gamification

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards

by Yu-Kai Chou  · 13 Apr 2015  · 420pp  · 130,503 words

within Epic Meaning & Calling Core Drive 1: The Bigger Picture Chapter 6: The Second Core Drive - Development & Accomplishment Development & Accomplishment in Games The First Gamification Site that I was Addicted to “I overpaid for my product. Take that, suckas!” Never make Users Feel Dumb Star of Bethlehem - Guiding Users Forward

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Accomplishment Core Drive 2: The Bigger Picture Chapter 7: The Third Core Drive - Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback The Computer Game that Became a National Sport Gamification Fatigue? Tic-Tac-Draw The General’s Carrot in Education Folding into the Crowd The Elysian Stairs to Health Empowerment and Creativity in the Corporate

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the Real World Left Brain vs. Right Brain Core Drives Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation Slight Semantic Differences with the Self-Determination Theory Motivation Traps in Gamification Campaigns The Problem with Educational Systems Pay to Not Play How Market Settings Reverse Social Settings The Advantages of Extrinsic Motivation Design How to Make

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, as well as ROI-driving business implementations. This book explores the interplay between these disciplines to capture the core principles that contribute to good gamification design. I will be sharing my observations in multiple industries and sectors based on my 12-year journey of passionately and relentlessly pursuing the craft

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Within the book, there will be many everyday scenarios to illustrate the potential of these Core Drives and the flexibility of their applications beyond traditional “gamification” examples. I myself still constantly gain new insights and revelations when I reflect and speculate upon the various possibilities contained in the 8 Core Drives

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that this lonely passion from 2003 would become one of the hottest new industries and buzzwords that people now commonly throw around as the term “Gamification.” Why Gamification? Gamification, or the act of making something game-like, is certainly not something new. Throughout history, humans have tried to make existing tasks more intriguing

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-like” naturally evolved too. Through the advent of the Internet, Big Data, pluggable frameworks, and stronger graphics, our ability to design and implement better gamification experiences has drastically improved to the point where we can now bring sophisticated and subtle game-like experiences into every aspect of our lives. In

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gives managers, marketers, and product designers tools for creating engagement and loyalty in their experiences. Human-Focused Design: The Better Term for Gamification In my own view, gamification is the craft of deriving fun and engaging elements found typically in games and thoughtfully applying them to real-world or productive activities

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the lens of games to understand how to combine different game mechanics and techniques to form desired and joyful experiences for everyone. The Conquests of Gamification Games have the amazing ability to keep people engaged for long periods of time, build meaningful relationships between people, and develop their creative potential.

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an AIDS virus protein problem that had confounded researchers for 15-years. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 70% of major employers are already using gamification to enhance performance and training at their companies. In a similar report, the market research firm Gartner predicted that 70% of Fortune 500 firms

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large communities of players addicted to them. Clearly, there are more to games than “meets the eye.” Unfortunately, a lot of people who work in gamification incorrectly think that applying game mechanics like points, badges, and leaderboards – elements that you can also find in boring and unsuccessful games - will automatically

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pretended to be a normal file to corrupt enemy computers. Learn from the design; don’t copy the shell. The Threat and Opportunities in Gamification Even though gamification has become accepted in the mainstream, poorly designed applications threaten its long-term viability and impact development. I am genuinely afraid that in a

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to design experiences that are fun, engaging, and rewarding. Google Trends search, “social media”, accessed 12/15/2014.↩ Chapter 3: The Octalysis Framework A Gamification Design Framework for Everyone Because of the issues discussed in the last chapter, I spent the past decade working to create a complete framework to

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3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, as well as Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity. Quick Intro to Level II Octalysis and Beyond Ten years of Gamification study and implementations result in a fairly robust framework that can become actionable towards driving better motivation and metrics. As you can see, creating a

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ways based on how they are executed and how different types of players respond to them. The two types of gamification implementations in my own work are “Implicit Gamification” and “Explicit Gamification.” Explicit Gamification involves strategies that utilize applications that are obviously game-like. Users acknowledge they are playing a game, and generally need

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. We will examine McDonald’s Monopoly game in more detail in Chapter 9 regarding Game Technique #16: Collection Sets. Other interesting examples of Explicit Gamification include the famous serious game FoldIt that facilitated AIDS research10, as well as AutoDesk’s Undiscovered Territory11, a game created for selling their very expensive

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four fields that I consistently see innovating time and time again, indicating a tremendous amount of application and growth in these sectors: Product Gamification Workplace Gamification Marketing Gamification Lifestyle Gamification Product Gamification Product Gamification is about making a product, online or offline, more engaging, fun, and inspirational through game design. Most companies struggle to create products

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product so exciting that customers become obsessed with using your product and are compelled to share how exciting their experience is with their friends. Workplace Gamification Workplace Gamification is the craft of creating environments and systems that inspire and motivate employees towards their work. More often than not, employees show up to

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up the correct motivations systems as early as possible to avoid the devastation of having a surplus in labor but a shortage in talent. Marketing Gamification Marketing Gamification is the art of creating holistic marketing campaigns that engage users in fun and unique experience designed for a product, service, platform, or brand

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, but should be an entire ecosystem where both the marketer and customer are able to experience fun and feel continuously engaged through multiple interactions. Marketing Gamification utilizes the platforms and vehicles described above as well as others: SEO, Social Media, Blogging, Email Marketing, online/offline competitions, viral vehicle strategies, and

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reward schedules to continuously engage users throughout an engaging and gamified experience. Lifestyle Gamification I mentioned in Chapter 1 that my life completely changed when I was struck by an epiphany that I should treat everything like a game

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generalized demographics and non-actionable reports, instead of creating a unique experience for each user in real-time24. Lifestyle Gamification branches into a few sectors such as Career Gamification, Health Gamification, Productivity Gamification, and Education Gamification. It can be utilized to gamify big picture activities such as accomplishing your life goals, or very tactical activities

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such as using a dice to determine how you should reward yourself (which is derived from Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity). Since Lifestyle Gamification fundamentally changed my life, I am extremely passionate about how it can help people achieve their dreams through 1. Finding their game, 2. Analyzing their

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/2011.↩ BusinessDictionary entry: “advergames”. Accessed 12/13/2014.↩ Mcgonigal, Jane. Slideshare: “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges: How to re-invent reality without gamification”, posted 2/17/2011.↩ Deterding, Sebastian. “The Lens of Intrinsic Skill Atoms: A Method for Gameful Design”, Game Design, College of Arts, Media, and Design

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Physical Activity by Almost 60%”. 09/06/2012.↩ Groden, Claire. Times. “TOMS Hits 10 Million Mark on Donated Shoes”. 06/26/2013.↩ Burbano, Jaime. Gamificators Blog. “Gamification for a Better World”. 10/27/2013.↩ Lebo, Lauri. ReligionDispatches.org. University of Southern California.”Atheists and Christians Compete to Give More”. 1/19/2011

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users’ daily complaining rituals too. Of course, though I firmly believe that both Amazon and eBay can drastically improve their metrics even more with better gamification and Human-Focused Design, both companies are incredibly and intimidatingly successful. With billions of dollars in revenue, each company powerfully wields different Core Drives

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epic vision that users can believe in, nor withholding certain parts of the experience to create emotional scarcity. The focus is quite different. In reality, Gamification is a combination of Game Design, Game Dynamics, Motivational Psychology, Behavioral Economics, UX/UI, Neurobiology, Technology Platforms, and Business Systems that drive an ROI.

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Why Jcpenney’s Strategy Backfired”. 5/29/2012.↩ Dan Ariely. Predictably Irrational. p2. Harper International. New York, NY. 2008.↩ Kevin Werbach. University of Pennsylvania. Coursera Gamification Course. 2012.↩ Progress Wars Website: progresswars.com↩ John D. Sutter. CNN. “Ashton Kutcher challenges CNN to Twitter popularity contest”. 04/15/2009.↩ CaptainUp Website: captainup

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p122. O’Reilly Media. Sebastopol, CA. 10/2013. ↩ Chapter 8: The Fourth Core Drive - Ownership & Possession Ownership & Possession is the fourth Core Drive in Octalysis Gamification. It represents the motivation that is driven by our feelings of owning something, and consequently the desire to improve, protect, and obtain more of it

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Grid”. 05/19/2014. ↩ Chapter 9: The Fifth Core Drive - Social Influence & Relatedness Social Influence and Relatedness is the fifth core drive within Octalysis Gamification and involves activities inspired by what other people think, do, or say. This Core Drive is the engine behind many themes such as mentorship, competition

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employees in it. Core Drive 5: The Bigger Picture Social Influence & Relatedness is one of the best studied and practiced Right Brain Core Drives in gamification, with Development & Accomplishment being the well-studied counterpart Left Brain Core Drive. Most people recognize spending time with friends as an intrinsically fun activity.

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. P16. Simon & Schuster. New York, NY. 2010.↩ Stephanie Simon. The Wall Street Journal.”The Secret to Turning Consumers Green”. 10/18/2010.↩ Mario Herger. Enterprise Gamification. P195. EGC Media. San Bernardino, CA. 07/24/2014. ↩ Tom Lyons. Strauss, Factor, Laing & Lyons. “What Wins Basketball Games Review of ‘Basketball on Paper:

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out what ideas other people have. Share your Knowledge! Beyond sharing my own research and interests, I regularly have guest bloggers posting their research on gamification, motivational psychology, behavioral design and much more on my blog YukaiChou.com17. If you have interesting knowledge to share through your own experiences and

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04/30/2014.↩ My Blog: YukaiChou.com↩ Chapter 11: The Seventh Core Drive - Unpredictability & Curiosity Unpredictability & Curiosity is the seventh Core Drive in the Octalysis Gamification Framework and is the main force behind our infatuation with experiences that are uncertain and involve chance. As mentioned in earlier chapters, our intellectual consciousness

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reward structures from small businesses and public transportation everywhere, one of the things I have been most impressed with is how the Taiwanese government uses gamification (specifically Rolling Rewards) to ensure tax compliance from small businesses. Tax evasion is very common in many countries, where businesses prefer to take cash

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Intrinsic Motivation focuses on the process. Slight Semantic Differences with the Self-Determination Theory Intrinsic Motivation versus Extrinsic Motivation is a popular topic within the gamification space and was heavily popularized by Daniel Pink’s book Drive3. The book explores how instead of being motivated by money (Core Drive 4:

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focused. Core Drive 2 focuses on progress and achievements, and as a result is based on Extrinsic Motivation in my framework. Motivation Traps in Gamification Campaigns Most gamification campaigns typically employ loyalty programs, badges, progress bars, and prize rewards, which focus on Left Brain Core Drives. This is because it is much

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been researched and written about individually (including the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation), I believe my work on White Hat versus Black Hat Gamification theory is fairly original and provides a unique design perspective. I began developing the White/Black Hat concepts while I was studying the Endgame Phase

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how Woot.com became an extremely successful eCommerce site based on two Core Drives: Scarcity & Impatience, as well as Unpredictability & Curiosity. Because Black Hat gamification creates urgency, when you need someone to take immediate action or a transaction, Black Hat techniques often become the most effective solutions. This dynamic also

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/2015.↩ Wikipedia Entry, “List of cognitive biases”: http://www.yukaichou.com/cognitivebias. Accessed 02/17/2015.↩ Yu-kai Chou. YukaiChou.com. “The Strategy Dashboard for Gamification Design”: http://www.yukaichou.com/strategydashboard. 07/14/2014.↩ Jane McGonigal. Reality is Broken. Penguin Group. New York, NY. 2011.↩ Ibid. P69.↩ Jane McGonigal.

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to attract, and premium subscription plans to setup. The goal for the Premium Subscription plan is for me to further enhance my research efforts on gamification design, behavioral economics, motivational psychology and more, while still being able to support my team of awesome consultants, programmers, writers, and operational folks. Right

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book purchases Workshop orders Increase consulting leads via the website Increase Email subscriptions Increase Social shares Increase video views for TEDx or Beginners Guide to Gamification Increase page views for the Octalysis Framework Increase overall views on my website Notice that this list is based on quantifiable metrics for what creates

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design to improve their organizations Educators, nonprofits, and governments that want to use the knowledge to create a social impact Individuals who are passionate about gamification, games, or self-improvement In Level III Octalysis, we would run separate Octalysis Charts to understand which Core Drives motivate each player type more,

Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps

by Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham  · 14 Aug 2011  · 145pp  · 40,897 words

-9938 or corporate@oreilly.com. Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Gamification by Design, the image of rhesus monkeys, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers

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that games can help you live longer by staving off dementia and improving general health. Therefore, seeing business and product designers embrace the concept of gamification should come as no surprise. As our society becomes more and more game-obsessed, much of the conventional wisdom about how to design products

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audiences, we need to consider reward structures, positive reinforcement, and subtle feedback loops alongside mechanics like points, badges, levels, challenges, and leaderboards. When done well, gamification helps align our interests with the intrinsic motivations of our players, amplified with the mechanics and rewards that make them come in, bring friends, and

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keep coming back. Only by carefully unpacking consumer emotions and desires can we design something that really sticks—and only through the power of gamification can we make that experience predictable, repeatable, and financially rewarding. We wrote this book to help demystify some of the core concepts of game

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on countless (valiant) real-world customers to arrive at the set of demonstrable, high-impact ideas presented in this book. When used together with the Gamification Master Class (also available from O’Reilly, at http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920017622) and the supplemental videos, exercises, challenges, and resources available at http://

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of it as creating 3D virtual worlds that drive behavioral change or provide a method for training users in complex systems. They are all correct. Gamification brings together all the disparate threads that have been advanced in games for nongaming contexts. In this way, we unite concepts such as serious

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markets ensure loyalty and engagement among their fickle and price-conscious users? One such marketplace, DevHub (www.devhub.com), thinks it’s found the answer: gamification. By deploying some of the basic tenets of the discipline—and with the judicious use of game mechanics such as points, badges, levels, challenges,

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been altered—for the better. Understanding our potential to experience the same things in two ways is the first step to understanding the power of gamification. Engagement The term “engagement,” in a business sense, indicates the connection between a consumer and a product or service. Unsurprisingly, the term is also

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take your business from everyday to gamified. We’re going to make something absolutely irresistible. Put on your apron, and hold on to your toque. Gamification is about to change everything. Chapter 1. Foundations As we mentioned in the Introduction, game mechanics cannot solve fundamental business problems. It will not rebuild

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infrastructure, nor will it heal disastrous customer service. And unless your actual business purpose is making games, it is unlikely that the result of gamification will give your product the full viral power of Zynga’s Facebook games, such as FarmVille and CityVille. As you arrive at the concept of

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know how to quantify the six minutes they got to meet and chat with Lady Gaga backstage after winning a call-in contest. But the gamification designer understands these values, and the price is almost always cheaper—and the reward stickier—than giving away free stuff. The House Always Wins

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start giving someone a reward, you have to keep her in that reward loop forever. This consideration informs the total cost of ownership question for gamification and should be part of your calculations (though you need not budget for it immediately). Exercise: How Competitive Are You? Are you a hyper

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and incentives/rewards, we came across a series of old beliefs, many of which were broadly held, that question some of the core tenets of gamification. Here are some of those beliefs, as well as thoughts on placing them in context. Old belief #1 Intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic rewards

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when we make the motivation extrinsic, we shift that locus of responsibility from hoping it happens to a structure and process for making it happen. Gamification works better if and when we can align intrinsic motivations and extrinsic rewards, and we should strive to achieve that wherever possible. But our

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game design, while focusing on the core elements that will produce the greatest impact for our players. For example, we generally ignore narrative structure in gamification because we are building “nonfiction” experiences. That is, the arc of your gamified system is based on your player’s and your brand’s

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key elements of the discipline here to focus on the most important. Our view of game design is narrow, but it is highly optimized for gamification. MDA Framework One of the most frequently leveraged frameworks of game design is referred to as MDA—which stands for: Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics The

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example, players may earn some points for the quality of their photos and other points for the quality of comments (although this is rare in gamification, depending on the circumstances, it might be worthwhile to keep them separate). Karma points Karma points are a unique system that rarely appear in

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a very compelling system—it’s more like a throwaway or afterthought. HuffPo has likely seen small improvements with minimal effort, but as with most gamification, there is much more that could be done. GetGlue (http://getglue.com), on the other hand, badges players for promoting media products socially. Therefore,

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user positively Remove opportunities to fail Learn something about the players Without a doubt, this is one of the most challenging and complex aspects of gamification to get right. Accomplishing all four objectives in the first few minutes may be nearly impossible in your environment, but we highly encourage you

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well-balanced XP system are the most important early players in the game, potentially becoming early evangelists. Further, the more gamified your market, the more gamification you will need in your system. If you are launching an airline, you probably need to employ a fairly evolved reward system from day one

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finishing their stint at Google, Crowley and Selvadurai launched a new version of Dodgeball, with game mechanics, on the iPhone. They called the app Foursquare. Gamification unpacked something for Foursquare that had been missing previously. The problem, it seemed, was that it wasn’t enough to have people say, “I’

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be described when appropriate. Feedback and Reinforcement One of the most straightforward and important game mechanics, and one that is increasingly a cornerstone of the gamification movement, is feedback. Broadly defined, feedback is returning information to players and informing them of where they are at the present time, ideally against

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ways that tend to attract more attention than individual activities. The site Youare.tv offers a good example of newer-style game shows that leverage gamification. Kudos systems These are generally used to provide positive reinforcement in the form of karma points or stars given from one player to another.

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resulting in greater engagement. Putting these mechanics together in sophisticated systems—which socializers, explorers, achievers, and killers can master—is the best way to advance gamification for your product, service, or brand. In each case, the mechanics that map to the specific motivational states and drives will differ. Obviously, the aesthetic

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engage players more deeply. Game and user experience designers have been implementing these techniques for decades to create addictive games and engaging player experiences. However, gamification as a complete concept—actively relying on game mechanics to engage players and solve problems—is still in its infancy. It can be challenging to

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sophisticated game mechanics to encourage runners—both casual and hardcore—to compete and improve their fitness program. It’s a wonderful example of what great gamification can do to motivate players. An Application for Runners While Nike’s goal was to generate brand loyalty and ultimately sell more sporting equipment, clearly

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Yahoo!’s millions of daily active players. Yahoo! Gamifies Questions Judging by traffic and engagement, Yahoo! Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com) is an unqualified gamification success story. There’s just one problem: it’s not always the best place to find good answers (or good questions). Questions like “How is

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proves that a well-implemented game design can help motivate people to make changes in their real lives. Conclusion In the preceding chapters, we discussed gamification, player motivations, game mechanics, and techniques. In this chapter, we looked closely at how companies have successfully used game mechanics and game-thinking to

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waiting for you to guide them up the mountain. It’s time to be their Sherpa. Check out more case studies and get insights from gamification experts at GamificationU.com. Chapter 7. Tutorial: Coding Basic Game Mechanics Predating even the foundations of the Internet, forum software has been a basic

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your roadmap (if not already implemented). Most forums make use of player status to distinguish between junior and senior members, but a more explicit gamification strategy can help make standard forums more fun. As we’ve seen in previous chapters, creating a truly great gamified experience involves thinking very closely

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out the topic creator’s posts. When that count equals 10, the topic creator receives the badge. Now, we have implemented our entire first-pass gamification makeover design. Players get points, move up to higher levels, and earn badges for extraordinary achievements. Taken together, these systems should motivate players to work

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focus their attention on trying to earn more badges, points, and higher levels. Summary In this chapter, we’ve covered the basics for applying simple gamification in a forums site. You’ve seen examples of how to implement the core backend elements of game mechanics: tracking scores, measuring levels, and

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a basic game layer, coding out all the pieces by hand. Another approach, which can help you get started more quickly, is to use a gamification platform like Badgeville. Badgeville (http://badgeville.com) is a white label social-rewards and analytics platform, and is sponsoring this chapter. Along with a

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is important because visitors and members have unconsciously and consciously trained themselves to ignore information that isn’t interesting or relevant to them. A better gamification platform will allow you to learn about your users and then customize their online experience based on their actions and interests. The necessity of real

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methods described above, you can provide your players with this experience in just a matter of days or weeks. Individuals and companies who understand gamification and build it into their platforms will have a significant advantage in the coming battle for user engagement. Index A note on the digital index

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Points for Key Activities adding signup bonus points, Awarding Points for Key Activities admin (administrative) positions, Policing Your System aesthetics, MDA Framework agile versus gamification design, Agile and Gamification Design air traffic control game, The Fun Quotient, The infinite leaderboard airlines, loyalty programs, The Evolution of Loyalty Altered Beast forums application, Planning

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Getting Stats from the Badgeville API, Getting Stats from the Badgeville API, Get statistics, The Game’s Just Beginning Badgeville platform, Tutorial: Using an Instant Gamification Platform reward program, Enabling social-sharing, Get statistics, Analyzing Sponsored Promotion Success, Getting Stats from the Badgeville API, Getting Stats from the Badgeville API, Get

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7: Creating a User Profile before_create callback, Awarding a sign-up bonus behaviors, desired, defining, Defining Desired Behaviors beliefs (old), questioning core tenets of gamification, Old Beliefs, Old belief #1 intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, Old belief #1 Berne, Eric, Why People Play Black cards, American Express, Enduring leveling systems

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eliciting with customization, Customization Is Commitment competitiveness, Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Motivation, Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Motivation, Old Beliefs measuring with test, Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Motivation questioning gamification, Old Beliefs research on, Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Motivation completing action in limited amount of time, 10. Being the Hero complexity, Progression of difficulty, Game Mechanics

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User Model to Scores and Levels Exit Strategy (app), 1. Pattern Recognition experience of players, guiding, Guiding Player Experience experience points (XP) systems, Agile and Gamification Design, Yahoo! Gamifies Questions, Quora Gamifies Answers, Quora Gamifies Answers Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Gamifies Questions, Quora Gamifies Answers, Quora Gamifies Answers experts, Expert Players

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Is Job #1, Fun Is Job #1 fun in, Fun Is Job #1 research on learning from games, Fun Is Job #1 legal issues in gamification, Redeemable points, Policing Your System levels, Status, Levels, Level Design, Progression of difficulty, Progression of difficulty, Enduring leveling systems, Enduring leveling systems, Example: Using

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Nurturing, Growing team-based challenges, 4. Organizing and Creating Order, 8. Leading Others terms of service, Policing Your System testing loops in games, Agile and Gamification Design The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, Choosing the Right Fun Things The Huffington Post, Badge Examples: The Good, the Bad, and

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, Player Types write_attribute method, Awarding a login bonus writing your canonical player’s story, Why People Play X XP (experience points) systems, Agile and Gamification Design, Yahoo! Gamifies Questions Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Gamifies Questions Y Yahoo! Answers, Gamify Questions—or Answers, Quora Gamifies Answers, Yahoo! Gamifies Questions, Yahoo! Gamifies

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Foundations, The Evolution of Loyalty About the Authors Gabe Zichermann is an author, public speaker, serial entrepreneur, and the foremost expert on the subject of gamification. His book, Game-Based Marketing (Wiley, 4/2010) has achieved critical and industry acclaim for its detailed look at innovators who blend the power of

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a breakthrough mobile email/text application. Christopher has deep expertise with agile development processes and distributed team management. Colophon The animal on the cover of Gamification by Design is the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta), a member of the macaque family. These animals are highly social, living in groups of 20 to

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon  · 14 Sep 2022  · 371pp  · 107,141 words

Basic Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021059463 | ISBN 9781541600171 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541600195 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Social control. | Social engineering. | Control (Psychology) | Gamification. Classification: LCC HM661 .H66 2022 | DDC 303.3/3—dc23/eng/20220228 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059463 ISBNs: 9781541600171 (hardcover), 9781541600195

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logic of constant improvement to its inevitable conclusion, with millions of workers coerced into playing games that measure their every action. Chapter Three shows how gamification has amplified the exhausting, technologically driven micromanagement of taxi and truck drivers, programmers, warehouse workers, and call centre agents that began with Taylorism over

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systems that aim to control citizens’ behaviour through rewards and punishments. Our fascination with China, however, risks distracting attention from problems closer to home. With gamification endemic in electioneering, wargames, propaganda, schools, and universities in the US and UK, even the richest democracies have proven vulnerable to its temptations. It’

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were designed to discipline children and introduce them to a disciplinary society, maintained through constant surveillance from cradle to grave. He would likely view gamification as yet another link in that disciplinary chain, powered by the surveillance capabilities of new technologies like the internet and smartphones. On the other

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and aesthetics to it, such as points, badges, levels, and so on. That said, I will apply modifiers to the term like “generic” gamification and “coercive” gamification to better distinguish between different types. When I was growing up in 1980s and ’90s Britain, game-like systems were everywhere. In the Cub

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we continue to build up our physical and digital infrastructure with smartwatches, surveillance cameras, and persistent social network identities, it becomes easier to layer gamification on top of the many types of data that infrastructure collects, not least the health and behavioural data that birthed the “quantified self” movement

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into the second reason: by limiting itself to seemingly impartial and “clean” digital data like GPS traces and structured data submitted through forms, generic gamification allows for automatic and instant judgements. Unlike the swimming proficiency badges of my youth, which were only awarded when a human swim instructor judged that

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influence sometimes called “pop behaviourism.” According to this understanding, in which reinforcing desirable behaviour with rewards unerringly results in more of the desirable behaviour, generic gamification should work. Indeed, according to these premises, it’s the only intervention that could work. And if it works, why wouldn’t you put

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of the points we earn in Google Maps, or awards we give drivers in Uber, or the productivity scores doled out by Microsoft. Generic gamification is the gamification that we’re most likely to encounter in our lives, delivered by Fitbit, Uber, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Duolingo, Strava, and countless other huge

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However, many researchers are also oddly fixated on studying the effectiveness of points, leaderboards, badges, and challenges that are foisted upon users of generic gamification, overlooking the storytelling and mechanics that underpin massively popular games like The Last of Us and Dance Dance Revolution. It is certainly easier to study

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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

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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

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reduce rampant exaggerations and misleading claims, recognising that tired and busy consumers aren’t going to read research papers into the benefits and drawbacks of gamification—though if you’re so inclined, you should focus on systematic reviews and meta-analyses rather than individual studies, and studies by independent researchers

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seeks to eliminate supervisors’ jobs.56 But many industries don’t need to install security cameras on the shop floor to implement Digital Taylorism and gamification, because they’re already partly or wholly digital. Hundreds of thousands of businesses coordinate their entire operations on sprawling “enterprise resource planning” and “customer

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collectively known as “fleet telematics,” trucking’s own version of Digital Taylorism that constantly monitors workers, even when they’re not working. Fleet telematics enables gamification. Sam Madden, a cofounder of Cambridge Mobile Telematics, says his company helps fleet owners “leverage the real-time data” to gamify safe driving, so

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Service Partner” companies that work with Amazon.79 By doing so, they could drive more recklessly to hit their quotas. 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

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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

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literally thousands of Zombies, Run! customer emails via our API-enabled online support system, Zendesk. Zendesk doesn’t have any features labelled explicitly as gamification, although a panoply of leaderboards make it impossible to miss which agents have answered the most tickets and garnered the highest “customer satisfaction” ratings.89

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areas put together. It can damage workers’ health, dissolve their financial security, and drain the agency and satisfaction from their livelihoods. And removing workplace gamification can improve lives. For years, GitHub, a code-hosting website with seventy-three million programmers, included gamified daily activity streak counters on user profiles.108

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with generic points and badges. It succeeds when it transforms activities for the smallest scale—even for two budding reporters covering an alien invasion. BEYOND GAMIFICATION It’s hard to think of an industry more damaged by COVID-19 than conferences. Unsafe, unnecessary, unreachable, and uninsurable, conferences were among the

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park, especially with its harder-edged leaderboards and gating. Still, it will probably accomplish its main goal: increased visitor engagement and return visits. The gamification of video games can make them more fun, but more often than not, it introduces unwelcome grind and compulsive behaviour. The games industry posts record

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democracies have their own scoring systems, whether implemented directly by the government or by companies operating privatised services like healthcare. When employed by governments, gamification is a fundamentally conservative technic, used to uphold existing systems and relations rather than transform them. It’s used for propaganda to support the army

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data, it’s impossible to know, though the entire project of the social credit system ultimately relies on the same dubious behaviourist principles as generic gamification. Its ambition also flies in the face of Confucian principles. Philip Ivanhoe, professor of philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea, writes: Under the

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responsive to their citizens’ views beyond periodic elections, gamified civic engagement has largely been limited to low-stakes planning. Democracies that have experimented with gamification on a wide scale are few and far between, with Taiwan standing out for its receipt lottery, which rewards citizens for patronising businesses that report

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sales taxes, and its vTaiwan online deliberation platform, gamified to encourage arriving at consensus rather than difference.84 Civic gamification can just as easily divide as it unites. The Juntos Santiago program (Together Santiago), funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge in 2016, was promoted

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stability. The lottery is another of America’s promises for economic mobility that it has no intention of keeping.”89 EDUCATION Education is one of gamification’s prototypical examples, dating back centuries through points, rewards, leaderboards, board games, and video games. Gamified pedagogical tools range from the mediocre (Carmen Sandiego)

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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. There’s

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to win the consumer AR market with half-baked hardware, Microsoft and Google have focused their ambitions on the government and workplace.4 Microsoft’s gamification of office and productivity software will undoubtedly become part of its wide-ranging AR plans, spanning virtual meetings and collaborative workspaces. The handheld computers

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of qualities as unquantifiable toward a system of measurement, similar to the ongoing process of monetisation that occurred around the same time.16 Likewise, gamification is the product of the hyperquantification of personal worth, driven by ideas of the quantified self and our obsession with metrics. Though indulgences were

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practice many people claimed indulgences repeatedly and mechanistically.33 Indulgences weren’t meant to be fun, either, and their interactivity was rather lacking compared to gamification. That said, virtual pilgrimages strongly resemble games. A print by Urs Graf, a Swiss artist, looks like a theme park map depicting a miniature

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with real horse-hair tails, human figures with cast faces painted for maximum verisimilitude, and painted backdrops.”34 THE FALL OF INDULGENCES—AND OF GAMIFICATION? The modern view of indulgences as patent nonsense designed to fleece uneducated rubes betrays our own intellectual snobbery, not only because highly educated people

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the efficacy of its successes can’t be extrapolated toward or credited against its ineffective failures and increasingly harmful experiments. Not all of the gamification implemented by unethical companies and authoritarian governments succeeds in manipulating people’s behaviour, but the huge energy exerted in the attempt should give us pause

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combination of exerting existing antitrust laws, increasing minimum wages, improving the social safety net, strengthening unions, and introducing strict workplace regulation. DESIGNING ETHICAL GAMIFICATION Noncoercive gamification would seem to be free of the power imbalances of many workplaces. When someone freely chooses to play a brain training game or enroll in

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in the balance. The result? Millions of workers, from investment bankers to Uber drivers, are seeing their working conditions degraded through gamified surveillance technology. Gamification has helped social media amplify information and misinformation, shaking markets and shaping domestic terror attacks. And governments themselves are directly gamifying their citizens’ lives through

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Start, especially Alex Macmillan, Matt Wieteska, and Steven Veltema, kept me grounded and were instrumental in building many of the most worthwhile examples of gamification ever made, without which I wouldn’t possess the practical understanding I have now. My conversations with game designers including Holly Gramazio, Tassos Stevens,

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and Meghna Jayanth also shed light on the wider implications of gamification. The early interest that writers Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen showed in my essay on the similarities between alternate reality games and QAnon boosted

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/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php?print=1. 13. Kohn, Punished by Rewards. 14. Bogost, “Persuasive Games: Exploitationware.” 15. Vanessa Wan Sze Cheng, “Recommendations for Implementing Gamification for Mental Health and Wellbeing,” Frontiers in Psychology 11, (December 2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586379. 16. “Groundbreaking New Study Says Time

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-workplace.html; “Cogito,” Crunchbase, accessed November 26, 2021, www.crunchbase.com/organization/cogito-corp. 43. “US20190385632—Method and Apparatus for Speech Behavior Visualization and Gamification,” WIPO IP Portal, World Intellectual Property Organization, December 19, 2019, https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf;jsessionid=63E90861E21501F1698669D21C8D7666.wapp2nB?docId=US279624750&tab=PCTDESCRIPTION

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56. Sarah O’Connor, “When Your Boss Is an Algorithm,” Financial Times, September 7, 2016, www.ft.com/content/88fdc58e-754f-11e6-b60a-de4532d5ea35. 57. “Gamification,” Gamification Service for the Neo Environment, SAP Help Portal, SAP, accessed November 26, 2021, https://help.sap.com/viewer/850b6386f85d49699cfa908a5bc99d99/Cloud/en-US/332a9fb362924b6bba6373f459a77af6.html

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ford-motor-co. 108. “Where the World Builds Software,” GitHub, accessed January 9, 2022, https://github.com/about. 109. Lukas Moldon et al., “How Gamification Affects Software Developers: Cautionary Evidence from a Natural Experiment on GitHub,” ICSE 2021 Conference Proceedings 1, (2021): 549–561, https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109

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If You Crossed Animal Crossing with Clubhouse,” TechCrunch, May 18, 2021, https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/18/skittish-andy-baio-virtual-events. CHAPTER FIVE: THE GAMIFICATION OF GAMES 1. Jeremy Dunham, “Rocket League Out Today, Free for PS Plus Members,” PlayStation.Blog, PlayStation, Sony Interactive Entertainment, July 7, 2015,

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pdf. 97. “Community Reviews for ClassDojo,” Common Sense Education, accessed November 28, 2021, www.commonsense.org/education/website/classdojo/teacher-reviews. 98. Azucena Barahona Mora, “Gamification for Classroom Management: An Implementation Using ClassDojo,” Sustainability 12, no. 22 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3390/su12229371. 99. “Carol Dweck,” Stanford Profiles, Stanford

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Bloomberg, July 8, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-08/someone-is-going-to-drill-the-oil. 60. “Secretary Galvin Charges Robinhood over Gamification and Options Trading,” Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, December 16, 2020, www.sec.state.ma.us/sct/current/sctrobinhood/robinhoodidx.htm. 61. “Virtual

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

by Adam L. Alter  · 15 Feb 2017  · 331pp  · 96,989 words

8. Cliffhangers 9. Social Interaction PART 3 THE FUTURE OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION (AND SOME SOLUTIONS) 10. Nipping Addictions at Birth 11. Habits and Architecture 12. Gamification Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply At an Apple event in January 2010, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad: What

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isn’t just a tool for doing less of the wrong things; it’s also a tool for doing more of the right things. Enter gamification. 12. Gamification In late 2009, Swedish ad agency DDB Stockholm launched an online campaign for Volkswagen. Volkswagen was releasing a new eco-friendly car that was

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giving, but under the hood it’s driven by a gaming engine. — What DDB did for Volkswagen and Breen did for FreeRice is known as gamification: taking a non-game experience and turning it into a game. A computer programmer named Nick Pelling coined the term in 2002. Pelling realized that

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, but he struggled to commercialize the concept, which lay dormant until Google and several prominent venture capitalists revived it in 2010. The central theme of gamification is that the experience itself should be its own reward. Even if you aren’t motivated to donate to a food charity, or to learn

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spend your time playing FreeRice. Over time, despite yourself, you’ll find that you are learning and donating rice. Gamification researchers Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter examined over one hundred examples of gamification, and identified three common elements: points, badges, and leaderboards. PBL, as the triad is known, first came together in

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airline frequent-flyer programs. United launched the first airline loyalty program in 1972, long before the advent of gamification, and other airlines soon introduced similar programs. With each flight or qualifying purchase, flyers earn points in the form of miles; when they earn enough

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-status members stand in different lines, board the plane first, and sometimes receive special treatment on the airplane—rewards that function as a conspicuous leaderboard. Gamification is a powerful business tool, and harnessed appropriately it also drives happier, healthier, and wiser behavior. That philosophy drove Richard Talens and Brian Wang, who

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private activity log, challenging yourself to run farther and lift more without having to share your progress with anyone else. Variety is also a critical gamification ingredient, and Fitocracy injects variety by allowing you to adopt quests and challenges that draw on your favorite exercises. Wang and Talens have collected dozens

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view where children are concerned, so a chocolate cake is all temptation and no downside. But children love games as much as adults do, so gamification endows children with a dose of self-control. Take the case of dental hygiene. Kids have better things to do than brushing their teeth, particularly

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2009, Adam Bosworth, the former head of Google Health, launched a health app called Keas. At first, Keas was big on data and small on gamification. Bosworth designed the app to deliver mountains of feedback tailored to each user. Users completed quizzes and entered their workouts and meals, and Keas explained

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founders decided that the best way to inject fun was to make the learning experience one big game. Learning, it turns out, is ripe for gamification. Each new module of information can be structured like a game that begins at zero knowledge and ends at perfect comprehension. Q2L uses the same

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when they meet the professor—as far as they’re concerned, they’re just completing another quest. — From Andy Phelps’ quest to Q2L’s missions, gamification is designed to raise productivity where people would prefer to be lazy. In many contexts, laziness is the human default. Social psychologists Susan Fiske and

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, and praise. As Nick Pelling explained when he coined the term, you’ll know you’re looking at gamification when the fun of playing the game becomes the reward. In some contexts, gamification can be dangerous. Exercise addicts tend to focus on the game of working out every day, or racking up

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black shirt.” Raising Men’s success has spawned new chapters across the country, a growing online following, and tens of thousands of dollars in funding. Gamification doesn’t help much when an experience is already fun; it does its best work when the experience is boring. On-the-job training is

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vaccine,” the researchers explained. Although the video had traumatized them in the short-term, Tetris had prevented it from traumatizing them in the long-term. — Gamification is widely celebrated, but it also has detractors. In 2013, a large team of researchers published a paper on games in Nature, one of the

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advertising” of its software. It was possible that Lumos’ games warded off cognitive decline, but the evidence was scant, and Lumos had overclaimed. Even if gamification works, some critics believe it should be abandoned. Ian Bogost, a game designer at Georgia Tech, spearheads this movement. In 2011, he delivered a talk

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at a gamification symposium at Wharton. He titled his talk “Gamification Is Bullshit.” Bogost suggested that gamification “was invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is video games and to

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domesticate it.” Bogost criticized gamification because it undermined the “gamer’s” well-being. At best, it was indifferent to his well-being, pushing an agenda that he had little choice

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but to pursue. Such is the power of game design: a well-designed game fuels behavioral addiction. Bogost demonstrated the power of gamification with a social media game called Cow Clicker. He designed Cow Clicker to mimic similar games, like FarmVille, which had dominated Facebook for many months

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’s objective was simple: click your cow during critical periods and you’ll earn virtual currency known as mooney. Cow Clicker was supposed to satirize gamification, but it was a smash hit. Tens of thousands of users downloaded the game, and instead of playing once or twice, they played for days

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a game or not. He’ll learn the purpose of eating soon enough. But just as he replaced eating’s true motive with fun, so gamification trivializes other experiences. The piano stairs at Odenplan are a lot of fun, but they don’t actually promote healthy behavior in the long run

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piano stairs are charming, but they’re unlikely to change how people approach exercise tomorrow, next week, or next year. In fact, the fun in gamification may crowd out important motives by changing how people see the experience entirely. In the late 1990s, economists Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini tried to

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up on time—was crowded out by the extrinsic motive to show up late in exchange for a fair price. The same is true of gamification: people think about the experience differently as soon as it adopts the hallmarks of fun. Now exercising isn’t about being healthy; it’s about

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having fun. And as soon as the fun ends, so will the exercise. — Gamification is a powerful tool, and like all powerful tools it brings mixed blessings. On the one hand, it infuses mundane or unpleasant experiences with a

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pain, schoolkids relief from boredom, and gamers an excuse to donate to the needy. By merely raising the number of good outcomes in the world, gamification has value. It’s a worthwhile alternative to traditional medical care, education, and charitable giving because, in many respects, those approaches are tone-deaf to

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the drivers of human motivation. But Ian Bogost was also wise to illuminate the dangers of gamification. Games like FarmVille and Kim Kardashian’s Hollywood are designed to exploit human motivation for financial gain. They pit the wielder of

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gamification in opposition to the gamer, who becomes ensnared in the game’s irresistible net. But, as I mentioned early in this book, tech is not

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inherently good or bad. The same is true of gamification. Stripped of its faddish popularity and buzzwordy name, the heart of gamification is just an effective way to design experiences. Games just happen to do an excellent job of relieving pain, replacing

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TV Show That Gets You Hooked,” The Verge, September 23, 2015, www.theverge.com/2015/9/23/9381509/netflix-hooked-tv-episode-analysis. CHAPTER 12: GAMIFICATION Volkswagen was releasing: Website for DDB’s Fun Theory campaign: www.thefuntheory.com; Cannes Awards announcement: www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ddbs-fun-theory-for

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Kelemen, “Net Game Boosts Vocabulary, Fights Hunger,” NPR, December 17, 2007, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17307572. What DDB did: Background on gamification and examples: Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business (Philadelphia, PA: Wharton Digital Press, 2012), 168–72

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: Nick Pelling, “The (Short) Prehistory of ‘Gamificiation’ . . . ,” Funding Startups (& other impossibilities), Nanodome, April 9, 2011, nanodome.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/the-short-prehistory-of-gamification/; Dave McGinn, “Can a Couple of Reformed Gamers Make You Addicted to Exercise?” Globe and Mail, published November 13, 2011, last updated September 6, 2012

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, 2014, longevity3.stanford.edu/blog/2014/10/15/the-consensus-on-the-brain-training-industry-from-the-scientific-community; a classic paper that explains why gamification may rob people of the intrinsic drive to behave in ways that benefit them: Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, “A Fine Is a Price,” Journal

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, 9 environment and circumstance, role of, 4, 46–67 escalation and, 167–90 exercise and, 18–19 feedback and, 121–46 future of, 317–20 gamification and, 293–316 goal-setting and, 5–6, 93–120 habits and, 268–73 infants, visual attention in, 19–20 magnitude of problem of, 6

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), 206 Davies, Lynn, 99–100 DDB Stockholm, 293–95 Dement, William, 19 Demetricator, 285–86 Demos, Moira, 199 Denby, David, 241 dental hygiene for children, gamification of, 300 destructiveness, and addiction, 76–78 Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Behavior (DANVA2), 238–40 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 80, 254

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, 121–22 early adulthood, as highest risk period for addiction, 74–75 Earth, Wind & Fire, 194 ease, effect of replacing challenges with, 167–69 education, gamification of, 302–5 Edwards, Griffin, 161 email, 4, 23, 109–11 frequency of checking office, and disruptive effect of, 109–10 study preventing workers from

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Game Show Network, 163 game shows, TV barriers to entry, lack of, 163 Larson’s game show success and addiction to goal-setting, 100–106 gamification, 293–316 cognitive decline, effect of multitasking games on, 312–13 criticisms of, 312–15 DDB Stockholm’s Fun Theory ad campaign and, 293–95

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HappyBidDay.com, 152 hardship, 168–69 hardship inoculation, 241–42 harmonious passions, 21, 22 Harris, Tristan, 3 Harvest Moon (game), 164 HBO, 199 health apps, gamification of, 300–302 Health Lab, 302 Heath, Robert, 55 Heldergroen, 277 heroin brain patterns and, 71 harm score for, 48–49 military crackdown on use

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, 188–89, 300 Larson, Michael, 100–106 Larson, Teresa, 106 Lawrence, Andrew, 82–85 laziness, 305–6 leaderboards, 298 League of Legends (game), 228 learning, gamification of, 302–5 Lee, Hae Min, 196, 198, 200, 203 Lego, 174 Lewis, Michael, 119 Liar’s Poker (Lewis), 119 Life-Changing Magic of Tidying

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runners, and goal-setting, 95–97 Marks, Isaac, 76–77 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 275 Matheus, Kayla, 282–83 Medalia, Hilla, 252 medical benefits, of gamification, 309–12 Meier, Darleen, 206–7 melatonin, 69–70 memory, and addiction, 57–60 micro-cliffhangers, 205–8 microfeedback, 136–37 Microsoft, 28–29 Milner

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passion, 21–22 Oculus VR, 140–42 Olds, James, 52–57, 58, 67 O’Neill, Essena, 220–21 online shopping, 4 on-the-job training, gamification of, 308–9 opium, 31 optimal distinctiveness, 226 origami, 173–74 overcoming addictive behaviors, 263–92 behavioral architecture and, 273–92 distraction and, 267–73

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bad routines with good, 268–71 subconscious attraction to ideas railed against and, 264–65 willpower, role of, 265–66 overworking, 186–88 pain, and gamification, 309–10 Pajitnov, Alexey, 170, 171, 172, 173 Parkinson’s disease patients behavioral addictions as side effect of drug treatments for, 82–85 overcoming small

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–19 Polkus, Laura, 216 Pommerening, Katherine, 41–42 Popular Science, 17 pornography, 4, 265–66 post-play, 208, 210–12 post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), gamification as intervention for, 311–12 Powell, Mike, 100 Power of Habit, The (Duhigg), 268 Prelec, Dražen, 188 predatory video games, 155–59 Press Your Luck

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, 315 Ryan, Maureen, 203 Rylander, Gösta, 81, 84 Sacca, Chris, 140 Sales, Nancy Jo, 41–42 Saltsman, Adam, 155–56, 163–64 SAT vocabulary learning, gamification of, 296–97 Schachter, Stanley, 275–76 Schreiber, Katherine, 112–13, 115, 185 Schüll, Natasha Dow, 130, 134–35, 155, 183 Science, 168 Sedaris, David

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. See behavioral addiction Ter-Ovanesyan, Igor, 100 Tetris Effect, 171 Tetris (game), 170–73, 175–76, 189, 310–12 texting, 242–43 therapeutic properties of gamification, 309–12 “13, Right Now” (Contrera), 41–42 Time, 164 time on device, and slot machines, 136 Times, 48 tobacco plant, 31 Tolkien, J.R

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, 260 Williams, Evan, 2 willpower, 265–66 Winstanley, Catharine, 138 Winter, Damon, 214–15 Wonder, Stevie, 195 Wood, Wendy, 265–66 Woodruff, Ernest, 38 workplace, gamification of, 305–9 World of Warcraft (game), 2–3, 5, 16–18, 61, 157–58, 228, 270, 289–90 Worley, Becky, 281 Wurtz, Bob, 53

Fixed: Why Personal Finance is Broken and How to Make it Work for Everyone

by John Y. Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai  · 25 Jul 2025

firestorm of criticism and a complaint filed by Massachusetts regulators, who cited the company’s “aggressive tactics to attract inexperienced investors, [and] its use of gamification strategies to manipulate customers.”7 Fintech companies understand that people tend to look only at the first one or two links offered by a search

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are “memecoins” whose value depends on their appeal to a community rather than their usefulness in blockchain transactions.33 If closer investigation turns up excessive gamification, marketing strategies that encourage frequent comparisons with peers to stimulate additional buying and usage, nontransparent fees, or excessive difficulties in canceling subscriptions, regulators should intervene

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amid scrutiny over gamified investing,” CNBC, March 31, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/31/robinhood-gets-rid-of-confetti-feature-amid-scrutiny-over-gamification.html. 8. Claire Hong, Xiaomeng Lu, and Jun Pan, “FinTech platforms and mutual fund distribution,” Management Science 71 (2025): 488–517. 9. Marco Di Maggio

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investment opportunities, 71–72, 89, 280–281n15 FTX, 191 future, downweighting against present, 47–49 gambling: acceptance of risk and, 130–131; fintech encouraging, 185 gamification: cryptocurrency and, 197; manipulation of customers with, 185 Garber, Alan, 145 gender gap: in financial literacy, 33, 34–35; multiple-choice tests and, 270n5 gig

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

by Liz Pelly  · 7 Jan 2025  · 293pp  · 104,461 words

given free promo and ad space. It’s telling that one of the first collaborations between people from Tunigo and Spotify involved this sort of gamification, and the idea that playlist promo was something that could be “won” by those with the most online engagement; in time, this would become a

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. But that didn’t help them fill a one-hundred-fifty-cap venue or sell merch.” The rise of streaming muzak also contributed to the gamification of music-making for young producers coming up in this environment; it spawned a whole web of sketchy new labels and playlist companies, and attracted

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different approaches work for different artists; his approach could be viable for some, even if what’s described can at times feel more like platform gamification than advice for running a sustainable DIY project. Rather than music culture, it was platform culture: norms and practices emerging because of specific platform demands

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curation practices for, 28–34, 92, 113–14 data-driven, 31–35, 79–80 daylist, 97, 107, 109, 113 flagship, 84–85, 127, 132, 178 gamification of, 28, 50, 66 hyperpop, 109–13, 181 “Lorem,” 114, 140, 180–82 as mixtapes, 29–30 mood-/emotion-based, 25–29, 39–40, 44

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff  · 15 Jan 2019  · 918pp  · 257,605 words

,” “competitive,” and “gratifying,” rewarding drivers for improvements on their past record and “relative to the broader policy holder pool.”44 In this approach, known as “gamification,” drivers can be engaged to participate in “performance based contests” and “incentive based challenges.”45 If all else fails, insurers are advised to induce a

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others, and Niantic is not the first to employ the structure of a game as a means of effecting behavior change in its players. Indeed, “gamification” as an approach to behavioral engineering is a subject of intense interest that has produced a robust academic and popular literature.32 According to Wharton

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methodology of choice to change individual behavior.34 In practice, this has meant that the power of games to change behavior is shamelessly instrumentalized as gamification spreads to thousands of situations in which a company merely wants to tune, herd, and condition the behavior of its customers or employees toward its

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company’s immediate interests, with programs such as customer loyalty schemes or internal sales competitions. One analyst compiled a survey of more than ninety such “gamification cases,” complete with return-on-investment statistics.35 Ian Bogost, a professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech and a digital culture observer, insists that

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individual actions toward precise local market opportunities where high bidders enjoy an ever-closer approximation of guaranteed outcomes. Niantic’s distinctive accomplishment was to manage gamification as a way to guarantee outcomes for its actual customers: companies participating in the behavioral futures markets that it establishes and hosts. Hanke’s game

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concerned with conditioning, through which various forms of persuasion are used to stimulate certain types of behaviors while suppressing others.”62 In anticipation of future gamification techniques as means of behavioral modification, the subcommittee report also noted with apprehension more “benign” approaches that relied on “positive reinforcement,” from “gold-star incentives

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. “Overcoming Speed Bumps on the Road to Telematics.” 45. Corin Nat, “Think Outside the Box—Motivate Drivers Through Gamification,” Spireon, August 11, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20150811014300/spireon.com/motivate-drivers-through-gamification; “Triad Isotopes,” 2017, http://www.triadisotopes.com. 46. “Overcoming Speed Bumps on the Road to Telematics.” 47

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people’s behaviors with Skinnerian-style conditioning, concluding that “good game play and effective operant conditioning go hand in hand.” 33. Kevin Werbach, “(Re)Defining Gamification: A Process Approach,” in Persuasive Technology, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, International Conference on Persuasive Technology (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2014), 266–72, https://doi.org

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Werbach and Dan Hunter, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business (Philadelphia: Wharton Digital Press, 2012). 34. Michael Sailer et al., “How Gamification Motivates: An Experimental Study of the Effects of Specific Game Design Elements on Psychological Need Satisfaction,” Computers in Human Behavior 69 (April 2017): 371–80

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, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.12.033; J. Hamari, J. Koivisto, and H. Sarsa, “Does Gamification Work?—a Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification,” in 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2014, 3025–34, https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2014.377; Carina Soledad

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González and Alberto Mora Carreño, “Methodological Proposal for Gamification in the Computer Engineering Teaching,” 2014 International Symposium on Computers in Education (SIIE), 1

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–34; Dick Schoech et al., “Gamification for Behavior Change: Lessons from Developing a Social, Multiuser, Web-Tablet Based Prevention Game for Youths,” Journal of Technology in Human Services 31, no. 3 (

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, https://doi.org/10.1080/15228835.2013.812512. 35. Yu-kai Chou, “A Comprehensive List of 90+ Gamification Cases with ROI Stats,” Yu-Kai Chou: Gamification & Behavioral Design, January 23, 2017, http://yukaichou.com/gamification-examples/gamification-stats-figures. 36. Ian Bogost, “Persuasive Games: Exploitationware,” Gamasutra, May 3, 2011, http://www.gamasutra.com/view

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behavioral modification; prediction products behavioral modification: awareness as threat to, 307–308, 370; critiques of, 323–324, 324–325; Facebook’s, 299–309, 468–469; gamification, 216, 313–314, 317, 325; herding approach, 8–9, 202, 295–296, 463; instrumentarianism’s use of, 397f, 428–429, 434–435; and Microsoft patent

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, Wallace, 285 fusion, psychological: as characteristic of adolescent relationships, 453–454, 458, 464, 468; and Facebook engineering design, 458, 459–460; with slot machine, 450 gamification, 216, 313–314, 317, 325 gaming industry technology, as behavioral engineering, 369–370, 449–451 Garcia-Martinez, Antonio, 306 Garland, Robert, 233 General Data Protection

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. See also knowledge Illinois Biometric Privacy Act, 251 imperialism, 353 incentive systems: to align managerial behavior with owners’ interests (shareholder value maximization), 39, 370; and gamification, 216, 313–314, 317, 325; in Google’s ad pricing, 82; Pentland on, 428, 429, 435, 436; Skinner’s anticipation of, 370. See also reinforcement

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, 457–458, 484 Institute of the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, 391 instrumentalization: definition of, 352; of digital social connection, 455–457; gamification as form of, 216, 313–314, 317, 325; Pentland’s work on, 420, 436 instrumentarianism, 376–395; and Big Other, 376–379; in China, 388

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

by Evgeny Morozov  · 15 Nov 2013  · 606pp  · 157,120 words

environments and data, quantifying the world around us with the help of self-tracking and lifelogging, and, finally, introducing game incentives—what’s known as gamification—into the civic realm. The last chapter offers a more forward-looking perspective on how we can transcend the limitations of both solutionism and Internet

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This trend toward introducing so-called game mechanics—the use of badges, points, levels, rewards, and virtual currencies—into diverse social practices is known as “gamification.” A game like ChoreWars—where players, who could be flatmates or members of a family, do household tasks in the real world to accumulate points

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the content of the game and various narrative strategies adopted by game designers. In other words, one doesn’t have to hate games to hate gamification; that process doesn’t, strictly speaking, turn everything into a game—it turns everything into limited (and often completely unimportant) factors that we sometimes

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-saving Facebook hits as FarmVille and Words with Friends, “Games should do good. We want to help the world while doing our day jobs.” Gamification taps into the same do-gooder mentality that Slovenian philosopher-cum-entertainer Slavoj Žižek identifies in various charity programs that encourage citizens to support a

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our day jobs and continue with our Frappuccino-powered soul-searching, why not help the world, after all? As for Zynga, its own forays into gamification seem rather ominous. For instance, it struck a deal with 7-Eleven by which, through some ingenious marketing, customers pay real money for FarmVille

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Chang, managing director of Mayfield Fund, a respectable venture capital firm, has backed many of the early experiments in self-tracking and is now exploring gamification, with a particular focus on health care. As Chang said in a recent interview, “The only way we’ll fix our horribly broken healthcare

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on themselves and coming up with even more possible diagnoses? What’s next, rewarding patients for trying out new drugs? No wonder venture capitalists love gamification: it’s the kind of solution that aggravates some existing healthcare problems—but does so in an extremely profitable way. Well, at least Chang

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is not hiding the fact that gamification is something akin to hypnosis and allows us to get the “right” outcomes by circumventing the usual deliberative and policy channels. As he put

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choice, as citizens are recast as consumers and players who expect everything to be fun and based on reward schemes. Note how Gabe Zichermann, a gamification entrepreneur, paints this future: “In a gamified future, I don’t think many companies, including the government, will be able to avoid becoming part

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reset. This will be the new normal.” The consideration that governments are not companies and citizens are not consumers doesn’t figure prominently in the gamification agenda. People’s expectations may well have been reset, but in politics people have more than expectations—they also have duties and obligations, which occasionally

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process of inquiry, and efficient as they are, they easily survive even very devastating criticisms. Monkeys, Sex, and Predictable Duress Alas, our leading proponents of gamification operate solely in utilitarian territory, never raising any concerns about how building game incentives into social and political activities might affect citizens. Perhaps they just

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want citizens to do the right thing for the right reason, not just because it’s more fun than playing Angry Birds. Skimming through gamification literature can be both frustrating and instructive, for it shows the rhetorical tricks deployed by game enthusiasts to promote their schemes and the inherent limitations

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that many of us enjoy playing soccer, often forgetting ourselves in the game, does not automatically license social engineers to build game incentives into everything. Gamification by Design suffers from all the common sins of geek think. Zichermann and Cunningham don’t even try to hide the Skinnerian underpinnings of their

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B. F. Skinner, not Marshall McLuhan, is the real patron saint of “the Internet.” Zichermann and Cunningham are mostly interested in the business applications of gamification—getting people to click things—so they don’t say much about its political and social implications (well, except for the curt remark that “fun

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the Future—Palo Alto’s premier facility for producing sound-bite-friendly futurism. McGonigal has emerged as the leading cheerleader for applying the logic of gamification to solve the world’s greatest problems; if solutionism has a goodwill ambassador, she’s it. She argues that games can “help ordinary people

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now? McGonigal’s overall method slowly becomes clear: start with some shallow and deficient definition of reality, stripped of any complexity of human interaction, present gamification as the ultimate savior, and never mention the fact that games are not neutral tools for getting things done but incentive schemes that might be

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want to help science and folding proteins because you earn points for doing so; the world-saving rhetoric of McGonigal blurs that difference. Few gamification enthusiasts emphasize this parallel, but the way in which game mechanics have invaded and colonized our lives closely mirrors the spread of market logic into

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market norm,” transforming our attitudes to the good in question—whether it’s education or health—and such transformations are not always for the better. Gamification is no different; a project that enlists citizens into helping science by relying on game mechanics rather than by appealing to higher values will eventually

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ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral meaning of these goods and the proper way of valuing them.” Gamification, like self-tracking, can easily desensitize citizens to the messy reality around them. Just like quantifying the output of complex sociotechnical systems to make our

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own practices more effective and less wasteful might preclude us from imagining how such systems might be supplanted and replaced, so can gamification, with its promise of making every activity more enjoyable, make us perpetually content with the current way of doing things. Chromaroma is a game

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reward of all: a medal of the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. As games researcher Mark Nelson notes of the Soviet experience with gamification, “Factory competitions could blend fuzzily into sports competitions: factories would not only compete against each other in production, but also as field teams in

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distracted them from realizing just how awful and grueling their working conditions were. Gaming theorist Ian Bogost, who is perhaps the most vehement critic of gamification, makes this point forcefully in a provocative essay—with the self-explanatory title of “Shit Crayons”—in which he notes that imprisoned Nigerian poet Wole

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unconscious,” to uncover the infrastructures that make our techno-binges possible, to transcend the reductionism of numbers, the paternalism of nudges, and the simplicity of gamification, and to engage users as citizens—rather than as consumers who only understand the language of prices and percentage points, or children who can’t

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after extensive deliberation, we cannot find a rationale, then perhaps we shouldn’t be pursuing that activity in the first place. The worst instances of gamification, however, leave no space for deliberation and put many social and political processes on a kind of autopilot, where citizens engage in them not because

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algorithms produce more interesting links. All of these are open-ended questions that do not easily lend themselves to straightforward nudging, self-tracking, and gamification. Why should we be measuring the calorie counts of our articles when we are not even sure that stories about the Middle East are more

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but amplify many others. Not all psychology is useless. In her analysis of willpower, McGonigal, much like her twin sister in her analysis of gamification, completely sidesteps all moral questions and simply treats them as irrelevant. She argues that we need to stop talking about behavior in moral terms, using

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all those sacrifices by means of nudges, so that no willpower is wasted on them at all. The growing appeal of self-tracking, nudges, gamification, and even situational crime prevention and digital preemption can only be understood in the broader intellectual context of the last few decades. As already noted

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what Kevin Kelly and others like him believe, “the Internet” tells us nothing. The important transformations that we are living through—self-tracking, lifelogging, nudges, gamification, and digital preemption—would not have been possible on such a grand scale fifty or even twenty years ago. But the institutional and political logics

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, we believe that Steve Jobs was the greatest enemy of freedom or creativity, we risk misunderstanding—and even understating—the enemy. To talk about gamification without also discussing B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism or to talk about digital preemption without bring up rational-choice theory and the Chicago school of

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the Planet,” Recyclebank, https://www.recyclebank.com/join/earnpoints. 298 a recent survey shows: Charlotte McEleny, “Two-Thirds of Marketers Do Not Understand the Term ‘Gamification,’” NewMediaAge, October 10, 2011, http://www.nma.co.uk/news/two-thirds-of-marketers-do-not-understand-the-term-%E2%80%98gamification%E2%80%99

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Processes Will Gamify Those Processes,” press release, Gartner, April 12, 2011, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1629214. 298 Seth Priebatsch of the gamification startup SCVNG: Jemima Kiss, “SXSW 2011: SCVNGR’s Seth Priebatsch on How Gaming Will Change the World,” The Guardian, March 14, 2011, http://www

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gamasutra.com/view/feature/134735/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php?print=1. 298 “The use of game mechanics”: Alan I. Chorney, “Taking the Game out of Gamification,” Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management 8, no. 1 (2012), http://ojs.library.dal.ca/djim/article/view/2012vol8Chorney. 298 “a world in which a person

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.com/2012/02/14/opinion/making-good-citizenship-fun.html?_r=0. 302 “anything can be fun”: quoted in Chorney, “Taking the Game out of Gamification,” 8. 302 “governments typically use two tools”: Thaler, “Making Good Citizenship Fun.” 302 “relating to the duties or activities”: “Civic,” Oxford Dictionaries, http://oxforddictionaries.

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New Directions,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 25, no. 1 (January 2000): 54–67. 302 Hence, some recent social experiments: discussed in Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham, Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps, 1st ed. (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2011), 16. 303 Decades’ worth of well-known

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March 25, 2011, http://www.edge-online.com/features/nil-point. 313 “Factory competitions could blend fuzzily”: Mark Nelson, “Soviet and American Precursors to the Gamification of Work,” Proceedings of the 16th International Academic MindTrek Conference, pp. 23–26. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2115483. 313 “A despot in

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phones, and holdouts, suspicion of Censorship Chang, Tim Cheever, Abigail Chorney, Alan Chromaroma Churchill, Winston Citizenship and morality and virtue, and efficiency vs. rewards, and gamification Civil disobedience Civil Rights Act Claiborne, Craig Climate change Clinton, Bill Cloud computing Coase, Ronald Cohen, Julie Condorcet, Marquis de Conservative resistance Consumerism Contextual discovery

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Data repositories Databases, and crime detection Data.gov Datasexuals Daytum.com Decision making and self-tracking and willpower Defection/lawbreaking Degrading environment, enjoyment in, and gamification DeLong, Brad Democracy and algorithms liquid democracy monitorial democracy stealth democracy Design/designers and psychology vs. philosophy and usability See also Adversarial design; Erratic appliances

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Double click Driver monitoring device Drunk driving Dworkin, Ronald Dyson, Esther e-book/reader Eastwood, Clint EcoPioneer EdgeRank (Facebook) Edgerton, David Edible paper Education and gamification and online learning and quantification Edwards, Douglas Efficiency and situational crime prevention vs. inefficiency vs. inefficiency, and journalists vs. virtue and citizenship Eightmaps.com Eisenstein

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Paul Grant, Ruth Green, Donald Green, Shane Greenwald, Glenn Guernica Gutenberg, Johannes Gutshot-detection systems Hanrahan, Nancy Harvey, David Hayek, Friedrich Heald, David Health and gamification monitoring device Heller, Nathaniel Hibbing, John Hierarchies, and networks Hieronymi, Pamela Highlighting and shading Hildebrandt, Mireille Hill, Kashmir Hirschman, Albert Historians, and Internet debate History

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Moore, Gordon Moore’s law Morality and authenticity and citizenship revision of, and technological enforcement and situational crime prevention and technology and willpower Motivation and gamification Mubarak, Hosni Music critics Music industry Music Xray MyLifeBits MySpace Narrative imagination Narrative Science National Crime Information Center, FBI National Endowment for Democracy National Endowment

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Pocket registrator Political backpacking Political change Political information Political parties Political Reform Act of 1974 (California) Politics and ambiguity and consumerism and fact checking and gamification and hypocrisy and imperfection and mendacity and networks and the Pirates and proxy voting and technocracy and technology and technorationalists and technoscapists and transparency and

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Not Reality vs. games Recording devices Recyclebank Recycling Regan, Priscilla Regulation Reidenberg, Joel Reputation Reputation.com Restaurant Calorie Counter Restaurant critics Rewards vs. citizenship, and gamification Rich, Michael Rieger, Berhard Robinson, David Romney, Mitt Rosenblum, Nancy Rosenthal, Daniel Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Ruck.us Rupture talk Saint-Simon Sandberg, Sheryl Sandel,

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also Privacy Self-driving cars Self-experimentation Self-interest Self-tracking and authenticity and originality benefits of and correlations and decision making ethics of and gamification and hunches of information consumption and privacy and self-disclosure See also Lifelogging; Quantified Self movement Semiconductor industry SenseCam Sensors 7-Eleven Sexual predators Shapiro

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

by Brian Christian  · 5 Oct 2020  · 625pp  · 167,349 words

sister was worth a few points. Walking around the block was worth a few points. It was a start. This is a field known as gamification,67 and in the last ten years, thanks to insights from reinforcement learning, it has gone from something of an art to something of a

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for thinking and decision-making so that we can actually build a scientifically based curriculum for good thinking.” Lieder is interested in gamification and more specifically, what he calls optimal gamification: Given a goal, what is the best possible incentive structure to facilitate reaching it?70 This has much of the flavor

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in this case the agents being designed for are humans rather than algorithms. Lieder, working with Tom Griffiths, established some ground rules for what optimal gamification would look like. They knew from Andrew Ng and Stuart Russell’s work that one of the cardinal rules is to reward states, not actions

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works,” says Lieder, “people will learn to rely on that system more and more.”72 This left open an intriguing possibility: Could you use optimal gamification, not to obviate the need for planning, but to make people better at it? The incentives in this case are almost completely different. Instead of

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.” He assigned himself virtual “citations” when he did work he felt might result in real citations some several years hence. He used the same optimal gamification calculation that assigned his subjects’ essays a point value to compute the proper point values for each sub-subtask of his doctorate. He even used

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on the Folly.” 35. For several cautionary tales about “gamified” incentives, see, e.g., Callan, Bauer, and Landers, “How to Avoid the Dark Side of Gamification.” 36. Kerr, “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B.” 37. Wright et al., “40 Years (and Counting).” 38. “Operant Conditioning,” https://www

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_years_of_life/. 67. See, e.g., Deterding et al., “From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness.” 68. See, e.g., Hamari, Koivisto, and Sarsa, “Does Gamification Work?” 69. Falk Lieder, personal interview, April 18, 2018. 70. See Lieder, “Gamify Your Goals,” for a general overview and Lieder et al., “Cognitive Prostheses

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. 6334 (2017): 183–86. Callan, Rachel C., Kristina N. Bauer, and Richard N. Landers. “How to Avoid the Dark Side of Gamification: Ten Business Scenarios and Their Unintended Consequences.” In Gamification in Education and Business, 553–68. Springer, 2015. Campbell, Murray, A. Joseph Hoane Jr., and Feng-hsiung Hsu. “Deep Blue.” Artificial

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United States,” Council of State Governments Jusice Center, 2013. Deterding, Sebastian, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled, and Lennart Nacke. “From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining Gamification.” In Proceedings of the 15th International Academic Mindtrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments, 9–15. ACM, 2011. Devlin, Jacob, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and

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the 20th Century.” Review of General Psychology 6, no. 2 (2002): 139–52. Hamari, Juho, Jonna Koivisto, and Harri Sarsa. “Does Gamification Work? A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification.” In 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 3025–34. IEEE, 2014. Han, Hu, and Anil K. Jain. “Age, Gender

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Humanity Institute, 223, 246, 291–92, 296–97, 309, 313, 386–87n55 gait, 253–54, 382n13 Gal, Yarin, 282, 284, 285–87 gambling, 153, 207 gamification, 176–80 gaming Arcade Learning Environment, 181–83, 209, 369n4 autonomous driving and, 228–30 backward learning and, 365n27, 369n9 bespoke games, 181, 369n2 boredom

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists

by Julia Ebner  · 20 Feb 2020  · 309pp  · 79,414 words

the cover of the video game ‘God of War’ and renamed it ‘God of Race War’.20 Social media researcher Ahmed Al-Rawi calls this gamification strategy ‘troll, flame, and engage’.21 Despite Reconquista Germanica’s game-like character, their impact is real. Using leaked materials from GCHQ, the British spy

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with social credits; you can become the perfect patriot. ‘This App will disrupt the firewall of fear. It features a radar for Patriots, and a gamification for activism.’3 The AltRight.com website of American white nationalist Richard Spencer featured a special profile of Patriot Peer to promote the app internationally

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one right-wing extremist movement.5 What was new in Christchurch, however, was the escalation of gamification: the appropriation of gaming elements for terror, the use of violence at the intersection of fun and fear. Gamification – adding game elements to products, services or activities that have nothing to do with games – is

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Kellogg’s first started putting little games as prizes into its breakfast-cereal boxes in 1910, the idea became an instant hit. By the 1950s, gamification as an employee motivator was born. The sociologist Donald F. Roy demonstrated how a daily routine game in which factory workers steal bananas leads to

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higher job satisfaction and productivity. A hundred years after Kellogg’s gamification of cereal purchases, few employers, marketing agencies and political organisations are not using gamification to attract and keep recruits, customers or voters. Almost everything is gamified today, and that includes terrorism.6

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conspiracy theories fuelling hatred and violence against ethnic and cultural minorities. Livestream functions on social media serving as a means for making terror go viral. Gamification and internet culture coupled with ‘do-it-yourself’ terrorism. And politicians mainstreaming the ideas that drive terrorists. As I scroll down the news feeds of

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://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/3559727/The-Wave-the-experiment-that-turned-a-school-into-a-police-state.html. 15Michael Sailer et al., ‘How gamification motivates: An experimental study of the effects of specific game design elements on psychological need satisfaction’, Computers in Human Behavior, 69, April 2017, pp. 371

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at https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/13/the-world-of-holy-warcraft/. 17Linda Schlegel, ‘Playing jihad: The gamification of radicalization’, Defense Post, 5 July 2018. Available at https://thedefensepost.com/2018/07/05/gamification-of-radicalization-opinion/. 18See https://www.moddb.com/mods/stormer-doom/videos. 19See https://yuki.la/pol/114837006

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United States in 2018’, 2019. Available at https://www.adl.org/murder-and-extremism-2018. 6Ty McCormick, ‘Gamification: A Short History’, Foreign Policy, 24 June 2013. Available at https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/06/24/gamification-a-short-history/. 7The official Facebook newsroom announcement is available at https://twitter.com/fbnewsroom/status/1107117981358682112

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of speech here, here, here, here F-Secure here FSN TV here Gab here, here, here, here, here, here Gamergate controversy here GamerGate Veterans here gamification here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Ganser, Daniele here Gates of Vienna here Gateway Pundit here Gawker here GCHQ here GE here GellerReport

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Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI

by Yuval Noah Harari  · 9 Sep 2024  · 566pp  · 169,013 words

The Road to Conscious Machines

by Michael Wooldridge  · 2 Nov 2018  · 346pp  · 97,890 words

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

by Garry Kasparov  · 1 May 2017  · 331pp  · 104,366 words

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire

by Bruce Nussbaum  · 5 Mar 2013  · 385pp  · 101,761 words

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy

by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel  · 4 Sep 2013  · 202pp  · 59,883 words

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution

by Pieter Hintjens  · 11 Mar 2013  · 349pp  · 114,038 words

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social

by Steffen Mau  · 12 Jun 2017  · 254pp  · 69,276 words