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Soviet gamification

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Re: Soviet gamification

#31

Post by elteto »

oddx wrote: post #20
nine_k wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A former Soviet citizen here. > 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 l…

May be it was no best model, but about "hundreds of thousands to forced labor camps"- it was about 1 million people in GULAG before second world war (0.59% of 170 millions population). For modern USA incarceration rate is 0.74%. Are you sure it's better model? > You want a competition between producers? Have you tried the so-called 'market'? Market is nice when you have many producers. But as soon as company became '…

Yeah right, you had access to free healthcare, 3 meals a day and a lot of leisure time in a Soviet gulag. You are delusional if you think you can compare them.

Re: Soviet gamification

#32

Post by omonra »

CleanedStar wrote: post #7

"Of course, the Soviet economy is not widely held up as a model of success." 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 allie…

Lies. Don't see the point to argue, just couldn't let someone lie through their teeth without calling them on it.

But if anybody wants to understand that Stalin's USSR was pretty much a mirror image of Nazi Germany (they were evil to same degree - Stalin actually pulled genocide on Ukrainians before Hitler did it to the Jews), please make sure to read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stali...

Re: Soviet gamification

#33

Post by mjn »

omonra wrote: post #29

Author might want to learn about soviet laws about mandatory work & punishment for 'absenteeism' "On 8 January 1939, the government made clear that an unauthorized lateness of 20 minutes (or taking a break 20 minutes too long, or leaving 20 minutes early) counted as absenteeism, grounds for mandatory dismissal (Pravda, 9 Jan 1939). Transportation breakdowns (a common event) were no excuse; a doctor's certificate was…

(I'm the author.) What makes you think I'm not aware of those? The essay is in effect an attempt to express skepticism about gamification by pointing out that it looks awfully similar to something that was tried in the '20s/'30s in the USSR. Admittedly I make that point more clearly in the expanded paper version of the essay (linked at the bottom), where I discuss the descent of the '20s / early '30s gamification experiments into late-'30s Stakhanovism.

I think there is overall (including today) some pretty strong internal difficulty when claiming to "gamify" work but still retaining the context of a hierarchically controlled workplace where work is mandatory, with penalties tied to the "game". Then it devolves into just another method of workplace accounting & control.

Re: Soviet gamification

#34

Post by elteto »

alive-or-not wrote: post #2

Author doesn't seem to know exactly how successful the Soviet Union was with this tactic. In four years - 1929 to 1933 - it transformed from an agrarian country, devastated by wars, to world second industrial power. Just a few years later USSR was capable of outproducing in many areas the whole of Europe under fascist control. As a side node gamification drives me mad. IMHO only an idiot would care about made up "ach…

At what price?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Re: Soviet gamification

#35

Post by omonra »

mjn wrote: post #33
omonra wrote: post #29

Author might want to learn about soviet laws about mandatory work & punishment for 'absenteeism' "On 8 January 1939, the government made clear that an unauthorized lateness of 20 minutes (or taking a break 20 minutes too long, or leaving 20 minutes early) counted as absenteeism, grounds for mandatory dismissal (Pravda, 9 Jan 1939). Transportation breakdowns (a common event) were no excuse; a doctor's certificate was…

(I'm the author.) What makes you think I'm not aware of those? The essay is in effect an attempt to express skepticism about gamification by pointing out that it looks awfully similar to something that was tried in the '20s/'30s in the USSR. Admittedly I make that point more clearly in the expanded paper version of the essay (linked at the bottom), where I discuss the descent of the '20s / early '30s gamification exp…

Ok - apologies, I must have misread it.

It's just to me - discussing Soviet attempts at gamification without mentioning things like the law I described or placement of peasants back into serfdom (after they had been granted freedom 60 years earlier) is akin to discussing whether Nazi train schedules were effective.

Re: Soviet gamification

#36

Post by moxie »

samatman wrote: post #28
moxie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the purges of the 30s and 50s, the most dangerous place to be was a member of the central committee. Ordinary workers were not affected by the bulk of the purges (and to some extent did not even realize they were happening), with the notable exception of Jews during weird Stalinst manipulations like the Mingrelian affair. As recently as 2009, 60% of Russians preferred the Soviet days (with older citizens that…

Your first paragraph is astonishingly untrue, and a comparison to Holocaust denial would not be unfair. Middle of the road estimates for those murdered by gulag are around 40 million. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM That matters in Russia worsened after the fall of Communism is separated by decades from the nadir of Stalinist violence.

Those are by no means "middle of the road" estimates. What we now know (and everyone from Suny to Sudoplatov agrees) is that most 20th century estimates of Stalin's crimes are greatly exaggerated. Specifically, it was long thought that everyone who went into the gulag died there, and it wasn't until the post-soviet years that we learned most didn't.

So it depends on how you count (is famine murder?), but the number intentionally killed by Stalin is much closer to 6 million. And again, this was not primarily a worker phenomenon, but was centered more towards specific peasant classes ("kulaks") and nationalist separatist movements (particularly in the Ukraine). It was also something that wasn't totally known, until Khrushchev's "revelations" (which were also largely dishonest themselves).

Since you're comparing me to a Holocaust Denier, I'll refer you to Timothy Snyder (a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a history professor at Yale)'s article which summarizes a lot of the current thinking:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-...

But again, I think what's perhaps most important, was that at the height of the purges, from 1934 to 1936, the absolute most dangerous place to be was in the central committee. During that period, 80% of the central committee members were killed. That's significant because the Stalinist nightmare is often explained as a willingness to sacrifice living humans for ideology, which I think is much too simple. It wasn't the obvious power relationship seen in Facism throughout that period of an elite group killing a subservient population, but of those in power actually killing each-other.

Re: Soviet gamification

#37

Post by Zigurd »

alive-or-not wrote: post #2

Author doesn't seem to know exactly how successful the Soviet Union was with this tactic. In four years - 1929 to 1933 - it transformed from an agrarian country, devastated by wars, to world second industrial power. Just a few years later USSR was capable of outproducing in many areas the whole of Europe under fascist control. As a side node gamification drives me mad. IMHO only an idiot would care about made up "ach…

Re "only an idiot would care about made up 'achievements'"

Napoleon said about military medals: "With such baubles, men are led." And yet, even in this forum, you will probably find some people eager to explain how that's not the same at all.

In designing any system of incentives you have to figure in, or be fortunate to get right, how irrational people are about incentives. The market is a darwinian engine for optimizing irrational responses. Sometimes that's brilliant, and sometimes it isn't.

Re: Soviet gamification

#38

Post by orbitingpluto »

I remember reading an article about Soviet nail factories competing against other nail Soviet nail factories. To boost production everyone ended up creating worthless pin sized nails: one point per pin. To correct this they shifted to production by weight, leading to crude low quality heavy nails.

Gamification doesn't work unless it actually means something.

Re: Soviet gamification

#39

Post by mjn »

orbitingpluto wrote: post #38

I remember reading an article about Soviet nail factories competing against other nail Soviet nail factories. To boost production everyone ended up creating worthless pin sized nails: one point per pin. To correct this they shifted to production by weight, leading to crude low quality heavy nails. Gamification doesn't work unless it actually means something.

As an academic, this sounds remarkably like what's going on with our own "gamification" of academic publishing, with impact factors, citation counts, h-indices, acceptance rate targets, journal points systems, etc. People do strange things which happen to maximize ("game", as it were) those metrics.

Re: Soviet gamification

#40

Post by tatumizer »

avmich wrote: post #30
kostya-kow wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a side node gamification drives me mad. IMHO only an idiot would care about made up "achievements". Idiots make an overwhelming majority of population.

Idiots include also that vocal part of population longing for - and getting - Nobel prizes. One ought to realize how different SU was in 20s, 50s, even 70s from Russia today. People in SU thought about themselves and their country very similarly as it is in US now - the most progressive country, and of course, the smartest and overall best people. Little doubt about that. Tokens were much more serious then - in US on…

"if you're good, you can perhaps show an Order" ??? Is it your wild guess? Who told you this nonsense? Gamification was executed so badly - it was complete absurd. It was anti-motivation rather than a motivation. Everything was fake, everybody ridiculed it, no one ever taken it seriously within my memory (since mid-60s).
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