The Gamification Distraction

From video game culture, a broader distraction from the real.





I have for some time had no small degree of discomfort with the whole concept of gamification, an idea and an approach that is now raging—as these things are wont to do—across industry, education, and institutions both governmental and non. The thinking seems to be that gamifying things has the power to radically accelerate the move from intention to action, and there are plenty of good examples that bear this out. In fact, I experienced one such example in my professional life recently, where gamification played a huge role in driving the success of a development program I had designed. More on that later, but the fact is my discomfort remained, which is why I was so thrilled to read Nathan Heller’s excellent review in this week’s NewYorker. It demystifies my discomfort and, I think, clarifies the whole issue.


Heller reviews the new book SuperBetter by Institute for the Future tank-thinker and repeat TedTalker Jane McGonigal. The book is, like most of McGonigal’s career, a celebration of the power of gaming to change lives for the better—nay, the superbetter! It is a prescription for a gamified lifestyle wherein the struggling human adopts McGonigal’s seven principles of the game and thereby transforms daily trials into fun and rewarding challenges one can conquer—kind of like reaching level 80 in World of Warcraft. This SuperBetter lifestyle prescription moves the popular concept of gamification out of the business, commercial, educational, and institutional spheres and into the sphere of daily life. But in doing so, as Heller adeptly explains, McGonigal runs into trouble.

My own brush with the power of gamification was in a business context, where results tend to be funneled toward the positive. Everyone wants the team to succeed. Everyone wants to be able to tell the team they succeeded. And, of course, everyone on the team wants to feel like they succeeded. In my case, my Sales Operations team succeeded in increasing what we called Sales DNA, a term we coined to describe the Operations team’s level of understanding of the Field Sales teams it is charged with supporting. We made little videos that told true stories from the field, packaged these up on a flashy, easy-to-use website, added in lessons, character bios, and thinly disguised quizzes, and gave the team a relatively persuasive management nudge (i.e., an e-mail from the VP) to go check it out. All that might have been enough—the presentation had a cool factor and the content was intriguing and important—but the thing that really drove the traffic to the site was the gamification element: We awarded “Sales DNA Points” for various activities on the site, offered cash awards to the top three point earners, and posted the points rankings twice a week. The results could not be described as anything but a success: Just shy of 100% of team members consumed 100% of the content, performance on quizzes was exceedingly high, and most importantly, a team that is widely dispersed across the globe generated a frenetic  amount of viral activity, posting hundreds of blogs and discussions, many of which generated long threads of commentary and questioning. In the end our metrics showed that Sales DNA had increased dramatically, and I personally received a barrage of accolades and awards for the program’s success.

So why the discomfort? First and foremost, there were some outliers, a few people on the team for whom earning Sales DNA Points became much more important than the true intended goal of increasing Sales DNA. This tilted focus led these people into behaviors uncharacteristic of the professionalism and integrity they normally demonstrate, and it left me discouraged. Despite the fact that the vast majority of the team acted in the spirit of the program, these few individuals required the erection, refinement, and maintenance of guardrails—a huge drain on me and on the organization as a whole.

But I can’t lay my discomfort on the wanderings of a few strays. What disturbs me more is something larger, which is that we in the developed Western world seem to be transforming into a species that requires some surface-level titillation in order to get important things done. The state government here in California, for example, is charged with funding and maintaining a public education system. Why do we need a state lottery—essentially a tax on the poor—to fund public education? Why can’t we all just decide to fund public education—without the games? Another example is the Stock Market, which exists to capitalize companies. Why do we need gambling bets like derivatives, short selling, long positions, and the rest on Wall Street? Why can’t we just decide to capitalize companies for growth—without the games? And in my much less consequential case of Sales DNA, we have a team in Sales Operations whose job it is to help Field Sales. Why isn’t that motivation enough to watch some videos, review some content, and learn about the day-to-day lives of those we’re charged to serve—without the games?

All of this, of course, expresses little more than a bias: a wish that humanity were something other than what it is. In these realms, games are here to stay, but what is encouraging about Nathan Heller’s review is that it makes a compelling case that, in spreading into the realm of self-help, gamification may have finally overstepped. SuperBetter charges authoritatively into the world of self-help, Heller explains, mainly because we are in an era of Fitbits and smartphone weight tracking apps:

Previously banished to the back shelves of the bookstore…self-help is cool again, because it comes with numbers. Progress is trackable, like Venus through the night sky. Data has become our diet.

It turns out, though, that McGonigal’s most compelling data in support of life gamification is actually self-contradictory. One study indicates that P.T.S.D. could be avoided by putting a Tetris game in front of a soldier, first responder, or assault victim soon after the traumatic experience, thus occupying the visual-processing centers of the brain so that the disturbing images cannot attach themselves. In another study, burn victims play a 3-D virtual-reality game while their wounds are being treated, monopolizing their cerebral resources and resulting in a 35−50% reduction in the pain they experience. But far from proving that gamification improves life experience, these examples show the opposite: that it improves life by distracting from the immediate experience. This is not to invalidate the findings or diminish their clinical potential; it is just to point out that it is folly to apply gamification across the whole of life experience, which is for most of us anything but harrowing, and is in fact well worth experiencing closely, mindfully, and free of distraction.

McGonigal will undoubtedly have lots of people gamifying their lives in short order. She is a compelling cult figure who has captivated intellectual sanctuaries like Ted and NPR to the point where I will undoubtedly think of her each time my local public radio station offers the Lumosity brain enhancement game during pledge week. (“Why not just read a freaking book?!” I typically shout at the car radio.) But while Nathan Heller’s review might not have given me vindication for my anti-game bias, it does at least place limits on the spread of the game—limits that will, as more and more lotteries and Lumosities and Freerice.com’s  parade before me, give me some amount of solace.