Soviet gamification

Soviet gamification
kmjn.org

Part of my argument, though I make it more clearly in an expanded, short-paper version of this essay [1], is that the "gamification" part devolved into just regular old Stalinist command-and-control: production quotas and such, with a thin facade of worker autonomy and "voluntary" competition spread across it. That's one of the things people worry about with modern gamification as well, that a "game" that's a mandatory part of your job is not really much of a game, and more like old-fashioned, top-down control than the gamification consultants' uplifting rhetoric would like you to believe (e.g. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/19/local/la-me-1019-lop...).

[1] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2115483

Considering how token economies [1] are generally successful as motivators (HN karma, anyone?) I'd say this has less to do with idiocy and more with the "human nature".

BTW, if anyone wants a good, quick introduction to the criticism of gamification I can recommend the Errant Signal video on the subject [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_economy

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWfMjQKXZXk

I agree with you. The country went from a civil war and foreign invasion (including by the US, something I'm sure 99% of Americans don't even know) and then 25 years later were invaded by an alliance of Germany, Finland, Italy, Hungary and other countries. Followed by a Cold War against a nuclear armed opponent and its western European allies.

Yet during the 1930s, when starving veterans were being shot dead in the streets of Washington DC, when unemployment in the US and Europe was over 20%, the Soviet economy was booming. Massive steel factories were erected in places such as Magnitogorsk, and factories building tractors to send to industrialize agriculture. The US said Russia stole all technology from the US - until Russia launched Sputnik. You can't blame the adversary for stealing IP when they're doing things you can't do.

China also was a rural backwater, dominated by Europeans and Japanese until the 20th century. Under the leadership of the politburo of the communist party, its economy has been growing 10% a year since the early 1980s. People say that is unsustainable, but they've been saying that since the late 1980s. I'm sure their growth will slow down eventually, but they're already the second largest economy in the world by GDP. Of course, the politburo is not as left wing as it was during the height of the Cultural Revolution.

The USSR economy did stagnate when Stalin died, and people like Molotov were sidelined. Capital spending decreased, policies like detente were enacted, and the economy stagnated. The economy did very well before this change in policy though. American and European workers and firms went to the USSR in the 1920s because there was work and contracts in their growing economy, while the US economy went off the hinges. Kind of like the current US unemployment rate which is higher than anything since the mid-1980s.

> Yet during the 1930s, when starving veterans were being shot dead in the streets of Washington DC, when unemployment in the US and Europe was over 20%, the Soviet economy was booming.

Oh yes. The US and Europe credited the Soviet Union well, and the Soviet Union paid in gold.

At the same time, Soviet authorities robbed its own people, partly by putting hundreds of thousands to forced labor camps, partly by just taking away their possessions. The great hunger of 1935, with massive human casualties, has happened because grain was expropriated from peasants to be sold for gold, and the gold was spent to build massive steel factories and weaponry plants, using American and German expertise.

With regard to shooting people dead, USSR was not shy of action at all. Massive death sentences in 1935-1939 witch hunt campaign plus cruel oppression of several riots against expropriations and hunger account for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

(If you can't look this up in Wikipedia yourself, I'll gladly help you.)

Trust me, this is not a model of growth you'd enjoy.

Regarding gamification — yes, that was one of brighter ideas. Too bad that real competition was often replaced by a fake that made bosses happy, using massive falsification of results.

You want a competition between producers? Have you tried the so-called 'market'?