The Dangers of Gamification

Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken talks about the benefits of turning uninspiring tasks into an act of play - that is, gamification. McGonigal’s book encourages us to adapt the structures of those games - rewards, measurements, social engagement, quests, and so forth - to our daily lives. I have taken this to heart with my blog and volunteer work … and felt vindicated for the thousands of hours spent playing on my PC.

However, I suspect McGonigal is just formalizing something that most of us already do. To motivate myself to do my taxes, for instance, I have to frame it as the type of challenge in which I could take some pride. I set up some charts with the details of my bank accounts, bonds, superannuation, and student debt in Microsoft Excel, and then I’ll let myself spend a few hours just graphing it all.

These pie charts and timelines become my colorful reward for having done the hard work - in other words, my ‘badges’. I’m not alone - many subscribers of personal finance forums even post screenshots of their budgeting software or mobile devices as evidence of their achievements. 

The effort I put into ‘gamifying’ an activity is in inverse proportion to its intrinsic enjoyability. The most boring of activities, in other words, require the most housekeeping. The harder our jobs, the more likely we are to go out often; the greater the exam stress, the longer the schoolies. The difference between these reward-based systems and gamification though is that the latter enfuses the incentive with the activity - and in doing so, blurs the distinction between work and play.

However, gamification can sometimes spiral out of control. Case in point: cataloguing my 600 films, numerous episodes, and 75 000 tracks (or about 6 000 hours worth of listening)-worth of downloads. Doing so appeals to my selective OCD, and I like having all those movies organized in my multimedia library - replete with cover art and imdb rating. The problem is that I am unlikely to watch any of these films. My movie library has become an archive rather than a to-watch shelf. My new standards for film quality - bluray rips - makes much of my existing collection unwatchable. And my response when going through my music collection is quite often, ‘How the hell did this get in here?’

I have recently been getting into Google Tasks in a big way. It lets me keep my actionable-items centralized, available on my PDA and PCs, as well as grouped according to location: what I can do at Home, on the phone, online, shopping in the city, and so forth. However, I find I am getting too focused on the low-returns tasks - things that Steven Covey would summarize as‘Not urgent, and not important’. While I am chuffed for having managed to keep all the ‘urgent’ activities in my life at a minimum, this does not mean that I should let myself get caught up in trivia. As the saying goes, ‘easy’ does not equal ‘proceed’.

The Facebook travel App Tripadvisor is another poignant example. This rewards me with badges for activities such as making ‘friends’, or reviewing restaurants, or visiting cities. In some respects I am gaming the system - but in others, I am the one being gamed: I am contributing time and effort to writing hostel reviews that helps someone else’s bottom line. As the saying goes, “When something online is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” 

When managers over rely on ‘reportable’ figures they risk missing the point of what their team is doing. (If it can’t be measured, after all, it can’t be managed.) We run a similar risk, however, by become preoccupied with - for instance - ‘tick the box tourism’. I am guilty of this a lot: on a trip to Europe a few years back, I was obsessed about visiting all the ‘must see’ places such as the top Roman ruins near the Colosseum, top paintings in the Louvre - and doing all the right activities like drinking all the ‘right’ coffees, and climbing the right hills. I was a lot better on the second trip mainly because I deferred to what my local-living friends wanted to see, and do, rather than what my Lonely Planet suggested.

When I see, on Tripadvisor, the “Continents I have traveled to” badges in and think, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to get all seven?’ I know I’m missing the point of travel. Not only does TripAdvisor make me feel inadequate in my own travel achievements to date, but it encourages me to travel for bragging rights rather than the innate pleasure.

When Merlin Mann talks about optimizing your in box, he warns that efficiency hacks should fall *just short* of being fun lest they become a timesink in themselves. And Ken Kesey, as pivotal to the counter culture movement as he was, held ‘acid graduation parties’ “ostensibly designed to persuade people to go beyond drugs and achieve a mind-altered state without LSD”. The trick is to be able to gamify an activity, but to drop the game when the job is done: when you’re done with the tool - whether it be a board game or a graph - put it away.