Gotta violate the magic circle. Or establish a new one.
Why everything is becoming a game
11–20 of 84 posts
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#12[dead]
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#13I don't agree with the positive feedback loop being THE thing about games. It's the fact that games offer a sense of progress that life does not. The skinner box implies animalistic pleasure associations that we just want to keep hitting. The progress wanting is simply desiring structure and context to your effort. They're similar but not the same.
I don't think life has no sense of progress. I've been fiddling with motor vehicles on and off over my lifetime (mid fifties now) and progressed from simple tune ups to now re-building engines. It took a long time to get the "feel" of what's right and one outright failure. But I can see the progress I've made over that relatively long space of time in that I understand much better what I'm doing and why, what is OK a…
> Nobody is going to be able to [find progression and meaning] for you and it takes a conscious effort rather than just expecting it to happen.
I believe you've just given the tl;dr for Existentialism.
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think life has no sense of progress. I've been fiddling with motor vehicles on and off over my lifetime (mid fifties now) and progressed from simple tune ups to now re-building engines. It took a long time to get the "feel" of what's right and one outright failure. But I can see the progress I've made over that relatively long space of time in that I understand much better what I'm doing and why, what is OK a…
That's fair. I should have said "little" sense of progress. Practice and mastery is certainly a thing you can observe progress on. But the things people are gamifying tend not to be those things.
I didn't mean my comment to come across as a criticism (my apologies), just an observation. I would agree that gamification seems to have confined itself to immediate and facile activities.
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think life has no sense of progress. I've been fiddling with motor vehicles on and off over my lifetime (mid fifties now) and progressed from simple tune ups to now re-building engines. It took a long time to get the "feel" of what's right and one outright failure. But I can see the progress I've made over that relatively long space of time in that I understand much better what I'm doing and why, what is OK a…
> Nobody is going to be able to [find progression and meaning] for you and it takes a conscious effort rather than just expecting it to happen. I believe you've just given the tl;dr for Existentialism.
Ha ha - imagine that the secret of true happiness is something like noticing you got better at something you enjoy. It can't be that simple, right?
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#16It seems weird to me that the article lists several gamified apps without mentioning advertising. It seems obvious to me that gamified apps like Duolingo are incentivesed to keep eyeballs glued to screens mostly because advertisers pay per view, and strange not to mention this as a reason why we see so much of it in this space. Maybe the author thought it was too obvious to mention.
Advertising makes up only 9% of Duolingo's revenue and is also usually a small part of the revenue of most mobile games. Mobile games rely on "whales" (people who pay a lot, like a casino) and Duolingo makes almost all of its revenue on subscriptions. Both require sticky retention but advertisers don't drive the business model or executive decisions at these companies.
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#17I felt like the stuff about Kaczynski, while interesting, was a diversion. The meat is the beginning and the end: Skinner, how conditioning led to gamification which led to the addiction economy, and then strategies for turning the tables and take charge by choosing what games to play and how to play them. An evolved and condensed version of the closing with practical examples and practice exercises should be taught…
> which led to the addiction economy...
If people had fulfilling lives, consumed by work, family, community, and culture, there'd be little room for such addiction. The real story is a loss of meaning; it's a crisis of nihilism, more than gamification.
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#18https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification has citations for that word and trend as early as 2013.
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#19It seems weird to me that the article lists several gamified apps without mentioning advertising. It seems obvious to me that gamified apps like Duolingo are incentivesed to keep eyeballs glued to screens mostly because advertisers pay per view, and strange not to mention this as a reason why we see so much of it in this space. Maybe the author thought it was too obvious to mention.
Advertising makes up only 9% of Duolingo's revenue and is also usually a small part of the revenue of most mobile games. Mobile games rely on "whales" (people who pay a lot , like a casino) and Duolingo makes almost all of its revenue on subscriptions. Both require sticky retention but advertisers don't drive the business model or executive decisions at these companies.
[deleted]
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#20> Most of the feedback loops in employment — from salary payments to annual performance appraisals — were torturously long. So Coonradt proposed shortening them by introducing daily targets, points systems, and leaderboards. These conditioned reinforcers would transform work from a series of monthly slogs into daily status games, in which employees competed to fulfil the company’s goals.
My first thought was that working for such a company would be torture.
My second thought was that this basically describes Agile/Scrumm and has taken over the entire industry.