Gamification of things? Good or manipulative?

Not entirely sure this should be here but I was thinking about saving money this morning. In the recent part of history, the general populace getting into debts that are way over their heads has been a problem on arguably a much wider scale than at any point in history. There's also been a lot of talk about the increasing "gamification" of things - providing incentives for people to exhibit certain behaviours or desired trends.

So, I thought, I'm not bad at saving money and not spending it on stuff I honestly don't need... However, there are a lot of people out there (apparently) who are unable to spend thoughtfully - and i'm not just talking about keeping within their means so let's not bring the whole "no debt vs debt is good" debate in here, please. - so is it possible to gamify actual saving habits?

On the one hand, i think it's very possible. Just imagine your online banking account - you open it up and find that your "score" has increased because you managed your finances better than the same month last year or got an achievement for managing to save more than the last month (maybe through transferring funds to your savings account etc.). On the other hand, it's incredibly manipulative and the ethics of such a programme might be quire questionable - because someone, somewhere, would be "pulling the strings" on a lot of people's behaviours. This could give the banks even more power over economies than they already have with respect to lending and whatnot. Just imagine that the Superbowl is coming up and they offer points or achievements for spending on Superbowl paraphernalia - or they could even cripple the amount of money spent on the Superbowl and its associated links to other businesses by offering competing achievements or reigning in spending by prioritising saving for that month.

The other thing, i realised when thinking about this is that the credit industry has been gamifying their practices for a long time now. The "easy credit" thing was intricately an obtuse game. You were able to increase your 'score' (either money or property) with encouragement of 'achievements' like getting a higher credit score etc.. Some of the things that the banks have been doing over these last 2 decades (and i'm not limiting it to that, just in the context of the present economic difficulties) have been highly unethical so is it best just to steer clear of this type of manipulation or should it be harnessed into something that could be good instead of basically being guaranteed to be bad?

I think that there are two kinds of gamification. The benign kind basically involves repackaging data that already exists in such a way as to make it easier to make good decisions (such as, for example, showing you your savings month to month and providing dynamic long-term projections that help contextualize every purchasing decision you make). That is an info vis system that, due to the presence a previously-existing intrinsic reward system, can now be classified as more game-like. The malignant kind involves layering economies on top of economies to obfuscate the consequences of your decisions, and then aligning these economies in such a way that gaining forms of imaginary currency causes you to lose forms of actual currency. (Like credit card rewards points, air miles, or arguably Farmville.)

IMO, gamifying should serve to help you achieve goals you already had by clarifying your progress. If it causes you to unknowingly pursue goals that you would not otherwise wish to pursue, it is likely an evil thing.

Aside from that stuff, though, is the issue of reward systems that cause game compulsion, Skinner box style. An interesting moral question is: Even if we concede that the results of playing some game will be good, does that justify inducing game compulsion to achieve those results? Or more abstractly, is it justified to manipulate a person for their own good?

Could gamification potentially help some people? Sure. However the potential for abuse is rather high, we already know the lengths corporations will (and do) go to in order to manipulate us and imo the fewer tools we give them the better. As such perhaps it should be limited to a being part of the toolbox of psychologists for helping a certain type of patient through certain types of situations.

4xis.black wrote:

Even if we concede that the results of playing some game will be good, does that justify inducing game compulsion to achieve those results? Or more abstractly, is it justified to manipulate a person for their own good?

Trouble is there's often little consensus on what 'their own good' is and it seems to be often skewed towards 'my own good, but I'm totally helping them..really!'

krev82 wrote:

Could gamification potentially help some people? Sure. However the potential for abuse is rather high, we already know the lengths corporations will (and do) go to in order to manipulate us and imo the fewer tools we give them the better. As such perhaps it should be limited to a being part of the toolbox of psychologists for helping a certain type of patient through certain types of situations.

I guess the problem is that this is already a thing and is already being abused - especially in the cases of reward systems mentioned above.

4xis.black wrote:

Even if we concede that the results of playing some game will be good, does that justify inducing game compulsion to achieve those results? Or more abstractly, is it justified to manipulate a person for their own good?

Trouble is there's often little consensus on what 'their own good' is and it seems to be often skewed towards 'my own good, but I'm totally helping them..really!'

Does this sort of thing need to be brought to the attention of lawmakers and regulated in the same way that subliminal messages are banned for use in TV ads?

4xis.black wrote:

IMO, gamifying should serve to help you achieve goals you already had by clarifying your progress. If it causes you to unknowingly pursue goals that you would not otherwise wish to pursue, it is likely an evil thing.

I think this is a good way of describing the situation. From a purely anecdotal perspective, I've found gamification to have actually been a great help to me but I've kind created the "game" aspects myself if you will. I use MyFitnessPal for my attempt to lose weight. It sets you calorie goals and you enter food and exercise into it throughout the day. As you do so, you see your remaining calories go down. The only goal the site gives you is "Try to end the day with the number above 0 and you'll lose weight." It also gives you a minimum number of calories you should take in every day in order to be properly nourished. Using those rules, I have been attempting to adjust my eating and exercise habits so that I end with as high a safe number every day as possible. For some reason, my mind is more easily able to focus on the goal when I apply that kind of "high score" mentality to it. And it's been working. I've been applying a similar mentality to my attempts to pay down my debt load from my previous failed business and that's been met with decent success as well. However, there are other aspects of life it would be dangerous to apply this model to (like say, burning yourself out by trying to set a goal to get every work project completed ahead of schedule).

I've heard people argue that this type of model is a great thing to use in schools to encourage kids to learn but I don't know if I agree with that. If someone doesn't want to learn something, I don't think "gamifying" the objectives is the way you engage them. The technique has to be used in conjunction with a goal someone wants to complete. Otherwise, they will either find a way to game the game or they may complete their objectives but not retain anything.

Bad.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I post frequently about getting a lot of joy out of games where the fun is derived from doing things that aren't specifically scored or rewarded. I was bothered by it in games but ultimately began to think about extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation. My main concern, as it pertained to games, was that even games that were too heavily "game-y" ran the risk of stripping some of the organic fun and play, the creativity out.

Apply it to real life, though, and you quickly realize how bad it can be. Here's a good collection of articles on this subject that bubbled up a while back.

http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_Considered_Harmful%3F

I think my biggest concern at this point, setting aside imagination, creativity and how rewards and guided experiences could stomp on those virtues is that a person could get "hooked" on the extrinsic motivators for the wrong reasons, thus finding less joy in the activity for its own sake.

That's obviously a very extreme situation and we're not there. But you watch the way people participate in Twitter and Facebook and it's clear that people are willing to eschew in person relationships for the "quick hit" of online relationships. I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that this could go badly.

I worry at as I get older the younger workforce will insist on the workplace becoming gamified...at that point I might just go Michael Douglas Falling Down on them...

TheGameguru wrote:

I worry at as I get older the younger workforce will insist on the workplace becoming gamified...at that point I might just go Michael Douglas Falling Down on them...

The Kinect for Windows + Windows 8 == Workplace Achievements

I'm with you, though. I'm already feeling that the generation gap is growing rapidly. And I'm barely over 35.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

From a purely anecdotal perspective, I've found gamification to have actually been a great help to me but I've kind created the "game" aspects myself if you will. I use MyFitnessPal for my attempt to lose weight. It sets you calorie goals and you enter food and exercise into it throughout the day. As you do so, you see your remaining calories go down. The only goal the site gives you is "Try to end the day with the number above 0 and you'll lose weight."

Opt-in sites like MyFitnessPal don't bother me, and I've used them from time to time.

But the gamified component of our health insurance website irritates me to the point that I actively stay away from it. I don't really care about earning "life points", or just what "my coach" has to say to me. Because it's associated with the insurance company, it feels incredibly intrusive, whether or not there's any actual connection between data I enter there and data in the insurance system.

As someone who has lost significant weight and watched my wife do the same I know that that kind of thing only happens when the motivation comes from deep within. You have to be committed to making far-reaching changes and recommit to them moment by moment. Gamifying that will do nothing.

DSGamer wrote:

As someone who has lost significant weight and watched my wife do the same I know that that kind of thing only happens when the motivation comes from deep within. You have to be committed to making far-reaching changes and recommit to them moment by moment. Gamifying that will do nothing.

I disagree. While I've wanted to lose weight for years, it is true that part of the reason I'm having success now is because I really decided to knuckle down and commit to it now. However, the self-imposed gamified aspect I'm using with MyFitnessPal has without a doubt made the process much easier for me by giving me an easy way to set and monitor goals. I'm trying to lose weight purely by burning more calories than I take in because fancy diets are nonsense. I've tried calorie counting in my head before and it's nigh impossible to do so accurately. This site and the ease of which I can set and raise my personal goals by being able to easily pull up my daily numbers on my phone is without a doubt a big part of the reason I'm succeeding at this.

Perhaps this is not the best example because as Katy says, it's something I'm choosing to do. I do believe forcing a gamified concept on someone as her insurance company does is kind of scummy, at least if it's tied to anything. If they want to offer a totally optional thing that allows you to use gamification to pursue a healthier lifestyle that makes things better for them and you, I don't see the problem. If they start forcing you to use it or tying your level of coverage to how many "life points" you have, that's crossing the line. I think gamification is a great way to create engagement and quantify goals but it should never be something forced on people. Games by their nature are supposed to be entertainment, something we do because we want to. You make them compulsory, they're no longer games but work.

Being an adult isn't fun. There are lots of things we need to get done that we don't enjoy doing. If we create new systems to "manipulate" ourselves into getting that stuff done, isn't that good?

Parallax Abstraction wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

As someone who has lost significant weight and watched my wife do the same I know that that kind of thing only happens when the motivation comes from deep within. You have to be committed to making far-reaching changes and recommit to them moment by moment. Gamifying that will do nothing.

I disagree. While I've wanted to lose weight for years, it is true that part of the reason I'm having success now is because I really decided to knuckle down and commit to it now. However, the self-imposed gamified aspect I'm using with MyFitnessPal has without a doubt made the process much easier for me by giving me an easy way to set and monitor goals. I'm trying to lose weight purely by burning more calories than I take in because fancy diets are nonsense. I've tried calorie counting in my head before and it's nigh impossible to do so accurately. This site and the ease of which I can set and raise my personal goals by being able to easily pull up my daily numbers on my phone is without a doubt a big part of the reason I'm succeeding at this.

Right. But I would argue that the gaming aspect isn't what's motivating you. What's motivating you is that you just want to lose weight. Deep down. And the tools at your disposal are making that easier. That's far different than it being a game.

LobsterMobster wrote:

Being an adult isn't fun. There are lots of things we need to get done that we don't enjoy doing.

Maybe that's the problem in that our easy, even mobile, 24/7 access to stimulation and entertainment has reduced our ability to take pleasure and pride in the intrinsic value of doing what needs to be done for its own sake.

DSGamer wrote:

Right. But I would argue that the gaming aspect isn't what's motivating you. What's motivating you is that you just want to lose weight. Deep down. And the tools at your disposal are making that easier. That's far different than it being a game.

Fair enough yes. If I wasn't into the idea of losing weight, that MyFitnessPal allows me to make a game out of it probably wouldn't be enough to make me keep up the effort.

krev82 wrote:
LobsterMobster wrote:

Being an adult isn't fun. There are lots of things we need to get done that we don't enjoy doing.

Maybe that's the problem in that our easy, even mobile, 24/7 access to stimulation and entertainment has reduced our ability to take pleasure and pride in the intrinsic value of doing what needs to be done for its own sake.

I know the value of a job well done. I don't feel that glow of satisfaction after paying my bills.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

Right. But I would argue that the gaming aspect isn't what's motivating you. What's motivating you is that you just want to lose weight. Deep down. And the tools at your disposal are making that easier. That's far different than it being a game.

Fair enough yes. If I wasn't into the idea of losing weight, that MyFitnessPal allows me to make a game out of it probably wouldn't be enough to make me keep up the effort.

This in spades.

Gamification can be a force multiplier when it comes to motivation and stick-to-it-iveness.

Is it worth drawing a distinction between intrinsic gamification, where you are the one doing the gamification for yourself (as PA is doing with his weightloss), and extrinsic gamification, where an outside entity sets the game-structures (e.g. Achievements)?

My take is that the former is much more powerful than the latter in the long term, as it implies a much greater degree of personal investment, but that it is more costly (time and effort) to get set up in the first place.

DSGamer wrote:

Bad.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I post frequently about getting a lot of joy out of games where the fun is derived from doing things that aren't specifically scored or rewarded. I was bothered by it in games but ultimately began to think about extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation. My main concern, as it pertained to games, was that even games that were too heavily "game-y" ran the risk of stripping some of the organic fun and play, the creativity out.

Apply it to real life, though, and you quickly realize how bad it can be. Here's a good collection of articles on this subject that bubbled up a while back.

http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_Considered_Harmful%3F

I think my biggest concern at this point, setting aside imagination, creativity and how rewards and guided experiences could stomp on those virtues is that a person could get "hooked" on the extrinsic motivators for the wrong reasons, thus finding less joy in the activity for its own sake.

That's obviously a very extreme situation and we're not there. But you watch the way people participate in Twitter and Facebook and it's clear that people are willing to eschew in person relationships for the "quick hit" of online relationships. I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that this could go badly.

I just read that thread for the first time and I thought your post was really interesting and it's unfortunate the thread mostly consists of opinions on achievements themselves rather than the effects achievements have on gameplay.

I'd like to see some post mortems about achievement design from developers. I wonder if any of them have had to design around achievements rather than simply applying them on top of a finished game.

gregrampage wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

Bad.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I post frequently about getting a lot of joy out of games where the fun is derived from doing things that aren't specifically scored or rewarded. I was bothered by it in games but ultimately began to think about extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation. My main concern, as it pertained to games, was that even games that were too heavily "game-y" ran the risk of stripping some of the organic fun and play, the creativity out.

Apply it to real life, though, and you quickly realize how bad it can be. Here's a good collection of articles on this subject that bubbled up a while back.

http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_Considered_Harmful%3F

I think my biggest concern at this point, setting aside imagination, creativity and how rewards and guided experiences could stomp on those virtues is that a person could get "hooked" on the extrinsic motivators for the wrong reasons, thus finding less joy in the activity for its own sake.

That's obviously a very extreme situation and we're not there. But you watch the way people participate in Twitter and Facebook and it's clear that people are willing to eschew in person relationships for the "quick hit" of online relationships. I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that this could go badly.

I just read that thread for the first time and I thought your post was really interesting and it's unfortunate the thread mostly consists of opinions on achievements themselves rather than the effects achievements have on gameplay.

I'd like to see some post mortems about achievement design from developers. I wonder if any of them have had to design around achievements rather than simply applying them on top of a finished game.

I would welcome having that discussion. As you know, threads don't always go the way you intend them to.

If we create new systems to "manipulate" ourselves into getting that stuff done, isn't that good?

Sure, as long as you're only manipulating yourself or other people who realize it's a manipulation. If everyone wants to 'play the game', cool, go for it.

But tricking people into it, that sucks. I think of gamerscores and achievements as being a form of that.

Malor wrote:
If we create new systems to "manipulate" ourselves into getting that stuff done, isn't that good?

Sure, as long as you're only manipulating yourself or other people who realize it's a manipulation. If everyone wants to 'play the game', cool, go for it.

But tricking people into it, that sucks. I think of gamerscores and achievements as being a form of that.

Why's that? I've never felt particularly compelled to chase achievements.

My one really positive experience with self-gamification was around 2002-3, when I started Weight Watchers online - having the point system, and clear limitations allowed me to treat my weight loss as a project with gamelike strategies for what to eat and when, as well as exercise. I managed to drop about 50 pounds that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Why's that? I've never felt particularly compelled to chase achievements.

Me neither, but I know numerous people that chase them, and some that really obsess about them.

Me, I only worry about achievements if I get something for them in exchange. (like the new weapons in TF2.)

Malor wrote:
Why's that? I've never felt particularly compelled to chase achievements.

Me neither, but I know numerous people that chase them, and some that really obsess about them.

But you said you're cool with it if everyone wants to "play the game." Aren't people chasing them or obsessing over them just a case of people wanting to "play the game" more than you're comfortable with? It's not like anyone from Microsoft is telling them they have to unlock every achievement or tricking them into wanting a high gamerscore. They do have rewards for specific achievements like Valve does. In my experience it's only been cosmetic stuff though, and are purely optional.

Stengah wrote:

They do have rewards for specific achievements like Valve does. In my experience it's only been cosmetic stuff though, and are purely optional.

Through the last Steam sale I got a Valve Complete Pack and Portal 2 by chasing achievements.

gregrampage wrote:
Stengah wrote:

They do have rewards for specific achievements like Valve does. In my experience it's only been cosmetic stuff though, and are purely optional.

Through the last Steam sale I got a Valve Complete Pack and Portal 2 by chasing achievements.

Yes, but I was talking about Microsoft, not Valve.

Stengah wrote:
gregrampage wrote:
Stengah wrote:

They do have rewards for specific achievements like Valve does. In my experience it's only been cosmetic stuff though, and are purely optional.

Through the last Steam sale I got a Valve Complete Pack and Portal 2 by chasing achievements.

Yes, but I was talking about Microsoft, not Valve.

Gotcha, I read it wrong.

gregrampage wrote:
Stengah wrote:

They do have rewards for specific achievements like Valve does. In my experience it's only been cosmetic stuff though, and are purely optional.

Through the last Steam sale I got a Valve Complete Pack and Portal 2 by chasing achievements.

I don't think it's very manipulative when a company offers to give me free stuff if I play a game (while at the same time implying that it's OK if I don't, too).

Beside the issue of manipulation, there are plenty of things in our adult lives that could use better goal signposting and better, quicker and more quantifiable feedback. These are all things that games do really well (or intentionally don't do, at times). I like the idea of more of that being improved.

Here is a very long talk by Jonathan Blow that comments (albeit indirectly) on the ethics of gamification: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5...