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..
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.
I would play this game for a fee of no less that AUD140/hour
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?
All sudoko is depressing IMO
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.
What we learn from games
There is evidence that we can learn to detect fake news (Roozenbeek and Linden 2019), improve empathy (Simonovits, Kézdi, and Kardos 2017), mathematical typesetting…
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