If it looks like a game, sounds like a game, talks like a game, is it a game? That’s the whole deal with gamification, turning other activities into games, and it is pretty obvious to see that in apps, from learning a language in Duolingo, logging your health activities in a fitness app, to even sending pictures to friends in Snapchat (do people still use it??? For those who do, do you guys remember the content of the photos after you send them? I never do).
Let’s use Duolingo as an example: every lesson you do in the app earns you XP (experience), the more XP the higher your level is. Every week they check if you are on the top of the leader board, comparing to other users, and upgrade your division (gold, silver, bronze…). And the most obvious and more generalized aspect of gamification: every time you use the app it counts towards a streak, which is only a badge that says you have been using the app for that number of days, and the streak resets to zero if you miss a day.
What is the goal of doing this? Well, from the user’s point of view, turning a “boring” activity into a game, can give them extra motivation. You don’t want to lose the streak, you don’t want to be downgraded from the division, you want to win, to be the best, to get better, so you open the app every day and do what is needed. From the app developer’s point of view is even better: you are forcing the user to open your app every day, and this brings them joy, it is a feature they will tell other people.
It sounds like a fairy tale, but sometimes the happy ever after is not actually the ending, just like with God AI. The gamification system works quite well until it doesn’t. All the motivation it gives you to keep working on the task can also work as a demotivating feature or even provoke anxiety.
Going back to the Duolingo example: imagine if you have been learning French for a year, using the app every day, so you have a streak of 365 days, a great accomplishment. But unfortunately today you were sick, or too busy with the rest of your life and you were not able to do the lesson. Your streak is lost, you went back to 0… I know that some people will think “Oh no, but that’s okay, I can rebuild my streak and go even further than 365 😃”, but I also know that I, and possibly a lot of people, will think “ Oh merde, you know what, it was a lot of work to get the streak of 365, and I don’t want to start again, I will give up 😡”.
Another example: if you use a fitness app, like Apple Fitness/Watch, you are probably used to the idea of rings, or visual metrics that show if you have achieved your goal. A goal can be walking 1, 5, or 10km a day, or any other health metric. In a similar way as with Duolingo, if you complete your goals for X days in a month you get medals, and you can compare yourself to friends and so on. The problem here is two: 1. giving up on doing something because there are only 10 days left in a month and you need to achieve your goals for more than 15 days to earn a medal; 2. the feeling of anxiety that you feel because you HAVE to run/cycle/exercise a lot and every day to be the best and get all the prizes. And when you do that, without a chance to recover, there is a high chance of your body giving up, and you ending up back to not doing a thing (or with an injury).
So the idea is that gamification is great for bringing motivation and turning boring tasks into fun activities (if you like games, otherwise, is just a way of turning boring activities into boring activities). But please, keep in mind that your life is not a game. There will be days that you won’t be able to use the apps and do the tasks, and there will also be days that you shouldn’t do them. It is better to do things slowly and for a long time than to give a burst and die before the finish line (not literally, I hope).
I am almost sure Paulo Coelho was talking about gamification when in 1998 he said ““I want to continue being crazy; living my life the way I dream it, and not the way the other people [apps] want it to be.”, I am almost sure…