On Labs, it was a lighthearted puzzle where players raced against time to stuff oddly shaped blocks into containers, a little like Tetris. It was fun! I enjoyed the challenge of flipping the blocks around and trying to pack the highest-value containers I could. It’s games like Ship It that make people think it’s easy to gamify warehouse work, but the comparison doesn’t stand up to a moment’s inspection: even the most die-hard Ship It player would tire of the game after playing it ten hours a day for four days a week.
There’s a more fundamental problem, though. Ship It is fun because it supplies players with just the right mix of blocks and containers and power-ups and new game mechanics to keep things interesting. That’s not the priority in real warehouses, where a worker might have to assemble hundreds of identical shipments in a row. I know because I’ve done the job myself. My company used to ship thousands of identical “virtual race packs” to players around the world, each containing a finisher’s medal, certificate, and a few other fun bits and pieces. Our priority was to get the packs assembled correctly and promptly. It wasn’t to make the job fun.
“a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders,” as the 1919 ruling in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. established.107 While this understanding is not universally accepted by academics and lawyers, many leaders act as if it’s still true.
I don’t doubt that all things being equal, the leaders of big companies would like to make their workers happy. But the truth is, if their company fails to grow as fast as competitors, they won’t be long in the job. As long as that’s the case, as long as government regulations remain lax and unions remain weak, there will be no change, and no real attempt to improve working conditions. Their priority is profit, not fun.
As a business owner, I’m perfectly aware that most companies are not a democracy. Employees effectively give up their freedom in return for pay during work hours, so almost anything that happens inside a business could be classified as coercion. The reason I single out workplace gamification as coercive is not to pretend employees would be perfectly free without it, but instead to distinguish it from other forms of gamification that we have a choice to participate in. In fact, it is doubly coercive, in that it also forces workers to make certain choices they wouldn’t otherwise have (e.g., continue picking up passengers far later than they’d like to) or aren’t in their interests (e.g., hiding injuries to help colleagues).
As David Graeber wrote in Bullshit Jobs, “The need to play a game of make-believe not of one’s own making, a game that exists only as a form of power imposed on you, is inherently demoralizing.” It is cruel to coerce workers into a funhouse distortion of play. Fairly paid, meaningful work can be its own reward. Absent that, workplace gamification is like pouring acid onto a festering wound.
Climate change is a completely different problem. We understand parts of how global warming is occurring, but we lack a complete understanding of how the entire system works, such as runaway feedback loops. This makes it hard to weight the value of different interventions into personal behaviour—how much should a game incentivise recycling versus reuse, or cycling versus taking a bus, or eating hamburgers versus working from home? The variables are endless.
The upper class arent going to be playing these games anyway.the world isnt on fire directly because one litters
So here’s what I would do: I’d try to make the act of mopping more fun. I don’t want to reward you after you’ve finished mopping, I want you to be excited while you’re mopping. Ideally, I want you to be excited to start mopping because you know it’s going to be fun. Clearly this can’t be achieved through points and badges alone: it requires real-time motivation. To do this, my game needs to know the cleanliness of the floor in real time (an input interface), along with a way to respond to and guide your mopping actions in order to maximise floor cleanliness (an output interface).
AR power wash simulator
That’s the beauty of gamification: every activity demands a new solution. If you’re a designer, that’s a good thing! But it’s also the challenge of gamification, because investors prefer infinitely scalable, one-size-fits-all solutions. That’s why we get points and badges instead of tailored games. Their insistence on generic solutions that serve everyone robs us of games that serve a few people well. Zombies, Run! may well be nostalgic design—Naomi and I made the game we wanted to play, and if you don’t like zombies or audio storytelling, or you’re more motivated by competition and social interaction, it’s not the game for you—but that hasn’t stopped millions of people from enjoying it. We didn’t need or expect Zombies, Run! to work for everyone; it just needed to work for enough players to pay our bills.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised, however. Megagames and wargames have a long history of simulating unusual and extreme scenarios for education and training purposes. The 2020 documentary film Boys State tells the story of a thousand teenage boys building a representative government from the ground up. In an interview, the directors noted that while teenagers were increasingly able to lead political movements in the real world, simulations help them understand how to wield the complementary mechanisms and levers of the political process in a safe environment.5
At this point, it’s worth considering whether gamers actually appreciated the addition of achievement systems, given that engagement is not the same as perceived value. In theory, achievements can be helpful markers of progress, recognising how much a player has improved in skill. They can also hint at fun ways to play the game they hadn’t considered, like E-Motion’s bonus for not rotating to the right. This kind of increased replayability can be a win-win for both the player and the game developer. But at their worst, achievements prod players into persisting at boring, repetitive, and frustrating tasks that they’d have otherwise abandoned, simply in pursuit of “finishing” the game—not by completing the final level or beating the final boss, but by collecting all the achievements. The problem is, because players differ, these two outcomes can exist in the very same game: when game designers build in too much of this “optional unfinishedness” to support extended replays, they make it hard to completely finish a game, as Mikael Jakobsson, research coordinator at MIT Game Lab, has noted.11
No one can fault a company for exploring new ways to make money
We absolutely can if they are doing so by destroying peoples lives
“Compulsion loop” is a scary-sounding term for a simple process.58 First, make players anticipate a reward, like a more powerful sword or the prospect of travelling to a new game area. Next, give them a challenge, like killing monsters or solving a puzzle. Completing that challenge earns them their anticipated reward, which in turn presents or unlocks yet more challenges for yet more rewards (e.g., the new game area includes a new quest giver). If this sounds a little behaviourist, that’s because it is, though the challenges are usually far more fun than those in generic gamification. The most fun games have a kind of looseness and play to their loops such that you barely notice them, or they can be so wide and subtle, they’re more of a suggestion than a mechanical system. But if it sounds like compulsion loops could in some circumstances lead to compulsive behaviour, well, that’s the entire point. Some might even call the resulting behaviour addictive.
The suggestion that video games can be addictive is widely accepted amongst gamers. In fact, it’s often used as a compliment for especially fun or replayable games. At the same time, it’s strenuously denied by the games industry, which is so wary of any comparison to drugs that anyone making the suggestion is attacked—including me.
As Han-Tani notes, “I can accept that a treatmill is a source of relaxation, but I just feel the way they are designed does not really encourage, from the start, a healthy type of engagement. If someone wants to form a bond with my game and play it for 1,000 hours, I’m fine with that. But I don’t want to add in elements of design that encourage that playtime via addictive loops and retention techniques. It feels coercive
IN 1963, AMERICAN HISTORIAN AND PHILOSOPHER OF TECHNOLOGY LEWIS Mumford spoke at the Fund for the Republic in New York as part of a convocation on “Challenges to Democracy in the Next Decade.”1 Mumford warned of the threat that “authoritarian technics” could pose to democracy:
From late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unless we radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of government, like national ballotting for already chosen leaders in totalitarian countries.
Writer Leah Muncy reflected on her mother’s habit of playing the California State Lottery: “The California lottery functions, of course, as another type of rigged capitalist competition, a game with a vanishingly small chance of reward that fools its players into believing that effort and big aspirations pay off. The California Lottery, in essence, gamifies the American Dream.… My mother worked, my mother dreamed, but these alone did not afford her financial stability. The lottery is another of America’s promises for economic mobility that it has no intention of keeping.”89
Many teachers, however, claim ClassDojo’s benefits are the product of its lesson plans and videos on developing a “growth mindset.” The idea behind the growth mindset, as developed by Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University, is that ability and intelligence and talent come from hard work, curiosity, and perseverance.99 This contrasts with the “fixed mindset,” which believes ability and intelligence come from innate, unchangeable traits—so if you say to a child “well done, you’re so smart,” you encourage a fixed mindset, whereas if you say “good job, you worked very hard,” you foster a growth mindset.
The concept of a growth mindset became popular in the first decade of the 2000s, and by the 2010s its principles were being taught in companies and schools. In 2016, ClassDojo partnered with Dweck’s Project for Education Research That Scales (PERTS), an applied research centre at Stanford University, to produce its growth mindset content.100 And if you squint, you can convince yourself that what appears to be generic gamification (awarding points for “teamwork” or “persistence”) is actually encouraging a growth mindset, thereby giving children more confidence to develop their abilities.
From experience, hearing the positive or negative point sounds are even more effective if students cannot see who is being awarded points. Hearing sound immediately causes students to self-check and monitor their own behavior. This is called the “Dojo Effect.” They will literally sit up straighter and focus on the task at hand when they hear the sound. Students think, “Was that me? Am I doing what I am supposed to be doing?” You might even create a bogus student in your class to award positive and negative points to just for strategic implementation of the “Dojo Effect.”103
You couldn’t build a better on-ramp to Foucault’s panopticon if you tried.
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
—George Orwell, “In Front of Your Nose” (1946)
This confusion is emblematic of hyperreality, an idea coined by Jean Baudrillard.11 It’s what happens when a simulation of reality becomes blended with reality itself, where the simulation is sufficiently realistic that it becomes indistinguishable from reality, where it’s experienced as more real than the real. Hyperreality manifests in theme parks, TV shows, virtual reality, and lately, social networking apps. If people experience everything through six-inch smartphone screens, it becomes disturbingly easy to make a hyperreal world with fake Facebook pages or Twitter accounts—far easier than funding an entire TV network or newspaper.
When you’re reading (or watching) a summary of an ARG? All of the assumptions and logical leaps have been wrapped up and packaged for you, tied up with a nice little bow. Everything makes sense, and you can see how it all flows together. Living it, though? Sheer chaos. Wild conjectures and theories flying left and right, with circumstantial evidence and speculation ruling the day. Things exist in a fugue state of being simultaneously true-and-not-true, and it’s only the accumulation of evidence that resolves it. And acquiring a “knack” for sifting through theories to surface what’s believable is an extremely valuable skill—both for actively playing ARGs, and for life in general.
And sometimes, I worry that when people consume these neatly packaged theories that show all the pieces coming together, they miss out on all those false starts and coincidences that help develop critical thinking skills.… Because yes, conspiracy theories try and offer up those same neat packages that attempt to explain the seemingly unexplained. And it’s pretty damn important to learn how groups can be led astray in search of those neatly wrapped packages.17
As for digital literacy specifically, the idea it can help solve the fake news epidemic is like training people to run faster to dodge traffic rather than enforcing road safety and building pedestrian crossings—it’s not that it’s worthless, but it places the burden on individual citizens rather than addressing the larger societal problem.
Or there’s Bellingcat, online sleuthing at its best. If you applied ARG skills to investigative journalism, you’d get something like this open-source intelligence group that discovered how Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down over Ukraine in 2014. Bellingcat’s volunteers painstakingly pieced together publicly available information to determine MH17 was downed by a Buk missile launcher originating from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade in Kursk, Russia.50 The official Dutch-led international joint investigation team later came to the same conclusion.51 Bellingcat continues to investigate criminal activity and crimes against humanity through its network of staff and contributors in more than twenty countries.52
Having left the world of neuroscience, I escaped one metaphor only to encounter an even more powerful one: the world as game. Other than simulation theorists, few believe we literally live in a game designed by otherworldly beings, but over the last century, the metaphor has dramatically shaped how we understand and act in the world. We can’t help but imagine life as a game now: a constant competition where we all begin as equals, where luck is present but skill can overcome any obstacle, where cheating is punished but if you play right, you’ll win. This distinctly modern amalgam of capitalism and the just-world hypothesis doesn’t reflect how the world really works, but we act as if it does, not just in our politics and workplaces, but in how we act toward each other.
Romance mechanics appear to approximate the real world as interpreted by game designers, an extension of the odious view that “nice guys” ought to be rewarded with sex. This disturbingly widespread “vending-machine” theory of dating, where men feed kindness coins (good deeds) into a machine (women) until sex falls out, mirrors the tactics used by pickup artists, most famously depicted in Neil Strauss’s book The Game.22 Games journalist William Hughes has criticised video games’ deterministic view of romance, along with the idea that all main NPCs should be romantically available to players, arguing they’ve “been giving players their pick of the buffet for years, to the point that it’s notable when a character isn’t available to the player in a romantic sense.… Using it to teach players, subconsciously or not, that achieving romance with another person is a factor of correct choices—that the right inputs can always be relied upon to produce the desired outputs—is an ugly side effect of a genre that traffics in some of the most intense emotions we have collective access to.”23
The Starbucks app for Android makes these promotional notifications essentially inescapable, since they’re cunningly grouped together with more useful order status notifications; you can’t turn off one without turning off the other.33 If you enjoy the game of being a Starbucks customer, this is a feature, not a bug. And if you don’t? Maybe you’ll come around if you get the right promotion.
Same for DoorDash
With money serving as an ultimate score for many, it’s hard to escape the feeling that capitalism itself is a game.
That game might be tolerable if capitalism’s fabled competitive “level playing field” meant we all had an equal chance of success. The metaphor serves capitalism’s champions because in sports, playing fields are level and all teams do play according to the same rules. Unfortunately, in the real world, corruption and regulatory capture and the sheer weight of historical inequality have conspired to tilt the level playing field into more of a muddy ditch, with one team at the top hurling balls on the team mired at the bottom.
That may be why a 2020 YouGov poll found that only 55 percent of Americans had a favourable opinion of capitalism, down from 61 percent in 2018.40 The decline was especially marked among millennials, of whom only 43 percent favoured it. Little wonder, given the long-term decline in social mobility in the US, the fact that Harvard has almost as many students from the top 0.1 percent highest-income families as from the bottom 20 percent, and the damning reality that the typical white family has a net worth almost ten times that of a Black family.41
For many, the world is indeed a game—and the game is rigged.
Social media has become the world’s new public square. It has democratised the ability to publish information and allowed any individual to get their message out to billions, a privilege once afforded only to the rich and powerful. It is too important to be played and manipulated like a game.
It is already rigged. Secret algos determine what gets shown and to wwho. That isnt s public square
Metaphors can help people understand the world in useful new ways. If thinking of your bladder as a meter means that you remember to visit the toilet before a long car drive, that’s a good result. “Spoon theory,” a popular metaphor by Christine Miserandino, describes how those with chronic illness have a limited amount of energy (“spoons”) to spend on activities during the day, forcing them to carefully plan out their time in advance.90
It is certainly possible these games could make warehouse work more fun, but that goal will always be balanced against Amazon’s ultimate goal of maximising profits; it’s unlikely that Amazon will re-engineer its finely tuned warehouse operations to make its games more varied and entertaining. What’s guaranteed is that AR will make the surveillance of workers even more comprehensive, with eye tracking and computer vision allowing each worker to be assessed and rewarded by their very own virtual Frederick Taylor. Could automation and robotics save workers from this tight leash? Perhaps, but robots have been in warehouses for years and if anything, they’ve increased the pressure on the remaining humans. It will be some time before robots can completely replace the speed, intelligence, and versatility of humans in all warehouse tasks, and until then, AR-equipped workers are more likely to become meat puppets directed hither and thither to fill in the many gaps.
There’s little sign that video games will give up their position as the world’s dominant form of entertainment, and that’s without AR or VR. What happens when games get even more fun and more immersive? Mark Aguiar, an American economist and professor of economics at Princeton, thinks the bottom could drop out of the employment market: not because there are no more jobs, but because young men will be so entertained by cheap or free video games that they won’t see the value in filling those positions. In 2021, he coauthored a provocative paper noting that in the early 2000s, young men aged twenty-one to thirty had shown a greater drop in their work hours than older men or women; at the same time, they’d shifted their leisure toward video games and other recreational computer activities (perhaps because they were more fun and more accessible than alternatives like TV or sports).6 Aguiar linked the two with a theoretical “leisure demand system” model estimating that somewhere between a third and three quarters of the drop in young men’s working hours was due, essentially, to cheap games being too fun.
At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions, but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
AS A GAME DESIGNER AND FORMER NEUROSCIENTIST, I IMAGINED THE MOST successful and popular gamification would naturally be the most fun and effective. Like a set of training wheels, I thought gamification could help beginners master new skills. Like a game of basketball, I hoped it’d turn a dull workout into a thrill. And like the best teachers, I imagined it would transform learning into a joy.
I never imagined most gamification would become as coercive and manipulative as it is today: a set of practices that aid those who want to systematically alter behaviour on a mass scale. Gamification acts as if it were for the player’s sole benefit—a lie aided by its use of the aesthetics of the most popular form of entertainment in the world—in order to smooth the acceptance of self-monitoring and surveillance, and the imposition of external goals and value systems. This has been enabled by a constant, real-time feedback loop conducted with ever-cheaper and ubiquitous technology. When that technology is so tightly controlled and locked down by platform owners, many never make an active choice to play because gamification is on by default; or they’re fooled into playing by false advertising; or because their wages are so low, gamified financial rewards become fines for not playing.
The purpose of gamification’s behaviour alteration varies. In consumer applications, it’s to increase engagement in order to better target and display advertising, to accumulate user data for sale, and to get users to spend money in the application itself out of compulsion or a need to escape artificial tedium. In the case of coercive gamification, it’s to get people (but not all people, just normal workers and citizens) to behave “better” or accept longer hours and poor work conditions for the same or less pay.
These goals are no more or less evil than those routinely pursued by companies and authoritarian governments. In fact, given that the behaviourist techniques employed by gamification can be traced back centuries, they’re quite banal and conservative. But what’s new is that the modern combination of networked surveillance technology and entertainment has made gamification both alluring and inescapable. We all play games, the world is a game, so you might as well play your role.
In anthropologist Natasha Schüll’s Addiction by Design, she quotes Sylvie Linard of gambling company Cyberview saying, “The more you manage to tweak and customize your machines to fit the player, the more they play to extinction; it translates into a dramatic increase in revenue.” Extinction is when players run out of money. In exploitative gamification, the bleeding is much gentler. You’re unlikely to empty your wallet, but you will run out of interest, out of patience, out of engagement; and in our attention-driven economy, engagement is money. No harm done? Not so.
It’s easy for designers to blind themselves to the reality of what they’ve made. It’s comforting to think that the good you’re doing outweighs any bad feedback or reviews. And if someone says they regret playing, they wasted their time or money, they ended up hurting themselves—surely that was their choice! But that’s an abdication of responsibility. It’s admitting that you aren’t working on behalf of players—you’re only working on behalf of profit.
For if life is to be a game, let it be one of learning and joy, not of grind and punishment.
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