Gamification, which is generally viewed positively as a way of making boring and repetitive tasks more fun while boosting desired outcomes, has a dark and in some cases sinister side, according to the author of a new book. Adrian Hon, an experienced and successful games designer, says that “with today’s gamification, you are no longer the player, you are being played”.
You’ve Been Played is in fact the title of his put-down of the world of gamification, which has spread from the world of gaming to embrace sectors as diverse as health, education, science, industry and transport among others. Hon suggests that rather than improving our lives, gamification removes personal freedom, encourages negative and unhealthy habits and in extreme cases can be harnessed by authoritarian regimes for nefarious purposes.
Hon underscores that he’s an insider when it comes to gamification. After studying psychology and neuroscience at Cambridge University, he designed games for the BBC, Penguin Books, Microsoft and the British Museum among others. He is co-founder of games company Six to Start and a co-creator of popular game Zombies, Run!
“I have been in the games industry for a long time and we’ve swung between ‘games are terrible and they will turn you into a killer’ and ‘games can do no wrong’ and the truth is somewhere in between,” he tells The Irish Times. But he emphasises that users need to be aware of gamification in areas such as workplaces, where they are being used to drive productivity and curb labour costs.
In the book, he says that for some companies it is a happy coincidence that a generation brought up with video games now associates points, quests and leaderboards with fun when these same things can now be used to control them at work. Far from being fun, he claims, these games are devices to make people pack more boxes or drive longer.
Hon accepts that there is an issue of personal choice. Employees are generally not forced to participate in these games but many will choose to as a way of enlivening a humdrum work environment.
Trust and blame
“It is presented as empowering. In normal games we had a choice in whether we participate and we trust that the rules are fair – that one side is not being favoured over the other. I’m not going to blame people for being trusting. There are worse things than being naive. If your employer says that they are concerned about your welfare, it’s understandable that you’d like that to be true and the message is often very powerful. What I’m saying is that they are not necessarily your friends.”
Workforce gamification may not make our jobs any more fun – it may not even make us more productive – but it succeeds in making workers feel that their failure to match ever-increasing targets is their own fault, not their employers’. And as more of the of the economy is digitised and networked, not even those in the highest-paid jobs will escape gamification.”
He describes this as “digital Taylorism”, the modern application of the scientific management approach that aims to squeeze higher productivity from a coerced workforce through the strict enforcement of standards and procedures. It’s seen widely in low-end jobs but increasingly in better-paid roles such as finance too, he notes.
The few studies that systematically examine the effectiveness of workplace gamification yield mixed results, he notes. Staff tend to work harder or become happier in the short term but, after a few months, the effect goes into reverse, with performance dropping below its original level.
The likely explanation for the short-term improvement is the “novelty effect” and Hon suggests that decline may be the result of cynicism on the part of workers and a realisation that they have been experimented on or been played by the employers.
So, if it doesn’t work, why do companies persist?
Corporate ladder
“If you are running HR at a big company and you want to keep moving up the corporate ladder, you need to look like you are doing something useful and innovative gamification fits perfectly. It’s new but not too new, it taps into cultural trends that the all-important millennials and Gen Z enjoy. And there are plenty of off-the-shelf gamification platforms that don’t require you to make changes to your corporate structure or processes. And if it doesn’t work? No one’s going to blame you for trying, not that most companies even bother evaluating these kinds of experiments.”
At the consumer level, games can be benign or a force for good, he happily acknowledges. Think Duolingo, the language app, or Chore Wars, which provides points for performing household tasks such as cleaning. Fitness tools, however, get a mixed rap from this author. Too often they push individuals too far, for example, ignoring the need for rest periods, which can lead to strains and injuries.
Developments in the field of virtual and augmented reality (AR) will make gamification even more pervasive. Everything can be gamified with AR, he notes. It is inconvenient to monitor everything with phones as you have to point to objects, for example, but “when you have glasses that can monitor and record everything that you do, then you can gamify everything, for better or for worse”.
Despite the best efforts of the tech giants who want to position themselves as gatekeeper and protectors of consumers, he says that, in a decade or so’s time, “we will find aspects of gamification absolutely horrific. There are so many areas where it can be used badly.”
The most worrying part of gamification relates to its use by governments to control citizens. Hon devotes a section of the book to look at experiments in parts of China to control citizen behaviour through a system of social credit scores. Trials have aimed to adjust behaviour with awards and punishments based on aggregated data from multiple government departments and agencies. Letting your social credit score drop too low could result in the loss of many privileges, he notes.
Ethical approach to gamification: Core principles
User opt-in: Gamification features should not be active by default in applications. Users should be asked to consent to them rather than having to go through settings to turn them off.
Rewards and punishments should be small: Outsized rewards and punishments are an eye-catching way to motivate users, but they warp people’s reasons for participating and can lead to harmful and unhealthy behaviour. Small rewards and punishments, on the other hand, force designers to make gamification fun, rather than relying on behaviour tricks.
Don’t misrepresent benefits: A brain-training game that works for university students in a lab doesn’t necessarily work for a 50 year old at home, especially if it has been redesigned during its journey to the customer. It’s easy to cherry pick a single improvement from an app and suggest it applies widely.
Work on users’ behalf: Ethical gamification doesn’t burden people with regret, stealing their time and money. At its best, it is motivated by making hard and tedious tasks more fun and lightening people’s loads, rather than maximising profit for its creators or sponsors.
You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments and Schools Use Games to Control Us All, by Adrian Hon, is published by Swift Press
