How gamification took over the world

We live in an undeniably gamified world. 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 sites and try to swipe our way toward social connection. But is all of that a good thing? In this edition of What’s Next in Tech, explore how gamification took over the world.

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Gamification was always just behaviorism dressed up in pixels and point systems. Why did we fall for it?

It’s a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow be applied to the real one??

Often pondered during especially challenging or tedious tasks in meatspace (writing essays, say, or doing your taxes), it’s an eminently reasonable question to ask. Life, after all, is hard. And while video games are too, there’s something almost magical about the way they can promote sustained bouts of superhuman concentration and resolve.

For some, this phenomenon leads to an interest in flow states and immersion. For others, it’s simply a reason to play more games. For a handful of consultants, startup gurus, and game designers in the late 2000s, it became the key to unlocking our true human potential.

Broadly defined as the application of game design elements and principles to non-game activities—think points, levels, missions, badges, leaderboards, reinforcement loops, and so on—gamification was hawked as a revolutionary new tool for transforming education, work, health and fitness, and countless other parts of life. According to gamification boosters, the real world is insufficiently engaging and motivating, and too often it fails to make us happy.

Gamification promises to remedy this design flaw by engineering a new reality, one that transforms the dull, difficult, and depressing parts of life into something fun and inspiring. Studying for exams, doing household chores, flossing, exercising, learning a new language—there was no limit to the tasks that could be turned into games, making everything IRL better.

But instead of liberating us from drudgery and maximizing our potential, gamification has turned out to be just another tool for coercion, distraction, and control. Read the story to understand how.

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Image: Selman Design