Gamification as Checking Out Escapism

Gamification takes advantage of the human psychological predisposition to engage in gaming and competition. In 2011, it officially became a buzzword when Gartner added it to its ‘Hype Cycle’ list.

Unfortunately, most games center around escapism, wasting your life away.

This has led to the commodification of things like trophies, coins, awards and rankings in games that have no intrinsic value or that cannot be exchanged for anything outside the game world. It is even scarier when you look at the data on the amount of money people spend on in-game currencies and similar products in apps that have gamification hardwired into user status.

In turn, this has engendered new speculative scam-like arenas, like non-fungible tokens (NFT), which we addressed in “The ‘Bored Ape Yacht Club’ NFT Pump-and-Dump Ponzi Scheme.” This was followed by a value drop of digital tokens by almost 50 percent, renewing doubts over hype-fuelled markets.” The great NFT sell-off: has the digital collectibles craze hit its peak?”

OpenSea suddenly limited the number of times users could mint NFTs for free on its platform because over 80 percent that were created with the tool “were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam.” It reversed that decision within 24 hours, however, after outcry from NFT project developers.

Social media has already established itself as the most anti-social thing that could ever exist. In it one is able to interact with narcissistic douchebags who post selfies and cat pictures every 5 minutes, and you think that is what friendship is.

They want you to be lonely and miserable and the only friends you should have are propaganda bots with fake AI generated profile pictures feeding you garbage on your feed.

Then there is the perpetual red dot. On Instagram, the app’s default settings ensure that there’s always a little red dot there to alert of something—potential friends, tagged photos, likes, comments, liked comments. Ditto the addictive bell on Twitter.

Quartz debuted an app that allowed people to have emoji-filled conversations with a bot about the daily news. And publications like Slate publish weekly news quizzes that encourage readers to stay up to date on a constant feed of propaganda so that they can earn high scores.

Imagine a world where every activity and choice we make on a daily basis – how we brush our teeth, what cereal we eat for breakfast, how we perform at school, what books we read for leisure – would be measured by sensors and gamified.

In an article in Forbes magazine, Fredrick E. Allen has assigned “Electronic Whip” for the attempts done in Disneyland to keep worker engaged to their work. Workers had reported feelings similar to slavery behaviors and whipping sense.

Gamification can create a false set of incentives: One of the biggest problems with gamification is that it incentivizes winning over other objectives. Students may not be retaining information, but rather learning just enough to complete the challenge. Gaming, and especially the urge to win, may increasingly drive students to cheat.

Game designers like Jon Radoff and Margaret Robertson have also criticized gamification as excluding elements like storytelling and experiences.

In education, it results in pointsification, or assigning points for mastery of a concept. Creating a culture of pointsification in the classroom can lead to students needing instant gratification as a motivator for learning. Constantly assigning a points value to mastery can have unintended consequences and build habits in students that may be hard to reverse.

The Chinese government has announced that it will begin using gamification to rate its citizens in 2020, implementing a Social Credit System in which citizens will earn points representing trustworthiness. It has been reported that citizens will receive points for good behavior, such as making payments on time and educational attainments.