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Social Gamificaton

Gamification is a method of transforming an activity to resemble a game in order to increase motivation and engagement in that activity. It is the capacity to motivate people to do things they wouldn’t normally do, and this can radically change their day-to-day life. The simplified goals in a gamified system are easier to understand and easier to determine whether or not they have been met. Gamification design has been used to intentionally motivate people to learn languages and exercise more, but also motivates people to make excessive meaningless connections and shorten and simply their thoughts. The continuous push of gamification is slipping into social activities whose gamified goals are detrimental to the accomplishment of the original goals of the activity. Although it can increase motivation for various activities, the increased role gamification plays in online communications and ordinary social situations is problematically instrumentalizing our goals and demands a reevaluation of standard procedures.

Many examples of gamification design start with a company’s desire to increase conversions or user engagement, and a gamified system would be designed to fulfill that need. Providing a quantified measure of a behavior influences further behavior that would change the score up or down. This is further amplified when a feedback and reward system is in place (Nguyen 413). Many video games offer the promise of badges and rewards for leveling up, or attaching a high price to desirable items, incentivizing players to do the most boring and repetitive tasks in order to get enough points. Players willingly complete these mindless activities while playing despite avoiding similar monotonous activities in real life because the game provides immediate and clear measures of progress (Nguyen 413).

Companies have taken this knowledge and implement points, badges, and leaderboards (PBL) or similar game elements to increase user engagement and meet their business goals (Bekk 1060; Toda 11). Duolingo, a language learning service, incentivizes users to learn new vocabulary and spend time each day practicing the language to gain experience points and rank up in the leaderboard and challenge their friends. FitBit offers a similar PBL system for users to measure their fitness goals. Gamification makes completing tasks more fun and rewarding and increases motivation to do those tasks with an efficiency that cannot be replicated without gamified elements. The real world is boring and dull, and playing a game makes completing an activity easier or at the very least more exciting to do (Nguyen 413).

1. Gamification in Education

It’s not just companies that implement these systems, elements have slipped perhaps unintentionally into education, most notably higher education. A qualitative assessment of a design portfolio or lab report would provide more context as to how the student performed, noting areas for improvement, and other bits of information that would be useful for the future success of that student (Nguyen 423). This data isn’t transportable or easily comparable, making the analysis of many scores impossible or difficult to automate. Awarding a student points or a score to represent how well they retained information or applied skills makes for an easier method of evaluating averages across classes, a single student over time, or across multiple institutions (Nguyen 423). Representing a complex and abstract piece of information by a concrete and simplified measure makes understanding that information easier. It’s easier to process and measure a life goal with a simplified analog; a good education is indicated by a high grade point average (GPA), being healthier is indicated by increased distance jogged.

This follows what Nguyen describes as value capture, where a natural value that is hard to express, subtle, and rich is substituted with a simplified and quantified value concocted by a social or institutional situation (422-23). The simplified value eventually completely replaces the natural value in terms of motivators. A student would enroll in university to further their learning. Soon the student receives a low quantitative score of their coursework and is motivated to increase that score to show that they can learn the material. The student becomes overly concerned with maintaining a high GPA and doing well on tests rather than the original goal of learning and understanding new concepts. The value-captured student measures their academic success at how well they can take tests rather than how much they’ve learned, being more focused on the gamification aspects of education rather than the learning aspect of education (Toda 8).

This results in an instrumentalized goal. An instrumental goal or value is one that is valued as a means to achieve and end, or terminal goal or value. If it weren’t for the looming threat of an exam coming the next day, a student wouldn’t be cramming the night before. Trying to digest large chunks of diverse information in such a short period of time is not the best way to learn and retain something. The original goal of learning new material is instrumentalized into being able to doing well on tests. Just being able to achieve a high GPA means nothing when you haven’t learned anything, which is what you originally set out to do.

And because the educational setting is viewed as part of real life and not a game, some participants who are value captured are unable to recognize that the original goal has been instrumentalized. They instead see a low test score as failing at getting an education instead of viewing the situation through the lens of their original natural value of further learning where they might see a learning experience regardless of the score.

2. Gamification in Social Media

Gamification and its way of instrumentalizing goals is present in social media. Nguyen identifies that the natural goal when using Twitter is something akin to communication and discourse to further everyone’s knowledge, but being such a massive platform, gamified elements of likes, retweets, and followers are used as a measure of success (412). Because Twitter has a method of measuring the apparent engagement and spread of an idea, value-captured users will emerge who will adopt the simplified goal of gaining as many likes, retweets, and followers and use these to gauge how influential a certain message or person is not only on the Twitter platform, but in real life (Nguyen 411).

Because the user is motivated by the promise of a higher score, they change what they say on the platform to whatever has been shown to increase that score. These users will follow examples of other viral posts and successful people on the platform and format their messages in order to achieve a similar high score. This promotes mindless parroting of vague messages that hold no value to the original poster because the only value they have is seeing their numbers go up and will say anything to achieve that value. The original goal of Twitter as a forum for discussion and spreading of ideas has instead been instrumentalized and now the goal seems to be saying messages that the audience wants to hear to see the numbers go up. Saying what the audience wants to hear un-promotes the challenging of beliefs or ideas in those audience members, resulting in no real truths being discovered or greater knowledge gained from either party.

Nguyen points out that some Twitter users approach Twitter as a game, finding fun in saying the right things to get the most likes and followers, yet do not provide any identification to others of their true intentions (422). This is unfair to both value-captured and value-independent users. A value-independent user has an external motivator and is not driven by scores; doing whatever it would take to increase their scores would undermine the user’s terminal goals (Nguyen 426).This creates a problem when a user approaches Twitter as a platform for genuine communication, where this user would take what the game-player says as genuine and completely misinterpret any communications they make (Nguyen 422).

A game with imperfect information is one where either: the game’s structure makes it difficult for the player to understand what the opponent’s moves are, the player’s perception of the game and opponent is limited by their cognitive ability, or the player forgot moves made by themselves or others. If a player uncertain of where they are in the game, that they don’t know for sure which move their opponent has already made, the player cannot have a strategy that guarantees a win for themselves, nor can the opponent have a winning strategy (van Bentham and Dominik 3.6). Because there is no obvious external indicator of whether a user is playing the game, value-captured, or value-independent, there is an uncertainty in any communications made on the platform, thus resulting in a game with imperfect information. Meaning that no players/users of Twitter have a guaranteed winning strategy of achieving their goals, instrumentalized or not. The natural goal of this platform is communication and discourse, but because of all of the effects of gamification, there is no guarantee that this goal can be reached.

3. Gamification in Job Hunting

Not all instances of gamification are intentionally designed. In certain social-adjacent situations, gamified elements end up appearing due to elements of competition or evaluation already present that are not given a numerical score. An example of this is found in career fairs and job interviews. Notably in the technology field, many positions are highly competitive, and employers have thousands of applicants all vying for the same position. Trying to evaluate each candidate within their own context with qualitative information is time consuming and it is difficult to compare or average evaluations of many applicants. In this job hunting context there has been no official implementation of a gamified system like there is in education, but the general aspects of a game are apparent.

A well-known and successful company could advertise an open position, resulting in myriad individuals applying for that position. Having the human resources department manually look through resumes and cover letters would take immense time and resources, so systems were implemented to automate the process. The use of industry terms and an easy-to-read structure in a resume increase the ranking of that application. When the hiring managers do have the time to manually evaluate cover letters and resumes, they are likely to spend mere minutes actually looking at it before deciding the applicant’s fate. An advanced artificial intelligence system can be implemented to do even more evaluations before an application reaches human eyes. This extends to the interview process, as well as being present in elevator pitches at career fairs. Applicants who explain their experience in the industry and give examples on how they match the criteria from the job listing are viewed more favorably than those who do not.

Because the applicants value getting the position so greatly, they focus their efforts and learn how to succeed at making it past the automatic checks and human interviews. They notice that applicants that parrot back industry terms from the listing in their applications are more likely to pass the first few checks. Applicants learn to say what the interviewer wants to hear to earn as many job points as possible so that they get hired. In such a competitive job market, the majority of applicants are likely to share similar skills and skill levels, resulting in value-captured people obsessing over how to give the best interview or write the best application. The natural goal of submitting an application for a position and interviewing a hiring manager is to give a good first impression and indicate that you can do the advertised job well. For the value-captured applicant, the simplified goal is to learn and master how to regurgitate a job description and lie about how they match listed criteria.

Admitting that you don’t fully match the listed criteria on an application listing gives you far less job points than if you were to “present yourself so it sounds as if you match the criteria,” thus incentivizing and motivating people who want to get hired to misrepresent themselves (i.e. lie) because if they don’t get as many job points, they won’t get the job, won’t be employed, and view themselves as incompetent. This example illustrates what it’s like for the value-captured user. Perhaps a value-independent user might not succumb to the same lines of thinking or have a greater control of the situation, but it’s not like the value-captured users are to blame for succumbing to a system that transforms complex and hard to attain goals into much simpler and quantified ones.

Instrumentalizing goals in games is not a problem because those goals never had real-world value, however the problem occurs when this occurs to a goal of a real-life activity. This natural goal has value independent of whatever game is being played, but because the activity has been gamified, the natural goal had to be simplified, resulting in many players forgetting the importance and value attributed to the original, natural goal (Nguyen 429). The goal of hiring employers should be to find an individual who has the necessary work experience and can competently complete the described job. Hiring a candidate who spent more time learning how best and quickly to get hired rather than working on their industry skills is only an instrumental goal and should not be held at the same value of the original, natural goal. An individual who spends the time to learn how to lie about themselves and how to parrot back the right words to an interviewer is not guaranteed to be the best fit for a position. This simplified goal conflicts with the original goal of finding a candidate who can do a job.

4. Conclusion

Gamifying something does not always give the desired outcome. Adobe tried to gamify a learning system during the free trial period in Photoshop, but the venture never increased conversion rates (Bekk 1060). Gamification in education results in students more focused on getting the most points instead of actually learning, and can actually decrease motivation over time (Toda 9). It’s difficult to have normal discussions on Twitter. It seems hopeless – what can there be done about this situation? How do you completely upturn the structure social institutions or mass online communication? The very least we can do is to be aware of this trend. Being aware of the issues that tend to occur keeps them in the front of your mind, keeping you consciously thinking about how your goals might be shifting. The disclosure that potential game elements can cause distraction has been identified to reduce negative effects of gamification (Bekk 1072). If the collective is more aware of the facets of gamification, we can take steps to reduce it’s influence in our lives. We need to be aware of and reevaluate aspects in social institutions that are slipping into gamified territory.

Works Cited