The Gamification of Humanity

YOU’VE BEEN PLAYED: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All, by Adrian Hon

When did daily life come to feel so much like a competition? In “You’ve Been Played,” Adrian Hon traces how and why gamification — the application of video-game principles like experience points, streaks, leader boards, badges and special challenges — has come to suffuse nearly every aspect of human existence in the digital era. Examples range from exercise (Nike, Strava), housework (Chore Wars) and brushing your teeth (Pokémon Smile), to — more disturbingly — going to school (ClassDojo) or work (Amazon warehouses’ PicksInSpace).

Hon slips easily between the perspectives of expert, enthusiast and critic. An education in neuroscience informs his explanation of the behaviorist underpinnings of gamification. And in his capacity leading the games company behind the popular running app Zombies, Run!, much of his working life is spent tussling with these issues. Some of the book’s most insightful moments come when Hon discusses how his team considers ethics and user experience when deciding how much to use gamification tricks in their own work.

Hon is also an unabashed fan of video games who admits to spending hundreds of hours compulsively playing titles that run the gamut of gamer respectability, from Civilization to Candy Crush. He clearly remains a believer in the promise of games and their principles, when used right, to delight people and even improve their lives.

The breadth of sources Hon marshals is evidence, too, of his grounding in the subject. Some are to be expected: books released by M.I.T. Press, work by well-known commentators like Neil Postman and Ian Bogost, news articles from mainstream and gaming publications, plus a handful of loftier references like Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” and Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish.” But throughout, the book also quotes liberally from ordinary users’ posts on social networks and internet forums. This firsthand testimony — an outsourced Amazon driver’s complaint that the company’s ranking-and-scoring app is inaccurate and disincentivizes safe driving, for instance — is often illuminating and persuasive.

That Hon is neither Luddite nor scold lends his criticisms of gamification bite and authority. “You’ve Been Played” is at its sharpest when Hon dresses down lazy or coercive gamification. He builds a case that the deliberate layering of generic points, leader boards, missions and the like atop any kind of human behavior is at best useless and at worst insidious.

Even more convincing, and fascinating, is his examination of how employers and schools use gamification strategies to justify and facilitate near-constant surveillance of workers and students, opening them up to punishment for deviations from perfect behavior even when the boss or teacher isn’t looking. Hon makes a strong and sophisticated argument that workplace gamification is in fact “doubly coercive,” since workers are less able to opt out of the experience that is pushing them into choices they wouldn’t otherwise make, potentially even dangerous ones like driving longer hours to achieve a “reward” from Uber.

Less cogent are digressions into some au courant topics for digital hand-wringing, like conspiracy theories and crowdsourcing criminal investigations, whose relevance here is less obvious. Hon draws out at length an analogy between QAnon and alternate reality games, both of which scratch adherents’ itch to fall down rabbit holes, uncover secrets and trace connections. But this is proof that our larger society reflects game mechanics, not necessarily that it’s being villainously driven by them. QAnon, infamously sprawling and atomized, lacks an individual malevolent actor or even central force to hold to account, so the comparison leaves the reader wanting.

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