You've Been Played E-Book

Adrian Hon

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 548

Beschreibung

How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation – and what we can do about it Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet. Points, badges and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. In You've Been Played, game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations, schools and governments use games and gamification as tools for profit and coercion. These are games that we often have no choice but to play, where losing has heavy penalties. You've Been Played is a scathing indictment of a tech-driven world that wants to convince us that misery is fun, and a call to arms for anyone who hopes to preserve their dignity and autonomy.

Leseprobe

Also by Adrian Hon

A History of the Future in 100 Objects

SWIFT PRESS

First published in the United States of America by Basic Books 2022

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2022

Copyright © Adrian Hon 2022

The right of Adrian Hon to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800751972 eISBN: 9781800751989

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Chapter One: THE RISE OF GAMIFICATION

Chapter Two: LEVEL UP YOUR LIFE

Chapter Three: GRIND AND PUNISHMENT

Chapter Four: DOING IT WELL

Chapter Five: THE GAMIFICATION OF GAMES

Chapter Six: THE MAGNIFICENT BRIBE

Chapter Seven: “I’VE DONE MY RESEARCH”

Chapter Eight: THE WORLD AS GAME

Chapter Nine: THE TREASURY OF MERIT

Chapter Ten: ESCAPING SOFTLOCK

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

A WAREHOUSE WORKER PICKS A BOOK FROM A TRAY AND HER VIRTUAL dragon speeds up on a screen beside her. If she works faster and longer than her colleagues, she’ll win the race and get an award. It’s a distraction from the tedium, but it’s hardly fun.

Not far away, an exhausted Uber driver is about to sign off when a new Quest pops up on his app: if he completes another three trips, he’ll get a six-dollar bonus. He’s barely making enough to cover the payments on his car, so he sighs—and accepts.

At home, his partner obsessively “researches” the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory on obscure forums, videos, and blogs. It’s not as relaxing as watching TV, but uncovering clues and drawing connections makes him feel like he’s playing an exclusive game.

Next door, a retiree buys a subscription to a brain training game. It tells her that if she plays its “scientific” minigames every day, she’ll get smarter and avoid dementia. The game doesn’t tell her that going for a walk outside would be just as helpful.

• • • • • • •

I’ve spent the last decade making one of the most popular gamified apps in the world, so you’d expect me to be the first person to spread the gospel of gamification. Yet today, nothing makes me more worried.

Gamification should be a delight. We all choose to play video games and board games and jigsaw puzzles and sports in our spare time. Who wouldn’t want to use ideas from game design to make difficult or dull activities more fun—to gamify them? That’s what led me to cocreate Zombies, Run!, a game that’s turned running into an adventure for over ten million players. It’s why I admire Rock Band, Kerbal Space Program, and Pokémon GO for making it enjoyable to learn the guitar, understand orbital mechanics, and walk more every day.

But these apps and games aren’t the gamification we’re most likely to encounter in our lives. Our phones and watches now come with built-in missions and achievements for hitting ever-increasing fitness and productivity goals. In the classroom, teachers reward and punish children with behavioural management apps, doling out points at the tap of a button. Everyone from Uber drivers and call centre agents to programmers and investment bankers is having their work subjected to gamification, the latest friendly face on labour practices that exploit millions. And with gamification spreading to social networks, trading apps, credit scores, conspiracy theories, and social credit systems, our world feels increasingly like a game we can’t stop playing, where the stakes are so high, failure isn’t met with a cheery “try again” but the loss of your livelihood—and worse.

It’s bad enough that gamification has become the twenty-first century’s most advanced form of behavioural control, but there’s even worse news: it’s also deadly boring. It turns out that wrapping a veneer of missions and points and challenges around the job of a warehouse worker doesn’t change its crushing repetitiveness, though Amazon continues to try.

Over the years, I’ve found little evidence that most gamification actually works or anyone finds it fun, and so I assumed that it would eventually be abandoned or rejected. But since its beginnings in the early 2000s, when apps like Foursquare, Nike, and Strava introduced badges and levels to encourage people to exercise more and share their favourite shops and restaurants, gamification has only grown and grown. Practically anything that can be monitored and recorded has been gamified, and as technology has become cheaper, smaller, and ever more powerful, colonising our homes, our workplaces, and even our bodies, so too have the opportunities for gamification expanded to occupy every part of our lives.

Sometimes gamification really is fun: you can only smile at a game like Chore Wars that turns vacuuming the carpet and washing the dishes into quests for your family. More often, gamification is used to manipulate and control, whether that’s unscientific brain training games promising to make you smarter, or propaganda games spreading dangerous misinformation online, or video games tricking players into spending thousands of dollars on in-game items they can’t afford. For these games, helping you is far down their list of priorities.

That’s why I’m writing this book. With today’s gamification, you’re no longer the player—you’re being played.

• • • • • • •

I became a game designer by an unusual route. Like all my friends, I loved playing video games growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, and secretly hoped I might one day make games for a living. When it came to deciding what to study at university, however, I took what I thought was a more sensible option: experimental psychology and neuroscience at Cambridge University. I found my studies fascinating, but video games never lost their attraction. Whenever I wasn’t writing code to analyse brain activity or researching synaesthesia, I wrote about something even more fascinating to me: the burgeoning genre of alternate reality games (ARGs) which combined the real world and the internet.

Not long after I began a PhD in neuroscience at Oxford University, I left to become Director of Play for one of the world’s biggest ARGs, Perplex City. A few years later, I cofounded Six to Start in 2007 with my brother Dan Hon, where I designed games for the BBC, Penguin Books, Walt Disney Imagineering, the British Museum, Microsoft, and Death Cab for Cutie.

Six to Start has a long background in making “serious games” that attempt to not only entertain but to educate and edify, games that have won plenty of awards including Best of Show and Best Game at South by Southwest. However, we’re most widely known for our gamification of running in Zombies, Run!, a smartphone game which launched in 2012. Featured by Apple and Google, and played by over ten million people, the enormous success of Zombies, Run! led to a whole series of fitness games including The Walk and Superhero Workout, many of which were cocreated with the award-winning novelist Naomi Alderman. Most recently, we’ve worked with the NHS and researchers at University College London (UCL) on the gamification of fitness in the real world and in virtual reality.

I’ve spent the past two decades on two related tasks: understanding how humans think and making games that try to improve our lives. My games are routinely showcased as being the best examples of gamification in the world, so be assured: this book isn’t by an outsider who doesn’t understand technology and thinks video games are the devil’s work. Nor is it by someone who believes technology and video games will save humanity. It’s by someone who wants to explain what gamification really is, what it could be at its best, and how it’s being used to manipulate us against our will.

• • • • • • •

It’s tempting to classify everything with points and pixels as gamification, especially with video games ascendent in popular culture. I share the defi-nition used by most designers and critics, where gamification means the use of game design principles for nongame purposes. Those principles include some concepts that long predate video games and board games, like points, badges, challenges, levels, and leaderboards, along with concepts that are much newer, like “compulsion loops” and AI-driven non-player characters (NPCs). As for those nongame purposes, pick any human need or endeavour you can imagine—education, health, science, politics, companionship, terror, and of course, material gain.

This means there’s no bright line for what counts as gamification—it’s more of a family resemblance, encompassing everything from SimCity and Peloton to frequent-flyer programmes and Chinese social credit systems. It also means that one can find examples of gamification going back decades and even centuries, long before the term gained wide usage in the first decade of the 2000s. This book covers some of those older examples, but for the purposes of brevity, it is not an exhaustive record of all of gamification or its history.

Instead, I explore these historical antecedents as a way of understanding today’s gamification and how it might evolve. In Chapter One, I begin by tracing out the technological and social factors that led to the rise of gamification in the twenty-first century. The spread of the internet and the adoption of easy-to-use, real-time Web 2.0 technologies made it easy to add generic game-like features to apps and websites to boost engagement (i.e., users spending more time viewing websites and contributing valuable information for free). The simultaneous rise of gaming culture and technological optimism in the early 2010s led to the belief that video games, once a maligned hobby, were in fact an unalloyed good. A wave of utopian gamification followed, seeking to cure the world’s ills by channeling the seemingly limitless energy and creativity of gamers toward humanitarian goals. While these promises remain unfulfilled, the charismatic aura of empowerment and positive change they bestowed on gamification still exists to this day.

That aura shines brightly on the consumer and lifestyle gamification that I examine in Chapter Two. Gamification tells us that everything we find difficult or boring can be made easy, whether that’s learning the piano, recording our expenses, studying for exams, or getting fit. As long as it can be measured, it can be gamified and improved—and with smartphones always by our sides, bursting with sensors, so much can be measured. Lifestyle gamification’s grandiose promises are rarely backed up by the scientific evidence it claims, but is it any wonder that we feel pressured into playing when capitalism tells us we must improve or perish?

Gamification in the workplace takes this logic of constant improvement to its inevitable conclusion, with millions of workers coerced into playing games that measure their every action. Chapter Three shows how gamification has amplified the exhausting, technologically driven micromanagement of taxi and truck drivers, programmers, warehouse workers, and call centre agents that began with Taylorism over a century ago. Workplace gamification may not make our jobs any more fun—it may not even make us more productive—but it succeeds in making workers feel their failure to match ever-increasing targets is their own fault, not their employer’s. And as more of the economy is digitised and networked, not even those in the highest-paid jobs will escape gamification.

While many employers aren’t motivated to make their employees’ jobs more enjoyable, there’s nothing inevitable about gamification making players miserable. In Chapter Four, I demonstrate how to effectively gamify activities in two case studies: an imaginary game about mopping and a very real game about running away from zombies. Neither relies on the generic points and badges used in most gamification, which is also true of the other success stories I explore from the worlds of journalism and online conferences.

I tackle a strange conundrum in Chapter Five: the gamification of games. As video games have come to dominate the entertainment industry, companies are refining and repurposing game design concepts like achievements, trading cards, and “loot boxes” in order to maximise engagement and profit, even at the cost of enjoyment. When combined with games’ inherent interactivity and immersiveness, the result can be financially and psychologically devastating. Yet fun and profit and respect for players’ time don’t have to be mutually exclusive, as Nintendo has demonstrated with its long-standing resistance to gamification.

We have a chance of avoiding bad gamification at home and in the workplace, but there’s no escaping it when it’s deployed by governments, militaries, and financial institutions. Chapter Six addresses gamification in its most authoritarian forms, including China’s experiments with gamified social credit systems that aim to control citizens’ behaviour through rewards and punishments. Our fascination with China, however, risks distracting attention from problems closer to home. With gamification endemic in electioneering, wargames, propaganda, schools, and universities in the US and UK, even the richest democracies have proven vulnerable to its temptations.

It’s also in democracies that conspiracy theories like QAnon have spread so widely and caused so much damage. In Chapter Seven, I argue that modern conspiracy theories are best compared to ARGs in how they blur the boundaries between the internet and the real world. Born online, ARGs are real-time, participatory, highly social, and disturbingly fun—so if we’re to have any chance at combatting the gamification of misinformation and conspiracy theories, it can only be by restoring trust in institutions, and using lessons from game design to make civic participation more meaningful and accessible.

ARGs were once a novelty, but they don’t seem as strange today given so much of our world already feels like a game. Chapter Eight explores how financial markets, terrorism, social media, consumerism, and even dating have become gamified, and how the metaphor of the world as game is shaping our behaviour. Metaphors can enlighten but they can also mislead, and viewing the world as a constant competition where other people become disposable non-player characters bodes ill for us all.

In Chapter Nine, I peer into the future as augmented reality enables the gamification of every moment of our lives and virtual reality becomes so captivating it draws a generation away from employment. But it’s the past that I use to understand where gamification is taking us, and how it might ultimately change and end—specifically, the all-encompassing system of indulgences that ruled Europe in the Middle Ages and governed every aspect of people’s thoughts and actions.

I conclude the book with recommendations on how to design gamifi-cation ethically and with respect for its users, along with advice for governments and civil society on the regulation of workplace and coercive gamification. Despite my warnings, I don’t mean to condemn gamification. The worst gamification erodes free will and manipulates us for profit and power. The best gamification treats us as individuals and helps us flourish.

Let’s make sure we build the right kind of gamification—where we aren’t being played.