What it says on the tin. Gamification was touted as making good stuff more fun to do. “More often, gamification is used to manipulate and control, whether that’s unscientific brain training games promising to make you smarter, or propaganda games spreading dangerous misinformation online, or video games tricking players into spending thousands of dollars on in-game items they can’t afford.” And even the “good” side “is deeply conservative. Even if you make driving for Uber more fun, you’re still driving for Uber.” Slack is optimized out of the system, so people get used up faster and can’t make human connections. And gamification is ripe for conspiracists: QAnon gamifies conspiracies by sending people on treasure hunts for rewarding information; making them feel like they’re contributing to a community; satisfying a sense of play (“Yes-and is great for creating things but not for truth”); and denying responsibility for consequences, since everything is just a puzzle to solve.

Media literacy is not the solution; they already “do the research.” “[T]he idea [that media literacy] can help solve the fake news epidemic is like training people to run faster to dodge traffic rather than enforcing road safety and building pedestrian crossings—it’s not that it’s worthless, but it places the burden on individual citizens rather than addressing the larger societal problem.” We need other institutions to channel “energy and zeal for community-based problem-solving” toward worthier causes. Importantly, alternatives must not encourage us to see other people as mere “players,” which strips out complexity and decreases our emotional range. “Few video games and no sex dolls simulate the painful but necessary experience of rejection and heartbreak. In their pursuit to engage and entertain, the lesson they teach is that love is always available if you’re persistent enough. Or if you pay enough.”

Possibly the most interesting bit is the comparison between gamification and Catholic indulgences. “A book of hours from South Holland awarded forty days of indulgence for each step when reciting a particular prayer. Virtual pilgrimages were extraordinarily popular perhaps for this reason.” And indulgences were often marketed and collected by “farmers”; there were bootleg and forged indulgences and other scams. We shouldn’t be snobs about indulgences: “Do we buy Girl Scout Cookies just to support a good cause? When we walk an extra ten minutes at the end of the day, is it only for the ‘10,000 steps’ achievement? Motivations are rarely as simple as we think, and not everyone who uses gamification is being misled.”

He recommends that gamification, including hit counts/like counts etc., should be off by default and users should have to opt in, “without nagging or incentives.” Rewards and punishments should be small. Friction should be easy to find and hard to get rid of. ( )