Gamification

A place where I will store notes on gamification, both deliberate and accidental. Humans obsessiveness for arbitrary goals with intermittent variable reward. Related: Narrative.

The phrase, AFAIK, comes from the video game industry wanting to name what the marketable meta-product they had extracted from engineering addictive video games. See the Mashable Gamification writeup.

To touch upon: suggestive metaphor of sparse reward in reinforcement learning, especially for people. The industrial sale of gamification e.g.. Mike Hoye on gamification of conspiracy, gives it a horrific angle.

I am musing if, as a species, we tolerate such game-like activities as car-based commuting (Stutzer and Frey 2008), poker machines, depressing social media and bureaucratic proceduralism, because they each foster satisfying game-like addiction? It is certainly how I myself manage my akrasia.

Questions: what kind of variation do people have in their taste for the gamified? For example, some people enjoy Sudoku and driving a car around, both of which are for me an exquisite torture of wasted potential. Contrariwise, I enjoy mathematics, which is for some people a pointless well of tedium. I tell you what though, spending time in traffic doesn’t invent the incredible heights of modern technology though, does it now?

Self-hacking via gamification: Andrea Kuszewski You Can Increase Your Intelligence presents gamification as a way of getting better at stuff, based on (Jaeggi et al. 2008). Kuszewski has written lots of fun stuff in this vein, e.g. connecting with sex.

To file: Ulysses Pascal, The Gamification of Games, classifies the process of “gamification” as adopting behavioural control methods that have little to do with games per se and which games themselves are now adopting.

An online marketplace, like a game, is a highly controlled yet seemingly “open world” where choices can be monitored closely. Just as in the two-sided platforms for goods and services managed by Google and Amazon, these choice environments can be engineered to nudge behavior in predefined directions or to collect user data. With psychological insight into the values, ideals, and fantasies that users are not so willing to admit in search queries, emails, and purchasing habits, games are valuable supplements to the data Google and Amazon already collect.