There are few more depressing scenes than the one painted by the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll in her book Addiction by Design. She describes slot-machine players in Las Vegas so absorbed in their gambling that, when one of them collapses after suffering a cardiac arrest at the slots, others neither notice nor make space for the paramedics.
As Schüll explains, these slot-machine superusers aren’t even playing in the hope of winning money, but because they find the machine soothingly absorbing. They have entered what we might call the “junk flow state” — a grotesque parody of what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow”, a state of intense focus and immersion in a challenging activity.
Disheartening stuff. But even more disheartening is the knowledge that the same techniques long ago escaped the casinos and settled on your smartphone. Now toddlers watch TikTok with the same slack-jawed expression as the slot-machine addicts, while couples interrupt their dates to show some love to their phones.
The “gamification” of your phone sounds as though it means making everything fun, like a game. It doesn’t. Instead it means adding elements such as points, league tables, streaks and pseudo-rewards. These feel exciting but are as valueless as the “false win” experienced by a slot-machine player who pays $5 for a spin and then, with bells and flashing lights going off, gets $3 back.
Gamification can be beneficial when it keeps people coming back to language-learning apps or exercise programmes. But it has more in common with addiction, and all too often it is deployed in circumstances which are questionable or outright harmful. Consider the pricey meditation app which will tally your uninterrupted streak of daily practice, leading to not-entirely-meditative anxieties about breaking the streak.
At least that’s funny. Less amusing are investment apps which gamify trading. They give unpredictable rewards to new users, display leader boards with the top traders or award points and badges for activity on the app. Both common sense and evidence from The Behavioural Insights Team suggest that such apps are likely to damage the wealth of investors. Gamification encourages investors to trade more often, which is profitable for the app makers but not for their users.
These are not unusual examples. They are all but inevitable, given how much smartphone software depends on advertising. Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, points out that smartphones have a way of subtly redirecting our attention from our desires to the desires of advertisers. Gamification is part of the way that our phones keep us checking in.
For a lover of games such as myself, the most irritating thing about gamification is that it besmirches the good name of fun. Catherine Price, author of The Power of Fun, coined the term “fake fun” to describe these travesties of the real thing. For real fun, she suggests, look for a flow state, social connection and a spirit of playfulness. As for fake fun, there is no need to look for that: a bottomless supply of fake fun is already looking for you.
This is a great shame, because — and I can hardly believe I am having to write this — fun is great. Fun is great for building skills. We have all absorbed the idea that to achieve high levels of skill in anything, you need thousands of hours of practice. But it’s much easier to practise for thousands of hours if practice is fun. In his book Hidden Potential, the psychologist Adam Grant describes the playful practice of basketball legend Steph Curry and percussion maestro Evelyn Glennie. In the game of “21”, Curry’s fitness coach challenges him to score 21 points in 60 seconds, sprinting back to the halfway line between each basket. Glennie might challenge herself to play a piece backwards. Why not? And importantly, Curry and Glennie aren’t outsourcing their practice to a grimly gamified tracker of streaks or leader boards. They start with what’s fun.
Ali Abdaal’s book Feel-Good Productivity suggests a similar approach to work. “What would this look like if it was fun?” Abdaal asks himself, looking for the playfulness which leavens a difficult day. Steven Johnson’s book Wonderland even makes the case that “play made the modern world”: our games, sports, music and even stage magic have fuelled innovations in everything from chemistry to computing.
Still, this is all a bonus. The real purpose of fun is not to motivate more effective practice, to keep you going through a tough afternoon at work or to inspire the invention of software. The real purpose of fun is that it has no particular purpose at all: it’s one of those truly rare things in life worth having for its own sake.
In 2005, I visited Las Vegas to research my first-ever feature for the FT Weekend Magazine about how geeks took over poker. I watched the packed hall at the World Series of Poker, full of players who, despite the high stakes, the long hours and intense competition, definitely seemed to be having fun. Social connection, flow and perhaps even playfulness were all in evidence, even as both the pressure and the chips mounted.
How different was my evening, when I went to the bar and chatted to another journalist over a beer. While we talked, he fed a $100 bill into a slot machine that was built into the surface of the bar itself. Then he stabbed away at the screen, muttering, “This is so stupid.” It was a glimpse of our gamified future. It wore the trappings of fun, but it wasn’t fun at all.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 26 July 2024.
Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.
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