Chasing the Phantom of Gamification
I'm looking at gamification and I'm not exactly sure what I'm seeing anymore
What’s in 750 Words?
I joined a month-long journaling challenge feeling pretty certain that I wouldn’t be able to finish it. I’d wanted to journal many times in my life and I would only last a few days of consistent writing. It’s honestly been a sore spot in my life that I couldn’t figure out just the precise conditions that I needed to have a regular journaling practice, and that frustration bore out every time I tried to pick up the habit again. It would create a spiral where I would effectively tell myself, “Well, here we go again, what makes you think that this time is going to be any different?”
But this time was different. Thanks to my friend
, I became acquainted with the journaling web app, 750 Words. I started journaling in late March and at the start of April, I signed up for the challenge. 750 Words uses game-like mechanics like badges, progress bars, social functions to encourage one another, and monthly challenges.When you sign up for a challenge you have the option of setting up a reward/consequence thing. It’s a fill-in-the-blank pledge that says something in the vein of “If I succeed in this challenge, I will…” and “If I don’t succeed in this challenge, I will…”. I felt pretty bold when I made my pledge, I said that I would buy myself a milkshake if I succeeded and would give someone that I particularly didn’t like at the time a milkshake if I failed.
And Duolingo?
I have learned 2 other languages that aren’t my native language of English. A part of my time in the military, which will end in a year and a half, was in learning Turkish and Korean. I went to a place called the Defense Language Institute, which has an intensive approach to language education based on 8 hours a day of instruction followed by some amount of homework that varies based on the language. At the peak time of my learning Korean, I got to a CEFR equivalent of C1 in my ability to read Korean and B2 in my listening and speaking. In other words, I had “professional proficiency” in reading Korean, and “limited working proficiency” or upper-intermediate in listening and speaking. My Turkish was also at the B2 level across the board.
I’ve wanted to learn Spanish all of my life, and you’d think, based on my ability to learn two other languages, that I would have no trouble learning Spanish. After getting over my hang-ups in learning Spanish, I downloaded Duolingo, ready to dive in.
I feel silly introducing Duolingo, it isn’t something that needs an introduction. It’s a gamified platform for language learning. In my conversation with a gamification expert to write this article, the expert repeatedly emphasized how much of a gold standard Duolingo was for gamification. They cited the millions of people who have learned a language thanks to Duolingo. For me though, after a 60-day streak on Duolingo, I finally decided to delete it. The goal to me stopped being the act of learning and practicing language skills and became doing the bare minimum to support keeping the streak alive. I’m still studying Spanish, and so in a sense my language learning streak is alive, but my practice is completely divorced from the application now.
Two Apps, the Same Value, Different Experience
The difference between what I felt about Duolingo and what I feel about 750 Words compelled me to write this essay. I’m passionate about journaling and language learning, and they give me different but equally important perspectives. Journaling gives me intrapersonal knowledge—knowledge of myself—and language learning gives me cultural knowledge. I feel deeply passionate about both of these two practices. But I left one gamified application and continued to use the other. What gives?
It is easy to ascribe a level of domain knowledge as to why I left Duolingo. I’m deeply familiar with the process of learning a language and know what it takes, what it looks and feels like, to become proficient in a language. Even though I didn’t know much Spanish, I had all the meta-skills of language learning such that I could take myself through the process. I struggle with this as the answer. For journaling, there are very few meta-skills one needs to develop to be someone who journals every day. And the skill of writing every day is something that I have cultivated before when I was writing fiction and especially had to cultivate for my novel. It does seem, based on this, that the reason why I stayed on 750 Words and abandoned Duolingo was that I already knew the skills I needed to learn a language and with journaling I did not. There must be something different about them that is causing this to happen. There must be something in the design of these applications that on the one hand is conducive to creating a journaling habit and on the other hand a reduction of my language learning habit. I wanted to see what the existing philosophy of technology had to say about gamification to get after this question.
Introduction to Gamification
Gamification involves using game-based mechanics to achieve certain effects outside the game environment. Duolingo’s game-based mechanics, such as mapping one’s language journey on a map, encouraging feedback, and the system of hearts, are theoretically all in the service of promoting language skills. Or at least it’s supposed to be that way. With Duolingo, the core game loop, the core mechanics that augment one’s desired effects—language learning—fight against the business interest of Duolingo. Advertisements stop us after every lesson, most of which remind us to subscribe to their services so that we can get unlimited hearts you can make as many mistakes as we want, and the like. The business logic gets in the way of the game loop to get us to pay them money for the intended experience.
I will talk about gamification through the lens of game mechanics and game loops because I feel that gives us a useful framing around when gamification is happening optimally or if competing interests are getting in the way. In Duolingo’s case, the business logic of making money stops us from experiencing the core game loop as intended until we subscribe to the service. 750 Words is also a subscription-based service, but even while using the free/trial version of this software there wasn’t a video after every 250 words reminding me to subscribe. Nothing was preventing me from writing the 750 words in the application, the core game loop of 750 Words.
There are core mechanics that illustrate what game-based mechanics are, and they will ultimately describe how ubiquitous they have become. Badges, progress bars, experience points and levels, leaderboards, and likes. This is also where making distinctions between what is gamification and what is not a difficult one. Does Facebook, which employed the gamified element of likes in the mid-2000s, count as gamification in the same way that a flight training simulator does? They surely both used gamified elements.
Note: Duolingo isn’t all bad, I know of people who have learned a language because of it. I just also know people who have a 100 or 200-day streak in the language and they’re no closer to proficiency.
Gamification: Bullshit and other distinctions
Ian Bogost, a philosopher whose work I stumbled onto on accident, wrote a book called “Alien Phenomenology”, and while this wasn’t the first philosophy book I’ve ever read, it was the first one that centered me on a specific line of inquiry about objects. The subtitle of Bogost’s book is “What It’s Like to Be a Thing”, and it wasn’t until this book, and the offshoots that this book caused that I started thinking about what things there are out there and how we as human beings experience them. His work reinvigorated my love for philosophy in a way that hasn’t happened to me since reading Albert Camus about a decade ago. So in doing research for an essay on gamification, I was pleasantly surprised to see something written by Bogost. That is until I saw the title Why Gamification is Bullshit.
He describes gamification as bullshit, but not in the colloquial sense of “lies”, but instead, bullshit as formulated by moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt to mean the means “to conceal, to impress, or coerce" which has “no use for the truth”. I’ll admit that this characterization struck me pretty deeply, I mean how could I call bullshit on something that deeply changed the quality of my life through instilling a love and a regular practice of journaling? It flew in the face of my experience, to be sure. But as I read his article, I understood his response. In the early days of gamification, much like with many technological concepts, various consultant groups made land grabs for “gamifying everything”. In fact,
, in a recent post on gamification talks about this era well. Gurwinder writes in the article Why Everything is Becoming a Game that:In the 21st century, advances in technology made it easy to add game mechanics to almost any activity, and a new term — “gamification” — became a buzzword in Silicon Valley. By 2008, business consultants were giving presentations about leveraging fun to shape behavior, while futurists gave TED Talks speculating on the social implications of a gamified world. Underpinning every speech was a single, momentous question: if gamification could make people buy more stuff and work more hours, what else could it be used to make people do?
The promise of a better world, or at least that captivating story, fueled much of the posturing. Bogost bemoans this posturing, describing it as consultant “bullshit”, and in this way, gamification becomes bullshit, a consulting ploy meant not to solve actual problems but to coerce, conceal, impress, to paraphrase Bogost. What Bogost was rallying against wasn’t game-based mechanics employed to achieve certain ends, but the insertion of kitschy things you put on top of an application that only served the purpose of bringing more people to the application. What Bogost did believe in are games purposefully meant to teach something. See his game studio (and book of the same title) Persuasive Games for more details on that.
Gurwinder’s article above paints an even more grim picture than Bogost does about gamification. The mechanisms that gamification employs from the behavioral to the framing, have led to most of the problems we now face in our digital society. Note: This is a paraphrase of his essay, I do recommend you read it. He spends the last portion of his essay talking about what to do in this situation of gamified everything which feels more hopeful than the rest. I also interviewed an expert in Gamification, and he presented me with a more neutral account of gamification, stating in our conversation that while there are harms and misuses of gamification, it has also been used for good. The Red Cross, he explained, used gamified components to drive people toward the prosocial behavior of donating more blood.
Me, Complaining at a Crossroads
If I leave this essay as it is, I’ll be falling into an ideology I don’t believe in which is the idea that technology is neutral and it depends on how people use it that determines if it will have a positive or negative impact on people. Langdon Winner in his 1986 book, “The Whale and the Reactor”, also rallies against this idea. At the end of the second chapter, Winner summarizes the two ways in which there are “political qualities” in what he calls artifacts:
In the first instance we noticed ways in which specific features in the design or arrangement of a device of system could provide a convenient means of establishing patterns of power and authority in a given setting….In the second instance we examined ways in which the intractable properties of certain kinds of technology are strongly, perhaps unavoidably, linked to particular institutionalize patterns of power and authority.
For me, Winner presents a compelling account in both instances, but somehow gamification is different in analysis. Gamification is not a specific instance, as it is not one product, and neither are its properties fixed enough to state that gamification necessarily leads to institutionalized patterns of power and authority. Thinking back to Gurwinder’s article, we can see very clearly the ways that gamification has led to behavior manipulation at a mass scale, but so too has gamification led to positive outcomes, more blood donation, more people learning about other cultures through languages, more people journaling, the list is pretty long, especially if you take into account games like Habitica, which is set up to help you accomplish any goal one would want to achieve.
Back to technological neutrality, as you can see. But I will not be pleased with myself if I end this essay here, at ideological odds with myself. Sitting at this crossroads, and honestly kind of pitiful, is when I realized that my framing of neutrality is wrong.
Conceptual Multivalence
I will talk about this in two levels, the instance and the concept, and there are middle levels here but I’m not yet equipped to discuss them. The technological instance is the thing that we have direct interaction with, an application, a website, a highway, or a car. The technological concept is the level at which multiple technological instances can become grouped. I look at the instances of 750 Words, Duolingo, and the Red Cross application, and I can synthesize the technological concept of gamification. In the popular, non-academic talk, we tend to talk about concepts as non-acting, ephemeral things. Telling someone that they’re being “too conceptual” is a way to deride someone.
Here, I want to treat the concept as a unit of analysis. Specific applications, social networks, and even the roads we drive on seem to exhibit political qualities by distributing power in particular ways. If these instances can have varied outcomes that arrange power in different ways, then what does this say about the concept?
The word neutral was leading me astray, what technological concepts exhibit is a kind of multivalence. It is not just the human actor that dictates outcomes like the neutrality conversation led me to, but it does account for the different outcomes in specific instances of that technology. Conceptual multivalence, as I’m describing it, is the capacity of an abstract object (a concept) to have within it different and sometimes conflicting potentials for instantiation.
I’d like to illustrate this using Generative AI (GenAI) as an example. The concept of GenAI contains all the notions that you have accumulated in the relevant instances such as DALL-E, ChatGPT, and all those other products and services that you can name. What the idea of conceptual multivalence tells us about GenAI is that it is not just a matter of using it “properly”. This needs to go beyond the AI Ethics perspective. AI Ethics is useful work and it gives us knowledge about how to better use and live with the technologies. Conceptual multivalence work will help us understand the nature of the concept of GenAI and therefore what kinds of products it is capable of creating as it structures power, as all instances do. How to do this, however, is the hanging question of this essay.
Back to Gamification, a Conclusion
Gamification holds the potential for improving oneself and for making one addicted to the system in use, as well as other valences not explored here or not known more generally. I can’t because of this frame though, seek to abolish all gamified platforms nor should I place fault entirely on human involvement. As we interact with the concept and instances of gamification, we come to know it through our experiences, and that interaction encodes in us some degree of the valences possible in the concept.
The harms that gamification has wrought need to be held in tension with the benefits people have gained. These need to be held together with differing views like with those who have no reason to like it or don’t get it, or those who feel it to be infantilizing. All of these are equally true avenues into the concept of gamification, not because of a relative perspective, but because the concept itself holds multitudes that we can only access through our personal experiences and the experiences of others.
What we do with this collective information matters. It influences what kinds of policies we make, the kinds of technology we decide to adopt nationally and personally, and overall the lives we decide to live. I see a profound and exciting opportunity to try to understand technological concepts like gamification, toward improving our collective situations in the digital space. Not toward a utopia, but toward improving our lives which have become increasingly digital.