Instant Genius - How our lives are being gamified, with Adrian Hon

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

Whether you’re learning a new skill, trying to get healthy or simply progressing at work, you’ve likely experienced gamification. We speak to Adrian Hon, an author and games creator about why we should be cautious of gamification and its risks. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. From BBC Science Focus Magazine, this is Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Alex Hughes, staff writer at Science Focus magazine. This week, I'm joined by Adrian Hon. He's an expert in gamification

and the author of the book, You've Been Played. He explains how gamification has seeped into our everyday lives, how it can be used for exploitation, and what we can do to have a healthy relationship with it. So for those who don't know, can you explain what gamification is and a bit about where it's come from, its history? Sure. So gamification is using ideas from video games and game design for non-game purposes. So it might be like making education or getting fit. more fun using ideas from game design. And, you know, those sorts of things have been around for a very long time. We have all sorts of game-like incentives across schools and, you know,

through history for centuries. But the term gamification itself really only appeared about 15 years ago in the late 2000s. And that's when we started seeing a lot more game design elements being incorporated into apps and into other kind of digital services. And obviously with the average game, you have good games, you have bad games. What's the difference between good and bad gamification? When am I being played and when am I being supported to learn in a fun way? Well, I mean, part of that is in the eye of the beholder. It's a bit like saying, you know, what is good TV, what is bad TV, what's a good

company, what's a bad company. I think there are, I think, some pretty bright lines. So, for example, you might have a app that helps you. you learn a new language and it might use game design principles to ease you in or to make it a bit more interesting learning vocabulary. And I think most people would say, well, that seems harmless. Maybe it's even even very good. On the other hand, we have some examples of gamification. They're a bit more shaded. So, for example, some people say that the gamification in Peloton, you know, the spin cycle bike is a great way to motivate them to cycle more through the leaderboards and the achievements.

But we've also had some people say that they feel a lot of pressure to maintain their streak, you know, to keep exercising every day and to keep on climbing that leaderboard to the point where they get really anxious and they even potentially over-exercised and hurt themselves. And so that's a place where gamification can be potentially harmful. But then on the bad side, I would say there are games that, essentially are, I think, fairly clearly trying to manipulate people into more harmful behavior. So, for example, gambling apps might use gamification to get punters to spend more than they've planned. Or in the workplace, sometimes gamification is used to surveil people and to sort of get

them to work harder and longer than is maybe safe. And you talked a bit about gamification in the workplace there. I guess there's optional gamification, like health out, like the Peloton that you mentioned, and then there's the workplace ones or other ones where you maybe don't so much have a choice in your use of this service. Does that choice play a role in your experience of gamification? I think it's an important part of it. Yeah. And even that, you know, it's not just a binary. So, I mean, a good example of gamification in the workplace is with Uber drivers. So there's a lot of gamification across a gig economy, with people who deliver staff and people who are doing kind of freelance jobs.

And so for a lot of Uber drivers, millions of Uber drivers, they will get offered quests and incentives and all sorts of gamified design elements in the app to get them to drive to different areas or to maybe drive more than they'd like to. And if you look at conversations between Uber drivers, and a lot of them do not like this gamification, you know, they see it as manipulative. and promising prizes or extra money that don't materialize. But it's kind of, I think what, now you could say maybe people should just go to ignore this if it doesn't work.

But I think that what a lot of gamification does is it takes advantage of the positive associations a lot of us have from video games. You know, when you're playing a video game or a board game, you know, it's a good thing to complete a mission. It's a good thing to get more points or to clubs. or to climb the leaderboard. Whereas I think in workplace skimification, it's possible to take those associations and twist them

so that maybe it's not a good thing for you to go and win this quest for doing 200 Uber trips in one week. Maybe you shouldn't be doing that because that's working too hard and it'll be unsafe. So that's a place where there's a mixed amount of choice there, isn't there? Because you don't actually have to take any of those quests, right? but the quests and the other parts of gamification are built into the Uber driver app, so you can't really ignore it.

And the final thing I'd say on that is that completing a quest, if you're an Uber driver, it usually comes with extra money, you know, £10, 50 pounds, or £100. That's not a small amount of money. And that might seem like a nice thing that they're offering you. But if it becomes a large proportion of your profit as a freelancer, then maybe there isn't that much choice in it. Maybe you have to take that because otherwise you're going to lose money. You mentioned this a little bit there, so I want to dive into a bit more.

You come from a neuroscience background. So I'm intrigued. Is there a noticeable scientific background how gamification works? Are we getting those sort of dopamine kicks like we would with other reward-based activities? Well, I mean, so, you know, behaviorism really lies at the root of a lot of gamification. And so behaviorism is basically the idea that we can, well, that human motivation is basically down to rewards and punishments. And so if you want someone to do more of a particular task, then you give them a reward. And if you want them to do less of something, then you give

them a punishment. I mean, that's a bit of a simplification, but that's basically what it comes down to. And so when you look at gamification, you see behaviorism in practice. It's basically, hey, if we want you to drive more or to exercise more or to buy more drinks at Starbucks, we will give you this sticker. And if you don't do that, then we might send you sort of frowny emoji or that sort of thing. And so that's a pretty, you know, when I studied neuroscience and experimental psychology, that was one of my first lectures. And then we spent like a few hours on it, and then we just moved on because I think it was just acknowledged that this was obviously maybe it was a useful way to understand some animals, but it wasn't a useful way to understand

humans, because obviously humans do all sorts of things, like caring for sick people or writing books or whatever, that don't really come with obvious rewards. In fact, they may come with no reward, but they're still fulfilling for other reasons. So I think gamification does touch on some elements of psychology, some basic elements, and they are powerful, receiving rewards and punishments, but they're incomplete because I think everyone would understand that that is not the only reason why we do things in our lives. So why gamify? Is there any proof that it's an effective method for progress? You know, it varies quite a lot. So there has been a lot of studies, a lot of research onto the effectiveness as gamification. There's a problem in that pretty

much every form of gamification is different from the next. So duolingo, it's different Peloton, it's different from Uber drivers, it's different from Starbucks rewards app, it's different from frequent fly miles, you know, they're all very different. So one of those might be effective and the others might not, and that doesn't necessarily mean that gamification as a whole works or doesn't work. And I think that partly comes down to just, it's a pretty broad church. There are studies that show the gamification can be helpful, certainly in the short term, maybe in the long term. And what Some people say is that they'd like getting a sense of progress. They'd like the sense of structure.

You know, it can make, it can sort of distract you from an otherwise boring activity. So if you play Pokemon or if you play an exercise game, then you might be having so much fun, you know, walking around, collecting animals that you just don't notice that maybe you're a bit, you know, more tired or that your feet hurt. So there's definitely reason to believe that gamification can work, especially if it's fun and engaging. And even in workplace apps, there is some evidence to show that it can improve engagement. It can make people work a little bit harder for a short amount of time.

But the issue is that there aren't a lot of studies that look at gamification in the long term, you know, over months or years. And some of them do show that the results kind of revert back to the mean or even worse. So, you know, it's a bit like getting it. an exciting intervention in your workplace, new computers, new sorts of things. And you work harder, you feel appreciated, you feel excited. And then after three months, you're like, eh, it's just back to normal. So it's difficult. It's expensive to do this kind of research. And for a lot of applications out there, it's kind of really difficult for researchers to actually get access to the usage data

because it's owned by the company. So it's a bit of a black box in some ways. Personally, I've got health apps, apps for learning skills, apps for trying to remember information and learn, and realistically, a bunch of things that are designed to, I guess, improve me in some kind of way. Do you think there is maybe an attitude in society that we need to be constantly developing and there's some gamification tied into this? Oh, absolutely. I think it's hard to, you know, it's hard to overstate how much our attitude towards self-improvement has really changed over the last few decades. Even the idea of going out for run, exercising a lot, that's not that's not that old. You know, it's only something that people started doing the last few decades.

And I think gamification has become a big part of that. So if you think about the whole self-improvement kick, whether that's trying to increase your intelligence or read more books or lose weight, you know, even, you know, water your plants or take care of your garden, anything like that, you can find an app for every single one of those things, you know, dozens of apps in some cases. And most of those apps, a lot of those apps will use gamification to try and get people to effectively use the app more or certainly to try and make the activity more fun. And so that can be good, you know, if you want to, you know, exercise more, learn language than gamification. can be a great way of helping you.

There are some great gamified apps for helping you learn the violin or learn the guitar, which are pretty boring activities if you just do it without that. But I think one of the issues is that gamification can really turn into taking things a little bit too far.

A lot of gamified apps use competition to motivate people. And some people are motivated by competition, and that can be a great thing. But I think it can also create anxiety, and it can also sort of turn the act of whatever you're trying to gamify into something that it isn't. So for example, if I was trying to learn French and there was a leaderboard showing how many words I'd memorized and I was just trying to ascend the leaderboard

because that was what the app was really pushing me to do, that's not necessarily a great way to learn French. You know, French is not just about memorizing a thousand French words. It's about having conversations, it's about reading. And so that's where gamification can encourage us to pursue behaviors aren't necessarily what we wanted to do in the first place. I think it can feel quite overwhelming as an adult with, you know, any kind of gamification when you've got a hundred other responsibilities to also do and, you know, we want to also be learning.

But when I was at school, I used to love the gamification stuff at that stage. You know, we have one, a game we used to play for maths, and it was the one thing that made me enjoy it, really. I don't know, is there maybe more of an argument for this kind of stuff for children where development is more important? It's less about self-improvement, and it's, I guess, a way to make something fun for people that don't really want to be there. Well, yeah, I mean, I think a great way of understanding gamification is the idea of training wheels,

you know, where maybe when you start out, it's just, you know, if you're trying to do simple arithmetic than or learn physics or geometry, I think a game can provide a way for people to get into it and to maybe get over that really steep part of the learning curve. And I think that goes for everything. You know, if you're starting to learn, you know, running or starting to do weightlifting or whatever, it's really hard at the start. It's probably the most painful and most annoying at the start. And once you've got the hang of it and you've turned it into a habit, maybe you don't need the gamification anymore. And so I really do think that for activities where we're really convinced, everyone should

know how to do basic maths, then I think gamification, yeah, we should definitely consider it or any other kind of educational activity. When someone's playing a game, there's a clear end to it. You know, if you're, if whether it's a game on your phone, a game on a console, it either the story either finishes or you eventually become bored of it and you move on, how does that work with gamification? Does a business have an endpoint in mind? Or is the expectation that users are just going to eventually fizzle out when they've reached a point where they aren't interested anymore? Well, yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think businesses want to do a lot of things and

and increasingly they want to make as much money as possible. You know, I have a business. You need to keep the lights on. You need to pay everyone. And so I think you need people to use your app if they're going to like it and pay for it. At the same time, you know, if you look at a lot of popular apps, one way for them to maximize profit is to just keep their users, to retain their users is what we call it, to retain users for as long as possible, using the app as much as possible.

as regularly as possible and therefore keep paying because you know you might have a subscription or you might have some sort of in-app purchase that people use regularly. And in those cases, it is in the company's financial benefit, at least if you look at it at one way, to just keep people using the app forever. You know, imagine if you had a language training app that magically taught you French in five minutes, you would have to charge a huge amount of money to make your money back there. Because if you were just charging by the month, people would just pay for one month and never use it again. So in some ways, it's in your interest to sort of spin out for as long as possible. And we're seeing this, you know, not just in gamification, but also actually in video games.

You know, a classic, you know, game like, I don't know, Grand Theft Auto or The Last of Us, it does have a start and it has an end. But these days, the most profitable, games like Fortnite or Candy Crush, they are also endless, you know. And in fact, those video games also use gamification to encourage people to keep coming back again and again to sort of earn new things or to level up their characters. When we've talked about gamification here, we've, you know, spoken about health apps, workplace progress systems, all of these kind of ideas that I think are the obvious place your mind goes on the topic. But in your book, you talk a little bit about conspiracy theories. I was just wondering how these two things can be

linked. Yeah, I mean, you know, let me sort of give a bit of context around that. The conspiracy theory that I think a lot of people have heard about recently is QAnon, this kind of far-right conspiracy about politics and all sorts of things in America. And I saw a lot of people who were getting into Q&On say the same thing over and over again, which was, I've done my research, you should do your research, and you'd also believe Q&ON as well. And I thought, research, what do you mean done your research? You just typed in Q&ON into Google, and then you click some links. And it reminded me of a type of game that I've made called alternate reality games. and these are games that take place in the real world,

like physically in the real world, with actors and helicopters and things sent you in the mail, and also online on web pages. And the way that we got people to play these games was suppose these kind of mysteries, you know, secret codes and that sort of thing. And people would type in those things into Google and they'd find the fictional world that we'd created online.

and they would explore that world and solve the puzzles with an online community because the puzzles were too hard for one person to solve. And so it was kind of a pretty high barrier to entry in some ways, but also very exciting. And QAnon really reminded me of that kind of video game where people would hear some secret word that will they be asked some strange question, 5G cell towers, you know, that sort of thing. And they type in, hmm, 5G cell towers into Google. and they would find themselves watching these videos and the video would tell them to go and look at this photo,

and it would just all seem very, very exciting. And I think that's one of the things that we don't really think about when we think about conspiracy theories. People might say, oh, these people are just being misled or they're unhappy or they're not very smart or that sort of thing. They don't have access to information. But I would say part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they're really fun, you know,

And they actually resemble alternate reality games in the way that they are based around communities. These days, if you look at people who are into conspiracy theories, it's not just someone on their own, you know, going into a library. It is a group of people talking to each other all the time, swapping information and congratulating each other, you know, on interesting theories. So, you know, I'm not saying that conspiracy theories are a game. I don't think they've been designed like games, but I think some of the same. motivations are at work in why people stay in conspiracy theory communities for so long. And I guess my conclusion, you know, to that is to say, we need to make finding out facts about the real world more satisfying, which is not to say that we should turn the real

world into a game, but we should make it more accessible for people to learn the truth or learn more facts than it is for people to just fall into a Google rabbit hole about Q&on. On a very different end of gamification, a big talk for it now is the use of this kind of gamification in different financial trading apps. Is this something that you think is maybe an issue into the future, the gamification of industries where there's more on the line, I guess? Yeah. So this has been quite a big thing in the last couple of years, especially during the pandemic when people were really bored and they just started using training apps all the time.

So in the US, a popular app called Robin Hood was sort of called out, I suppose, by the US government for having gamified features in its app, confetti explosions when you bought some shares or sold your shares, you know, all sorts of scratch off tickets and things. just a lot of bits of gamification there. And the financial conduct authority in the UK has just this week said that they are on the lookout, they're warning trading apps for using gamification. They've seen some people using this and they're telling people, telling companies not use gamification to encourage users to perform risky financial behaviours. And so I think financial training is a pretty,

acute example of harmful gamification. You could lose a lot of money that way. But of course, it's everywhere. Financial trading apps are not the only apps that use gamification. You know, health insurance apps use it. Gambling apps use them. You know, video games use them. That's a lot of ways to lose money, unfortunately, and to lose time. So I'm very interested in seeing what happens as part of this warning from the FCA. Realistically, I'd say the average person see, you know, thousands of adverts every day. And most of them you don't even, you don't fully notice it or engage with it. It's just there in the background. You walk past them and they just exist all around you. Is there something similar with gamification? I think there's obvious examples of it where

it's very clear that you're being, I guess, gamified, but do you have that in your life where it is happening without you really noticing it? Is it more subtle sometimes? I think if you have a smartphone, you know, if you use the internet, you know, if you use online services, if you've got an Apple watch, part of, if you work in a lot of companies, you know, your life is being gamified in some way. I've got an Apple watch. And every month that tells me, if you want to go and win the new challenge, you need to go and exercise more than you did last month. You know, I've got Apple books, which says, hey, you should go and try and extend your reading streak so you can read five days in a row. If you've got Fitbit, it will tell you to go,

and try and win these different awards. If you've got private healthcare insurance, then you can save money and level up by buying vegetables and go to the gym. Increasingly, every single part of our lives is being gamified. And what is really fascinating is this is new. This is not something that really happened 30 years ago, 20 years ago, certainly not this often. And I think that because of technology,

because so much of our lives has been digitized, and some of that has been very good. There is just a lot more data flowing through our devices and through the internet and through companies about our lives and all of that data can be gamified in order to manipulate our behavior. And that sounds really conspiratorial. I mean, in some cases, that's fine. Maybe you do want help exercising more,

but it can also mean that the companies are trying to manipulate your behavior, maybe just to use, you know, their apps more in ways that you are not aligned with. So it is everywhere now. And what do you see is the future of gamification? Is this a tool that will become more into woven in society as we move into, you know, more digital lifestyle? I hate to use the buzzword, but, you know, the metaverse and all this sort of stuff. Well, is this something that's going to become more and more prevalent as we move forward in life?

Yes, I think it's a short answer. I, you know, like I don't see any evidence of companies getting exhausted using gamification. In fact, the opposite. You know, I think if you use, you know, virtual reality or augmented reality, you know, a lot of the most popular applications are effectively gamification, like exercise or education. And so I don't see that changing. I think that people still don't really think about it very much when they counter it. they just think, oh, that's, that's normal or that's good, you know. And I guess what I'm trying to do for this book is to get people to think a little bit more skeptically, a little bit more critically about the gamification they encounter. And is there something people should be doing about this? Or is there something they should be thinking about when they're approaching gamification in their lives? Well, I think you should just notice it.

You know, if an app says you've got five points. or here's an achievement you can win or here's a competition, you should just think, do I actually want to win this? You know, is having points a really a good thing for me.

You can turn off gamification in a lot of apps, although it's often not obvious how to do that. You can turn off the notifications. But as an individual, there's only so much you can do. You know, if you are an Uber driver,

then you can't turn off gamification really, you know, in your workplace. And so I think we should demand more transparency from companies, you know, from governments, whose gamification. And, you know, we should think about regulation. That is something that's happening in the EU, in the UK, in the US, around financial trading apps. And I think it should come to other sectors just to make sure that the worst abuses are curtailed. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Adrian Hon,

examining the growing trend of gamification and its risks. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can come and find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth. of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

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