![]() What’s more, these long, high-pressure hours come at a terrible human cost. Hon writes: "There’s another way to describe workers labouring longer for the samepay: it’s called cutting their wages. Indeed, as Hon points out, it feels more like an updated version of Victorian factory conditions, in which bosses sought to extract every ounce of labour from their workforce, no matter the consequences. The programs have finely tuned tricks to tap into your mind so that we work harder, faster, and longer." None of this looks remotely like fun. They also provide incentives that boost your score for returning from break faster. "In another game, you attempt to complete missions that have you work faster and faster for longer periods of time. "Take away the points and rewards in most gamified experiences, and you’re left with nothing" You might race one-on-one as flying dragons against a nearby worker or compete as a floor against another floor for your Amazon mascot to run faster around the course. In 2019, Amazon warehouse worker Postyn Smith, described the company's workplace games: "Most of the games involve some aspect of competition. Later he adds: "Take away the points and rewards in most gamified experiences, and you’re left with nothing." Anecdotes abound of corporate overreach, when it comes to gaming. "The answer for Zelda, for Tetris, for Mario, for Elden Ring, for Hades, is a resounding yes. "Just remove all the points and rewards and achievements from a game … and see if people will still play it," he writes. They are features of games, and not particularly important ones at that. Hon makes the point that gamification's primary features, such as points, badges, challenges, levels, and leaderboards are not games. The games they are required to play are extra work for them, and failure to "win" has onerous consequences. I can choose to learn Spanish via a gamification app, and I might even enjoy the challenges and rewards embedded within the game. But it's hard to see how these games are anything other than a burden for the people required to play them. Amazon and Uber use just such games to motivate workers. They are devices to track, measure and punish workers. The most egregious examples that Hon puts forth are apps that reward workers for hitting labour targets, which are embedded inside games. These apps are only interested in the goals of the employer. Workplace and coercive gamification ignores the user's motivation. Many companies ask employees to engage in games related to their labour activities. This is where workplace games come into focus. The app's gamification is not powerful enough to make Duolingo an entertaining game in its own right. Duolingo's effectiveness diminishes when the user has no external motivation. It works because "users are already highly motivated to learn, perhaps because they’re moving to another country for work," according to Hon. It's a bunch of lessons with motivational gamification tools, like badges, achievements, and streaks. While many gamification implementations do deliver – language teacher Duolingo is a fine example – many are intrusive and exploitative and are apt to make the lives of their users significantly worse, Hon argues. But as game designer Adrian Hon argues in his entertaining book " You've Been Played (How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All)", the key difference between Mary Poppins and many gamification applications, is that Poppins was interested in improving the lives of her charges, while most of the companies behind gamification apps are emphatically not interested in the wellbeing of their users. Gamification makes the same promise – it's essentially a system for turning real world activities into games, by adding challenges, prizes, leaderboards and all that. The children had fun, and they completed their chores. Being a nanny of exceptional ability, she delivered on her promise. Mary Poppins sang that "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," meaning that boring household chores can be turned into fun activities. ![]() In his book, developer Adrian Hon excoriates a one-time utopian idea: that gaming can be used to "motivate" workers
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