The Quantified Self
An interview with Adrian Hon on obfuscating compensation, self-improvement, and the gamification of our lives.
Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee the gamification of everything we interact with. If you go to the same coffee shop to earn points towards a free beverage, if you use Lyft to get points on Delta, if you drive for Uber and get sent on “missions” for a bonus, if you read online and keep track of pages for rewards, if you work in an office with random, incalculable incentives – you’ve been gamified.
To get a better grasp on what that means – ethically, psychologically, and financially – we spoke with gaming expert and author Adrian Hon.
Nice to meet you! Do you mind introducing yourself?
I'm Adrian Hon. I run a games company called Six to Start, that's my day job. We make a game called Zombies, Run!, which is a smartphone fitness game that makes running more exciting. Outside of work I'm a games journalist. I write a column for EDGE Magazine, and I have written fiction and nonfiction.
How did you get into game-making?
I originally trained as a neuroscientist. I studied neuroscience and experimental psychology at university, which was interesting, but I didn't know exactly how much my heart was in it. A lot of people my age grew up playing video games, and it was something that I was always interested in. Specifically, there was a game that was released in 2001 called The Beast, which was an alternate-reality game. And it was a game that took place on the web, on email, in the real world, on phone calls -- it was this sprawling kind of game across multiple platforms, and I just found it fascinating. It was a game that I could see myself making even though I wasn't a programmer or an artist, and so I left my PhD to help run a company that would make these. That's really how I got into games.
Were you interested in how gaming affects ones psychology?
I can't really sort of draw a straight line between psychology and neuroscience and my interest in video games. And I am a bit skeptical, honestly, of people who say there is a link. Video game design is still so much of an art. And I think people will say that they take principles from psychology, but I'm not sure I've ever really seen that happen in practice.
Can you explain what gamification means?
Gamification is the use of ideas and principles from game design like points and badges and missions and quests and data boards for non-game purposes – so using it for education, training, politics, or in the workplace.
In your writing about the gamification of work, you point to Amazon or Uber as examples. Why are they gamifying? What have you found in terms of reason?
That was one of the big questions I was trying to answer in the book because I couldn't really understand it, actually. I don't actually like gamification as it's done by most people and most companies. I think in principle it's great, I mean, it's what I do for my day job, but when I see a language app or a fitness app giving you badges, I don't find that terribly convincing or interesting.
There was this kind of burst in gamification in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and I thought it would go away, but it kept growing. And it kept growing especially in the workplace which I just found bizarre because I don't think there is a lot of evidence showing that the type of gamification companies or factories use really boosts productivity or happiness that much. It's hard to tell because getting data from these companies is extremely difficult, but I don't think gamification is really increasing productivity.
Rather, my theory is that it is accomplishing two other things that are useful for the company. For one, it basically obfuscates compensation. If you work for Uber, or other gig economy jobs, you can complete “quests” or “missions” or similar sorts of things in order to get bonuses. So it might be something like, "if you accept 40 rides in the next three days, we'll give you a $50 bonus." It might be, "if you go and work in this area, then you get 1.3 times your normal rate."
Obviously, you can look at this and say, well, that's great, you're getting extra money. But by giving drivers and workers these sorts of random "missions" that they have no control over, it makes it very difficult to know how much you actually are going to get paid at the end of the day. And if you're getting paid less, then you're not really sure whether it's your fault. Maybe you just have been too lazy or slow as a driver – or maybe it's a company paying you less. It's kind of hard to tell.
I have talked to some drivers about this, and they said that they didn't really like it because it sort of pushes them to always drive more. They feel manipulated by that. It's a convenient way for companies to hide true compensation and to drive compensation down.
It also helps companies hand off the process of managing and providing feedback to computers. Your performance is being monitored and judged partly through gamification, and that's delivered automatically through your computer or through your phone. You're not hearing from a human manager anymore, you're just hearing from this game. That's obviously cheaper for the company to do. It is also weirdly accepted more by workers because there is this idea that games are fair, because, if you play a video game, a good video game is designed to be designed so that you have a fair chance of succeeding and if you fail, you can improve.
So, that's my theory on why companies use gamification. It's not so much to make people happier, and it's not so much to increase productivity – because it doesn't seem like it really does that.
It's just to save money.
When you came to that conclusion, did that satisfy you or did that make this all seem remotely less interesting?
I mean, that's not really surprising. It's kind of why companies do anything. There's a reviewer who said, "How do we really fight back against gamification? It sounds like it's just capitalism." I mean, yes. I still think it's interesting that the desire for profit has manifested in a different way, through gamification.
Did you find it to be particularly American or particularly British, or is the trend global?
It's definitely on a global scale.
Do you see it in workplaces outside of tech industries?
People just think games are amazing and kind of magical systems that can get people to do anything. And if you play a game people will just be really happy and inspired. There was this whole thing in the 2000s and early 2010s where people were talking about it effectively. It's all gamification, they're trying to make everything more playful.
There was this popular video going around of some company that had changed a public staircase so that when you walked up the steps, it would play different notes. And everyone was like, "Wow, this will really encourage people to go and use the stairs more."
And I was like, this is just ridiculous. I mean, that's interesting, but that's kind of not actually the reason why people use stairs (laughs). I think it actually seems like it's more likely to give people an accident and just be annoying than it is to actually encourage exercise. But, there was a wave where the idea was by making the world a bit more playful and a bit more like a game, everything would get better.
Do you think there’s a greater political or labor philosophy being encouraged? You know, trying to make the workplace “fun”, making work feel like “family”, somewhere you can hang out? This trick of convincing people the company cares about you. How intentional is gaming in creating a culture of constant work, even beyond profit?
That's a really interesting question. There are two ways I can answer that. I think the first thing is that this is kind of what happens when a company doesn't really have an actual mission that people can get behind. If you don't have a mission, then you're just looking at whatever happens to be lying around to get people inspired. And so if playfulness and if games and table tennis are it, then let's do that, whether or not it works.
But then the second question is, why would people think that this would work? What I argue in the book is it is due to the cultural dominance of video games and of games in general over the last 50 years.
The popular conception of how video games have become the biggest entertainment industry is that in the 70s and 80s people just saw them as some weird hobby. Then, in the 80s and 90s, there was a moral panic (as there is with most new media) where people thought if you played Grand Theft Auto, you'd become a killer. And so people who are in their thirties, forties, and fifties today, remember when they were grown up and they were told that video games were bad for them. Now, what people want to say, is that video games are not just fine, they are good actually. You're more likely to find the headline saying video games make you more intelligent, video games promote social cooperation. And it's slightly weird to me that gamers who are so quick to dismiss studies showing that gaming causes violence, are now very happy to tout research that says games are really good for you.
That shift has basically made people think, well, games are just good, so the answer is we should go and play more games. Jane McGonigal, who wrote this book called Reality Is Broken, had a very popular TED Talk where she said that if only we all played games more, we would just solve every problem in the world, basically. That was absolutely wild. I mean, it didn't make any sense, right? I don't know why you would think that games would save the world. But that's why it's this sort of thoughtless intervention that people can use in workplaces or in civic society.
Who's excited to be saying video games are good?
I mean, it's everywhere. There was a study recently that said that video games are good for your well-being, which is just ridiculous because it only looked at a couple of games, and it was an observational study – they weren't looking at causation. It got published, more or less verbatim, by the BBC and The Guardian, and The Verge. It's tech sites, sure, but also mainstream media. I think that the journalists also believe it. I don't think they're skeptical. I think they're like, "Oh yeah, of course, of course, that sounds right." Maybe they think, “I want to affirm that my hobby, which people said was terrible, is actually a good thing.”
Is there a way to opt out?
So part of the issue is that there's not much you can really do about it as an individual. There are different kinds of gamification that people will encounter. So if you live in a town where Amazon is the main employer, then I don't know what you're going to do about that. Or if you live in a situation where Uber is your only solution to employment, then you can't turn the gamification off. As a consumer, yes, I think you should be more skeptical about claims of gamification in health and fitness apps and lifestyle apps, but still, there's not really a lot you can do to avoid it.
For example, in the UK private health insurance is becoming more common now. There's one company called Vitality, which is pretty heavily gamified. They wouldn't call it that, but basically, you can earn points for doing a number of healthy activities, like connecting your Apple watch to the website or literally buying vegetables at the market, and you can level up and get rewards. The problem there is that those are real rewards. I mean, they're worth actual money. It’s hard to tell someone you shouldn’t do this thing even though you could save hundreds of pounds a year. I think that's sort of verging on coercion.
People should be more skeptical about what gamification can do. I think people should criticize it. They should vocally push back against it if it is deployed in their workplaces or their local governments. I think people in positions of power should be more skeptical about it. I think people who make it should try and make good gamification – which is harder to do. It's really hard to make a fun game and it's harder to make one that's fun and also useful.
I’m feeling like a loser trying to get these Delta points now. I mean, the whole credit system seems to be incredibly reliant on gamification.
I mean financial credit systems are part of this. In China, you have this idea of the social credit score, which is simultaneously more and less scary than it sounds. I find it interesting that people's reaction to gamification is almost like it doesn't actually exist, or it couldn't possibly work on them. And I find it fascinating how it has gone from being this incredibly exciting new thing in the late 2000s to just being literally everywhere now. If you buy an Apple watch, if you buy a smartphone then there's going to be gamification inside it. And everyone seems to be like, “this is fine.”
The acceptance of just becoming data and in being okay with this level of surveillance is…
Gamification is almost like the sort of action layer of the quantified self and of self-improvement. We're in a place where people feel pressured to always be competing. If you want to survive and get a promotion and be interesting and build your brand and so on, you need to be doing stuff all the time. Whether that's learning a new language or losing weight or reading the best books. That's not new – the quantified self is not new, but the mechanism by which people try to motivate themselves to become better is.
It's not like, I just read more books. Instead, it’s, I'm going to reward myself by giving myself like five points for every page I read. If you use Apple Books, then if you read for five minutes, it'll be like, “Congratulations, you earned this achievement!”
Luv 2 b gamified!I looked up a painting that was referenced in a book I'm reading, and google gave me an achievement for looking at it. thanks google https://t.co/5V9JMfJuCgSara McHenry's New Nightmare @yellowcardiganIt becomes this default way to motivate yourself, and it's the default because it's just very easy to build, technically speaking.
Have your opinions shifted at all since writing the book?
I feel that through the book I was able to wrap my arms around the main areas. But honestly, I think any one of the chapters could be 10 books, and I hope people do that. There's always something new. I think I was probably a little bit too generous actually to some of the lifestyle and education gamification. I was a little bit, you know, wanting to say, “Well actually there are some things that are fine.” I'm actually less convinced about that now that I've been writing about it and researching it more. I'm interested to see where things turn up and how things turn out in the workplace. I do think that's changing.
One thing that's been kind of surprising for me, I wrote this essay about how gamification could be used to improve democratic processes and people just seemed incredibly obsessed with that, even though I'm still trying to figure out for myself what that means. But I get the impression that people are just desperate to find out anything that can kinda shore up democracy. So maybe gamification is it, I don’t know.