The trend of gamification — applying elements of game play to other areas of life — is the apex of the neoliberal fantasy, rendering both work and our leisure time outside of it into a series of games that we supposedly enjoy playing for their own sake.
Gamification in your personal life can be a useful tool to motivate yourself to complete a chore you don’t want to do, to build a habit that you have trouble forming, to otherwise increase the hit of dopamine you get when you do something if you’re someone who has trouble creating reward cycles in your life (shout out to [email protected]). When a corporation does it to increase your addiction to their platform, as so many do with phone platforms, social media platforms, or content consumption platforms, or with their employees, it is definitively exploitative.
Yeah, as someone with ADHD I find the idea that gamification is inherently exploitative to be outright offensive. It’s an absolutely necessary accessibility tool for many people with executive function issues. Hell I need gamification to remember to brush my damn teeth every day.
Sure some corpos can take it too far, but this article is way off the mark.
My ADHD brain also craves the dopamine hit.
However, I recently watched a video on how a Chinese shopping site gameifies itself to entice users to spend money with literal “spin the wheel for a chance at a huge discount” then “refer a friend to spin the wheel again!”
When gameification becomes a gamble, that is when it is exploitive.