Gamification: A Reality Check

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

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

In her 2010 TED Talk, “Gaming Can Make a Better World,” the game designer Jane McGonigal called this engaged state “blissful productivity.” “There’s a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 22 hours a week,” she said. “It’s because we know when we’re playing a game that we’re happier working hard than relaxing or hanging out. We know that we are optimized to do hard and meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time.”

McGonigal’s fundamental pitch was this: by making the real world more like a video game, we could harness the blissful productivity of millions of people and direct it at some of humanity’s thorny problems—things like poverty, obesity, and climate change. The exact details of how to accomplish this were a bit vague (play more games?), but her objective was clear: “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.”

While “gamification” never came up during her talk, anyone following the big-ideas circuit (TED, South by Southwest, DICE, etc.) or using the new Foursquare app would have been familiar with the basic idea. 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 already being hawked as a revolutionary new tool for transforming education, work, health and fitness, and countless other parts of life.

Adding “world-saving” to the list of potential benefits was perhaps inevitable, given the prevalence of that theme in video-game storylines. But it also spoke to gamification’s foundational premise: reality is somehow broken. According to McGonigal and other 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 that transforms life's dull, challenging, and depressing parts 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.

Today, 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. And yet, for all the crude gamelike elements that have been grafted onto our lives, the more hopeful and collaborative world that gamification promised more than a decade ago seems as far away as ever. Instead of liberating us from drudgery and maximizing our potential, gamification became another tool for coercion, distraction, and control.

Con Game

This was not an unforeseeable outcome. From the start, a small but vocal group of journalists and game designers warned against the fairy-tale thinking and facile view of video games that they saw in the concept of gamification. Adrian Hon, author of You’ve Been Played, a recent book that chronicles its dangers, was one of them.

“As someone building so-called ‘serious games’ at the time the concept was taking off, I knew that many of the claims being made around the possibility of games to transform people’s behaviors and change the world were completely overblown,” he says.

Hon isn’t some knee-jerk polemicist. A trained neuroscientist who switched to a career in game design and development, he’s the co-creator of Zombies, Run!—one of the world's most popular gamified fitness apps. While he still believes games can benefit and enrich aspects of our nongaming lives, Hon says a one-size-fits-all approach is bound to fail. For this reason, he’s firmly against the superficial layering of generic points, leaderboards, and missions atop everyday activities and the more coercive forms of gamification that have invaded the workplace.

Ironically, these broad and varied uses make criticizing the practice so tricky. As Hon notes in his book, gamification has always been a fast-moving target, varying dramatically in scale, scope, and technology. As the concept has evolved, so too have its applications, whether you think of the 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 or the utopian ambition of using gamification to save the world.

In the same way that AI’s lack of a fixed definition today makes it easy to dismiss any one critique for not addressing some other potential definition of it, so too do gamification’s varied interpretations. “I remember giving critical talks on gamification at gamification conferences, and people would come up to me afterward and say, ‘Yeah, bad gamification is bad, right? But we’re doing good gamification,’” says Hon. (They weren’t.)

For some critics, the idea of “good gamification” was anathema. Their main gripe with the term and practice was that it has little to nothing to do with actual games. Combine the cultural recasting of games with an array of cheaper and faster technologies—GPS, ubiquitous and reliable mobile internet, powerful smartphones, Web 2.0 tools, and services—and you arguably have all the ingredients needed for gamification’s rise. The reality in 2010 was ready to be gamified. To put it slightly differently, gamification was an ideal idea then.

Gaming Behavior

You may be asking, does it work? Indeed, companies like Apple, Uber, Strava, Microsoft, Garmin, and others wouldn’t bother gamifying their products and services without evidence of the strategy’s efficacy. Unfortunately, the answer to the question is super annoying: define work.

Because gamification is pervasive and varied, it’s hard to address its effectiveness directly or comprehensively. But one can confidently say this: gamification did not save the world. Climate change still exists. As do obesity, poverty, and war. Much of generic gamification’s power supposedly resides in its ability to nudge or steer us toward or away from certain behaviors using competition (challenges and leaderboards), rewards (points and achievement badges), and other sources of positive and negative feedback.

On that front, the results are mixed. Nudge theory lost much of its shine with academics in 2022 after a meta-analysis of previous studies concluded that there wasn’t much evidence it worked to change behavior after correcting for publication bias. Still, there are a lot of ways to nudge and a lot of behaviors to modify. The fact remains that plenty of people claim to be highly motivated to close their rings, earn their sleep crowns, or hit or exceed some increasingly ridiculous number of steps on their Fitbits (see humorist David Sedaris).

Sebastian Deterding, a leading researcher in the field, argues that gamification can work, but its successes are hard to replicate. According to Deterding, academics do not know what works, when, and how, and “we mostly have just-so stories without data or empirical testing.”

In truth, gamification acolytes are always derived from an old playbook that dates back to the early 20th century. Then, behaviorists like John Watson and B.F. Skinner saw human behaviors (a category that, for Skinner, included thoughts, actions, feelings, and emotions) not as the products of internal mental states or cognitive processes but, rather, as the result of external forces—forces that could conveniently be manipulated.

If Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning, which doled out rewards to positively reinforce certain behaviors, sounds a lot like Amazon’s “Fulfillment Center Games,” which dole out rewards to compel workers to work harder, faster and longer—well, that’s not a coincidence.

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

Sometimes, this may work; other times, it may not. But ultimately, as Hon points out, the efficacy question may be beside the point. “There is no before or after to compare against if your life is always being gamified,” he writes. “There isn’t even a static form of gamification that can be measured since the design of coercive gamification is always changing, a moving target that only goes toward greater and more granular intrusion.”

The Game of Life

Like any other art form, video games offer various possibilities. They can educate, entertain, foster social connections, inspire, and encourage us to see the world differently. Some of the best ones manage to do all of this at once.

Yet, for many of us, there’s the sense today that we’re stuck playing an exhausting game that we didn’t opt into. This one assumes that our behaviors can be changed with shiny digital baubles, constant artificial competition, and meaningless prizes. Even more insulting, the game acts as if it exists for our benefit—promising to make us fitter, happier, and more productive—when, in truth, it’s serving its makers' commercial and business interests.

Metaphors can be an imperfect but necessary way to make sense of the world. Today, it’s common to hear talk of leveling up, having a God Mode mindset, gaining XP, and turning life’s difficulty settings up (or down). But the metaphor that resonates most for me—the one that seems to capture our current predicament neatly—is that of the NPC or non-player character.

NPCs are the “Sisyphean machines” of video games, programmed to follow a defined script forever and never question or deviate. They’re background players in someone else’s story, typically tasked with furthering a specific plotline or performing some manual labor. To call someone an NPC in real life is to accuse them of just going through the motions, not thinking for themselves, and being unable to make their own decisions. This, for me, is gamification’s actual result. It’s surrender pretending to be empowerment. It strips away the very thing that makes games unique—a sense of agency—and then tries to mask that with crude stand-ins for accomplishment.

So what can we do? Given the reach and pervasiveness of gamification, critiquing it at this point can feel pointless, like railing against capitalism. And yet its own failed promises may point the way to a possible respite. If gamifying the world has turned our lives into an evil version of a video game, perhaps this is the perfect moment to reacquaint ourselves with why actual video games are plentiful in the first place. Let's all start playing better games to borrow an idea from McGonigal.