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Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)

austinhenley.com

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Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)

#31

Post by atomicfiredoll »

rmvt wrote: post #8
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #3

I think this article is written a bit like that cash register anecdote. There is no conclusion other than examples why you are this way. Why do you think you are like this? Not everyone is - I’m not. But I’m currently working on a rewards gamification system in a surgical-medical training device and we’re discovering in user-testing that while yes, medical students do fixate on optimizing their scores, the system doe…

> For me gamification turns some things into a slog. same for me. i admit it still feels nice to "watch the number go up", mostly on content platforms with a social component to it (hn, reddit, stackoverflow) as you feel whatever you've said has either been useful to, or at least resonated with someone. as social creatures it's only normal to seek some sort of validation. i think the only gamification set of features…

I've been very skeptical of gamification ever since seeing a marketing agency constantly pitch it as a way to increase user engagement and sales. Now it's a red flag that makes me ask, "what are you trying to manipulate me in to buying or doing?" The experience has been impactful enough that even I stopped caring as much about "achievements" in actual games.

Duolingo is interesting because it shows me I'll still engage with gamification if my goals align, but all those mechanics become a bit heavy. When I want flashcards and grammar lessons, getting a game to manage pushed me away. Then, when I realized our goals didn't align due to Duolingo's ceiling, it didn't seem worth being pressed to such an uncomfortable degree. I won't let myself be mentally abused by a cartoon owl.

Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)

#32

Post by dav_Oz »

>Schools do a terrible job with their gamification of grades so my GPA and attendance were terrible.

Well, it is simply another skillset since at some point you have to game the teachers setting the grades, which involves other kinds of (meta-)hacks. I remember one student who specifically asked every professor at the start of the semester what he had to do in order to get the best grade and then he meticulously kept track of the "progress", some teachers were very reluctant to do so in "specific" terms but in the end he "gamed" it successfully.

As a fun side note from the Old Continent: There is a kind of "ultimate achievement ring" of academia in Austria which dates at least back to the monarchy times under Ferdinand II and in its secularized form is now called "Promotio sub auspiciis Praesidentis rei publicae" and accordingly specified in Austrian federal law [0][1] which has to be followed by each Uni and kept updated[2].

The gist: perfect scores beginning from "Sekundarstufe II" (~ age 14-15) to the terminal degree "PhD/doctorate" achieved in regular time or better.

A fun side note of the fun side note: In 1910, Erwin Schrödinger who formally passed all the requirements for a "sub auspiciis" didn't get to put on the "ring of honor" because the University of Vienna at the time limited the award to only 3 candidates/year, he would have been the fourth one.

[0]https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/Dokument.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnormen&...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub_auspiciis_Praesidentis#Pro...

[2]https://senat.univie.ac.at/promotion-sub-auspiciis-praesiden...

Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)

#33

Post by sokoloff »

dav_Oz wrote: post #32

> Schools do a terrible job with their gamification of grades so my GPA and attendance were terrible. Well, it is simply another skillset since at some point you have to game the teachers setting the grades, which involves other kinds of (meta-)hacks. I remember one student who specifically asked every professor at the start of the semester what he had to do in order to get the best grade and then he meticulously kep…

It's pleasing that Schrödinger simultaneously did and did not earn that honor.

Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)

#34

Post by Hitton »

naillo wrote: post #21

I like to make new HN accounts every few months to avoid falling into this trap (i.e. feeling an obligation to sink more time into HN or reddit because I'm proud of the amount of points I have).

I have a userscript which among other things hides your score. I call this feature anti narcissism switch.

Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)

#35

Post by Hnrobert42 »

hef19898 wrote: post #14
number6 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need a bookmark. Just open a book. It is a progress bar in itself.

My parents hated it when I just bent over the uper corners of pages. Still do, to mark progress, and to mark interesting pages for later reference in text books.

You might be interested in page points. They are little metals tabs folded over so you can slide them onto a page’s edge. I like them better than bookmarks because they point to the exact line where I stopped reading.

Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)

#36

Post by ScoobleDoodle »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #27
TrackerFF wrote: post #20

I know it's only semantics, but it kind of bugs me how the saying "level up your [regular life skills]" has become so prevalent the past few years. Mainly because it give this illusion that once you've "leveled up" in something, you'll stay at that level forever - like in video games. But the truth is that all skills need to be honed and maintained, or else they will falter. Anyone that's been active in sports, music…

I never really noticed it as a key component to their success, but some of my favorite games model the degradation of skill over time. Both CDDA and Rimworld do this, and as a result, you end up with characters that are more nuanced and specialized, but also moldable into the “next right thing,” whatever you think that might be. Maybe it is the thing that makes these games fundamentally compelling over a longer time…

CDDA stands for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world.

Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)

#39

Post by FrustratedMonky »

adrianhon wrote: post #17

Self-promo: If you're interested in the rise of gamification, how it works (and doesn't work), and how it's being used in workplaces, schools, governments, and social media, I published a book last year called You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All . https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adrian-hon/youve-be... I've been designing games for twenty years, and I'm C…

Love Zombies, Run. How Gamification can be used positively.

Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)

#40

Post by Karellen »

greazy wrote: post #24
devjab wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark as a software developer, enterprise architect and later manager, and you wouldn’t believe the amount of gamification attempts that I have seen fail. I’m not sure where they come from. Ok, maybe I should clarify that. I understand how gamification is a very effective psychological tool to get people to spend a lot of time on things they wouldn’t otherw…

There is a good bit of research in the medical field. Eg here's a meta study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33128662/ I found this bit of the abstract interesting: > However, most studies lacked well-defined control groups and did not apply and/or report theory to understand underlying processes. This paper seems to be a good overview of the theories underlying gamification https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti…

> A good example is the Odin project study paths, or Khan Academy courses.

One other example that has a few of my friends hooked is Duolingo.

Learning another language was something they'd wanted to do, and had tried to do in the past. They just had trouble sticking to putting the work in.

But Duolingo's particular brand of gamification has got them doing the thing they always wanted to do, but never got round to before, and they now compare streaks of activity of more than a year.

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