Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy. Today is Monday, May twenty
second, twenty twenty three, and I'm the host of the show, Kara
Santa Maria. And before we dive into this week's episode, as always,
I want to thank those of you who make Talk Nerdy possible. Remember,
Talk Nerdy is and will always be one hundred percent free to download, and
that's because I rely on the support of listeners just like you. If you're
interested in pledging your support on an episodic basis and also getting an ad free
episode of the show, all you've got to do is visit patreon dot com
slash talk Nerdy to learn more. This week's top patrons include Daniel Lang,
David J. E. Smith, Mary Niva, Brian Holden, David Compton,
Gabrielle f Haramio, Joe Wilkinson, Pasqual Legilati, Ulrika Hagman, and
so so many more. Thank you all so much from the bottom of my
heart. All right, well, it's been a busy one here. I'm
really cracking the whip trying to get my dissertation finished within the next month or
so. So if you notice I'm not quite as active on social media,
not quite as active in responding, and if the podcast is sometimes a day
or two late, that would be why. But I am sticking with it
and I'm really appreciative of all of your support during this super hard process.
I've got a really good one for you today. It's a little bit of
a different flavor, but still I think personally, like right up my alley.
I had the opportunity to speak with Adrian Hone. He's the CEO and
founder of games developer six to Start, the co creator of Zombies Run,
and also a columnist for Edge magazine. He studied neuroscience at the University of
Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and the University of California, San Diego,
and he has a new book out called You've Been Played How corporations,
governments, and schools use games to control us All. So, without any
further ado, here he is Adrian. Home. Well, Adrian, thank
you so much for joining me today. Hi great to be here. Am
I pronouncing that correctly? Adrian? Yeah, yep, Okay, I don't.
I can't think of an alternate pronunciation, but it's all good. You
never know. So I'm really excited to talk to you about your book and
just to talk to you about the concepts and the messages contained within. I
think that this conversation, although contextually, fits within the vibe of the show
quite well. I don't think it's a topic that we have directly approached before.
So let's start there. You've been played how corporations, governments, and
schools use games to control us all. You know a lot about gaming.
Let us know why? Sure, well, the book is about gamification,
and um, you know, that's the idea of using concepts and principles from
game design, you know, video games for non gaming purposes. So a
lot of the time that's probably harmless, you know, it's for trying to
make learning a new language more interesting, or practicing you know, a musical
instrument, or um, you know, just trying to make education more interesting.
But other times all sorts of things might be gamified, like trying to
get you to shop more, or trying to get you to work out of
it your or you at your workplace, and basically trying to manipulate your behavior.
And so that is what I've been trying to address, you know,
looking at all these different examples of how gamification there has been used for you
know, more or less harmful, harmless ways, and certainly more harmful ways
as well. So you yourself, how how did you kind of come to
being an expert on this topic? Well, I mean, you know,
the thing about gamification is, even though the term is fairly new, it
only really started being used about fifteen years ago. The idea of using you
know, games for education or ideas like points and badgers and leader boards has
been around four decades, if not hundreds of years. And so I've been
making educational games or what some people were called serious games for a long time
before you know, the idea of gamification came about. And um, you
know, I'm probably best known for a game called Zombies Run, which is
a smartphone fitness game that tries to make running more fun. And the thing
is is that Zombies Run is often used as an example of really good,
really successful gamification. It's a way to make exercising, you know, more
more in dressing, and we've got millions of players. The thing is is
that I have found that kind of increasing the uncomfortable over the years to be
lumped in with other forms of gamification, which to me just feels pretty badly
designed, if not, if not quite harmful. So even though what I
do is definitely gamification from a kind of formal perspective, it's not something that
I um go out of my way to kind and say what I do my
life's work is gamification. Right, So there's there's a stigma that's now connected
to this for good reason, because there actually is harm that we're starting to
see. But of course, when you first set out to design zombies Run,
maybe we can stick with them. I guess the purity, the positive
side of things first before we get into some of the dark underbelly. But
when you first set out to design zombies Run, like, did you go
into it with an intention? Were you like, this is the point and
I'm going to build to that intention or did it kind of happen more nebulously,
you know, I mean, it was pretty nebulous, I suppose.
I mean, I've always been attracted to unusual kinds of games and games that
combine different genres. The way I got into video games was not through designing
normal console games or PC games, but through alternate reality games, which kind
of take place in the real world, and they might combine emails and fake
websites and their phone calls with live actors and helicopters and things like that.
And so when we came up with the idea for Zombies Run, part of
it came from me just wanting to make running more interesting, because when I
started running, I found it really boring and vd tedious and quite painful.
And I sort of gamified it for myself by using you know, GP watch
and all these things. But I was surprised that no one had used the
new features of smartphones and of the iPhone to try and make it into more
of a game. And so ultimately, you know, there was a problem
that I had, which was I found running starting to run kind of boring
and demotivating, and I knew that, at least for me, a game
like this would have made it more fun and more motivating and more exciting.
And so it wasn't really out of this kind of belief that the games can
make everything better. It was more that, oh, I think I have
an idea for a game that can make this particular thing better. And so,
um, you know, I sat down with our co creator, Namie
Altman, who's an amazing author, and she said that she just joined an
online running club and they asked people there, you know, why do you
want to learn how to run? And some people said they wanted to lose
weight, and other people wanted to get fit, and one woman said that
she wanted to survive the zombie apocalypse. And that is kind of how the
zombie aspect if it came in, because it just worked really well from a
storytelling and gaming point of view. So I mean, just to sort of
the back to your question, it really was to try and make a particular
thing more fun. But it was very specific. It wasn't like, oh
and now we can use this to go and make cycling better and learning French
better. It was just it was just for running, really right right,
And I have to say, from my end, part of the reason that
I was excited to be on the show is because when I was looking at
your bio, and obviously the topic is I think such an important one,
But when I was looking at your bio, I was like, no,
way, that was him because I love that game so and embarrassing to say,
I don't run much anymore because my knees get angry by it. But
when I was, when I was running quite a lot, that really did
keep me going. Such a sma our idea to make your run part of
It's almost like I think of gosh, like Bradbury's the Velt or like these
ideas of the metaverse or these different things that we think of as VR,
but it's audio. It's like audio VR. You're you're entering into or maybe
more like audio AAR. You're entering into this other world, right, and
you're engaging. You're this person who needs to get from this village and find
these supplies and you don't want the zombie. You have to outrun the zombies.
Yes, well you have to add run the zombies. And we played
very closely to what we were able to do with the hardware and with the
technology and with our own resources at the time, which is to say,
you know, they had actually been other running games, even for the iPhone,
certainly for Android before Zombies Run, and most of them involved making you
look at the screen, look at a map, and show you where to
run, a bit like Pokemon go right, and you start to do while
you're actually running, well exactly, it's it's kind of unsafe and really not
very satisfying to kind of stop it all the time, and so um,
you know, from a game design perspective, they just weren't very very good
for running, and so I think that we were able to use audio in
a way. I mean, we all know if you listen to podcasts,
you listen to audiobooks, it can be really intimate. It can feel really
directly emotional. Certainly when you're running, you feel that. And so I
think we're able to put people into a really immersive environment where in some ways
we're just distracting people, you know, from from the sort of pain and
tedium of running, particularly for beginners. In other ways, I think we
really are motivating them. You know, there's a mission Mission two, which
is my favorite one, where the gates on the base fail and the stuck
open and the zombies approaching, and you have to go out there with noisemaker
to distract the zombies and they kind of like, you know, everyone's washing
around and and it just feels every time I play that, even though I
played it like a dozen times, I sort of have to speed up,
and there is something that is really direct about that. Yeah, it's sort
of like the you've seen the VR sort of experiments or demonstrations where you have
to walk a plank and it's like you know that you're in VR. You
know the ground is under you, but it's still you have, Yes,
you have like a nervous system reaction. It's the same thing when you hear
the zombies getting closer, you have to run faster, exactly. It's so
brilliant tapping into something like deeply psychological. And of course this construct, this
idea of using You know, when we think of gaming, we think of
fun, we think of engagement. Like you said, we think of distraction,
we think of cognitive load, but in like a positive way, you
know, attention something that we want to draw our attention to, utilizing gaming
to improve things that we already value, I guess societally, like education,
like exercise. Well, I think that the best forms, or at least
the forms of gamification that are hardest to criticize are ones that the person,
you know, the user of the player, has picked for themselves. Rather
than someone saying, well, I think you should do this. This is
something where the person says I want to do this and where and this is
I'm going to be really specific here where the person that says, even like
five years later or ten years later would agree is still a good idea because
and because it's very possible for people to go and say, well, I
think this is a good idea for me to do now, which is to
say, you know, if you're twenty and you're just like I just want
to go and spend eighty eighteen hours a week playing this video game, you
might think that's a good idea, right, And I can't argue against that
that much, but I would say that probably you would feel differently five years
time or ten years time, and so there is this kind of like that's
my get out for saying, well, I just think that, you know,
we know what people should be doing best. And so all of that
is to say I think that if someone wants to go and use gamification to
make it more interesting to learn, you know, Japanese, or to make
cycling more fun, or to you know, learn about physics and a video
game, I'd say that sounds amazing, actually, And I hope the game
is good. But even if the game is bad, that's kind of okay,
right, because no one is being fooled here and people are going into
with their eyes open. I would say it gets worse when the game is
bad. I think that's a shame because people are wasting their money and their
time. So there are quite a lot of games out there like this.
So I would say a lot of brain training games and apps on smartphones are
like this, where they say, well, we can improve your memory,
we can improve your intelligence, we can make you better at your job if
you play these mini games, and unsurprisingly a lot of people think that's a
good thing to do. I would do it if it actually worked. I
mean, the problem is is that these apps do not work, and they're
certainly not as useful as perhaps just going out for walk or you know,
doing some crosswords or learning how to dance, and so that is bad.
I mean, that's just that's just false advertising fundamentally. But it's using using
gamification as a cloak. And so those are the kind of like either perfectly
fine or just somewhat objection about things. But then there are more worrying forms
of gamification, which I would call coercive gamification, which which I spend a
fair bit of time on. Right, So maybe maybe you know, we
dive into that now because I think that there's probably gamification happening to us,
you know, and I think that really is the big distinction that we maybe
don't even recognize as such. Because the UI or because the experience feels so
natural, so fluid. It's it's just part. It's just become part of
our lives. So I would love to enter into this conversation about the harm
you know, like as you mentioned the corporations, the governments, you know,
like the controlling components that that you talk about. Well. So,
I mean a good example of this would be loyalty programs of all kinds.
So you have frequent fly programs, you have the auto programs for places like
Starbucks, and you know, it's always interesting talking about these because when I
talk about them, people say, yeah, but I love getting a free
flight, I love getting you know, free coffee, and it's like,
well, obviously it's not really free because you know some things. But also
you know, you see people seeing, oh, well I just need fifty
more stars to go and get an extra thing, or today is double double
XP day or double points day, and they go and buy an extra coffee
that maybe they didn't actually really want or need, but um, but this
is some something where they think, well, I actually really value these points.
Right at the very least, they wouldn't have done it otherwise probably yeah,
they wouldn't have done otherwise and maybe they didn't feel so terrible about it,
but but I mean, obviously the behavior is being changed. I think
everyone would probably agree that they would behave differently if the loyalty program didn't exist,
and you have that in a really troubling way. I think, for
for frequent fly programs, where people will do things like mileage runs, where
you know, just to sort of get to the next tier to upgrade,
they will just fly kind of pointlessly. Really, Oh gosh, that's so
detrimental. That's all I thought you were going to mention. You know how
sometimes when you when you go to buy your flight, they're like, you
can double your miles for an extra two hundred dollars. Like what, well,
I'm not going to be that. But that's like not even as bad
as flying for no reason in putting all of that carbon into the air,
Like wow, exactly exactly. I mean that's another thing. I mean,
that's a good point where these points and these different sort of currencies really obver
skate value, right. It just makes it harder for people to understand what
they're getting out of it. And that's why, incidentally, why a lot
of you know, free to play games and really kind of compulsive, addictive
games or mobile have like five different currencies, you know, and you're just
like, wait a second, how much of these tickets worth? And you
know, it makes it harder to really understand what's going on and to sort
of convert that to money, you know, in a way, I think,
sorry to interject, but in a way, I think it's why I
have. You know, you look at like credit card culture right to live
in modern America, but to live in the lope, to live anywhere in
the world right now, and and engage right in this kind of like capitalist
stranglehold we have, we need we need credit, And um, a lot
of people utilize credit, you know, responsibly, and a lot of people
utilize credit irresponsibly. Whether um, that's a whole other conversation, but whatever,
there's a lot of predatory practices that, um that make it very easy
to be irresponsible with credit anyway, Well I all of them. Yeah,
So I was gonna say, I think the points do play into that.
Wh why that is? Yeah, And so like I my credit cards that
I use, which you have to use credit cards anyway, are all cash
back cards. And when I talk to my friends and they're like, why
don't you have an airline card run I'm like, because I know exactly that
I'm going to get one point five percent cash back on everything I use.
I have to use the credit card anyway. It's it's what I'm It's how
I live my life if I got no note, nothing back. And I'm
sure it influences me. I'm sure I'm just as much as sucker. But
there's something or me about the fact that I know exactly it's dollars as opposed
to some sort of point that I have to convert, which simplifies it for
me and makes me feel like less of a sucker. No, is that
valid, is what I'm asking. No, I think it's I mean that's
what I do. I think it's totally valid, and I think it makes
things much more transparent. I mean, that's one of them, is ultimately,
And you do see people on frequent flyer websites who'll be like, well,
actually, if you get this AMEX you know, Delta airline thing and
use it for two months and you I mean people treat you know, these
things like games and and there are ways to play them well, and um,
you know, in fact, in frequent Flyer programs. People will often
call their spouse or their part and their player too because they can they can
unlock more benefits. So so, but it's like a casino, right,
Like the reason that a handful of people can do well is because so many
other people are doing so, or like otherwise they wouldn't that wouldn't be the
system because the corporation wouldn't be making money. That is exactly right. And
it allows people who have the time, um, and and the sort of
capacity to juggle, you know, five different credit cards and to spend lots
of time on forums learning about the latest deals. Those people get rewarded for
you know, that effort, and everyone else who doesn't have the time,
um, you know it is essentially paying for that. And so I think
that is so it's really important to say that a lot of cases where our
lives are being gamified, it is possible for for people, if they're dedicated
enough, to play that game in a way that will work for them.
But like you say, it is impossible for that to work in a way
that benefits everyone. Like, it's that's just not how it works. So
system is Bill, It's it's a feature, not a bug. Yes,
yes, And I think it is very convenient for these companies to be able
to point at people and say, wow, look at this person who earned
like five free flights or these upgrades or whatever, and people can think,
well, I could get that as well, and it's like, there is
no way you're getting that because you would have to completely transform your life probably
to make that work. And and that is worrying because I mean, do
you really want to transform your life to get you some extra coffees to get
some extra flights? That is, that is probably not what most people would
if they were asked to kind of in a neutral way, without advertising what
they would say their value. So I think there's a lot of this going
on. And in some places we can avoid it. We can just say
well, I'm just going to get the cash back credit card, and other
places it's it's basically impossible to avoid. So um, you know, in
the UK, we've been following the US, we have much more we have
more people joining private healthcare insurance because the NHS is being underfunded, and a
lot of these insurers use points systems and use gamification to encourage you to do
certain things. And again sometimes that is to they'll reward you. They'll give
your extra points if you go running more as measured by your Apple Watch,
if you get to the gym more as measured by you checking in, even
if you buy vegetables and healthy foods. They can sync up with your supermarket
purchases and see what you're buying. And you could say, well, that's
good, I'm being rewarded for these things. And it makes me feel quite
uncomfortable because it is. It also means that you're being punished if you want
behaving in a certain way. And I think that is strange coming from the
UK, where we didn't used to link the provision of healthcare and the cost
of healthcare with your behavior in that way. If you see what I mean,
I know that's kind of more normal and different treats be in the UK.
It used to be it doesn't really matter who you are, doesn't matter
how you behave, We're just going to go and treat you and it's going
to cost nothing. And now, which, yeah's different, and that may
be you know, two American ears. In some ways that maybe what is
seen as kind of extremely on one side, and then of course the sort
of directly tying to behavior might be seen as extreme on another side. But
ultimately, when we look at the evidence base, we know that behavior only
takes us so far when it comes to health. And yes, it is
part it is a variable amongst a very complex algorithm. And to oversimplify it
that way actually is it's a social justice failure, right, it is it's
punishing people for existing. Yeah. So yeah, yikes. Yeah. So
one one area of that, the research that need for this book that kind
of surprised me. The most um is of kids. And you know,
if an adult looks at this particular thing which I'm going to subscribe, they
would say, well, of course there's a gamification. It's kind of weird.
And kids, obviously they don't know any better, so they just think
it's it's normal. And there is this app called class Dojo which is in
use in supposedly nine of US schools and certainly lots of schools in the UK,
and it's basically behavior classroom management app for teachers, and it does sort
of two things. The first thing is it's like a private social network where
teachers and parents and students can connect and share homework and photos. And that's
all fine, there's nothing too bad about that. But the weirder thing about
it. What I learned was it's a way of basically trying to manage classrooms.
So the teacher installs the class Dojo app on their phone and they set
up a grid showing all the different students UM, and they can set up
points systems so that if you know Mary is behaving well, then class ten
points, and if you know Peter is behaving badly or sleeping or whatever going
to the toilet too much, even you know, minus twenty points and so
UM class Dodo essentially gamifies behavior in the in the classroom UM and teachers,
some teachers love it, and even some parents love it. Some kids love
it. UM. You see lots of stories of schools quite openly saying,
well, you know, here's the point setup you have, and hear the
rewards that you get if you have certain points totals like you get to play
on video games, you get to go to lunch early, you get to
you know, get sweets, that sort of thing, you get to get
to break early. And so it is basically sort of incentivizing kids for good
behavior three points and through through you know, through a game, and you
know the way thing is. But whenever I talked to people about this.
Certain people of a certain age will say, well, have we always done
this? Right? We always had That's what I was about to. Yeah,
like you know, haven't we? Like we we actually teach, you
know, I'm a psychotherapist, and when we're working with parents, you know,
doing parent training with kids with conduct disorders or ADHD, we will often
teach like you know, a poker chip model and transactional and quid pro quo
structures to help these children learn responsibility or to learn boundaries. Um And,
in a way, that's the same thing. It's just not digital, but
is it not? Well, so, I think that something changes when it
becomes digital and what it becomes this move basically um So. People have liken
it to getting gold stars or you know, putting morbles on a job.
These are sorts of things that you know, happened when I was a kid
or or decades before that. And I think it's different because it's much faster
and much easier, and it remembers much better things like that. It could
be more punitive, It could be more punitive, It can be communicated easier
to parents. Um it. You know, it's just harder for people to
kind of wipe the slately in on something that is digital that is always working,
and there are certain effects to it that are really unexpected but also very
powerful. So um, so when when the teacher gives so one points or
deduct points as a certain sound effect, you know, that happens as you
might expect, you know, happy sound when you're getting a machine. And
the crucial thing is it doesn't like, say, necessarily who has received those
points or been aducted those points and so on the class dojo official blog they
had a post saying, you know, this sound effect is really really powerful.
People kids really respond to this, and researchers have found this as well,
and so the blog said, um, what you might consider doing is
sending up a fake student in your classroom and occasionally deducting points from that student
so as to scare effectively the other kids into submission. Because I'm not sure
this is like some creepy mid century psychology experiment stuff, right, I mean
this behaviorism right yeah, like but like but like the dark side of behavior
yes, yes, um, and so this is a thing, of course,
so I might say, well, I don't use it in that way,
and I just use it to reward people, and I don't punish people,
and blah blah blah. Absolutely true. I'm sure there are a lot
of teachers out there who use it in a perfectly okay but I think that
the tool enables people to use in a bad way. And I would say
that, you know, I can imagine it's helpful in certain circumstances. I
think that what is worrying to teachers and parents who've spoken to me about it
is it is encouraging people, kids to learn and to behave for the wrong
reasons. Effectively, you know, you're saying, well, the reason why
you should be quiet is because you will get more points, and the reason
why you shouldn't, you know, make trouble is because you'll be the data
points, not because of more kind of intrinsic reasons. I mean, of
course, I'm sure that teachers would say, well, here's the real reasons,
but the things that are being reinforced are the points. That is what
you're really worried about, which is like the antithesis of one of the other
big things that we often do when working with children and children who are struggling
with some of these behavioral issues, is really emphasizing what we call natural consequences
and not trying to make everything feel like an artificial transaction, because we will
not mature and develop and grow if we don't see the real world consequences of
our actions. And if we yeah, if we separate those things out too
much, we're actually perpetuating a sort of like immaturity in children. Yeah,
And I think the gamification can be a useful scaffolding to get people into the
habit of behaving in a certain way, right It Like I a zombies run,
Like my hope is eventually people get good enough of running that they don't
need zombies run to run anymore. Maybe they find it fun, but but
they just don't need it. And I think that the danger is when the
game is not designed to let people go eventually and to to sort of development
as people. And of course that that's against usually the commotional addressed of the
company. I mean, the company wants to get people playing and engaging with
the app or the game, Trevor, because you make more, right,
good luck selling that to the that the CEO. Right, That's that's it's
a tall order within kind of this capitalist view that we're looking at, and
especially when we think of games we think of games as entertainment, we think
of them as as money making prospects. Yeah, exactly. So those are
the places where I think people don't necessarily know that they're being played. You
know that that they are, that they think it's just normal. All right,
everyone, I want to take a quick break to thank the sponsor of
this week's episode, Story Pitch Decks. Are you a startup founder struggling to
get your pitch deck noticed by investors? Do you spend endless hours tweaking and
revising only to see lackluster results. It's time to take your pitch to the
next level with a new book, How Good Is My Pitch Deck? By
Keen Angle. Keen and his team at Story Pitch Decks have helped raise hundreds
of millions of dollars in early stage funding at a rate forty times higher than
the industry average. Investors are looking for promising startups that are well prepared and
have a compelling pitch. With Keen's proven strategies and actionable frameworks, you'll learn
how to evaluate how compelling your startup story is, mitigate your pitch's biggest weaknesses,
ideally position your startup within any industry, and much more. You'll also
gain a deeper understanding of what investors are looking for and how to effectively communicate
your unique value proposition. Plus, this book includes a free digital companion kit
with full length example pitch decks and cheat sheets. Head to Amazon and search
for how Good is My Pitch Deck to get his copy to deck. Yeah,
I'm curious about another component that I find is somewhat psychologically damaging, but
I'm not sure how the literature bears out, so this is going to be
a little bit anecdotal. But as you were talking about this classroom map,
I was thinking about this like massive trend. And I don't know if you
if you have it in the UK, but here these gyms they call them
Orange theory gyms, but I think that's just you know, that one company,
but there are probably other iterations of it where people wear wearables and then
their stats are up on this huge scene and I'm like, I can't imagine
that is so black mirror to me. All I can think about is feeling
shame, you know, But maybe that's my own psychology talking. So this
feels dangerous to me to constantly compare ourselves to other people. I have seen
these and I have to confess in some ways, I think, wow,
that looks like that's fun, and some people, some people love it,
they flock to it, and you know, it's not exactly the same thing.
But over the pandemic, I've got a palat home and of course pelt
On it is similarly gamified, and it shows your your points in your output,
and there's a leader board with everyone who's working out at the same time
as you. And the thing that I always tell game designers and tell people
who are interest in the gamification is that it is it is motivating, and
it is exciting to see yourself rising up on the leader board, like you
think, wow, I'm really making progress here and I'm doing better and I'm
beating all these people. But for every person who is at the top of
the leader boarder for every person who's going up the leader board, there was
someone who's going down, and there's someone who's at the bottom of the leader
board. Right it's a zero some game like it is not. It is
not motivating to be the person at the bottom of the leader board. It
just feels terrible. And so I and fundamentally I think that there are some
people who who love competition, and who are best motivators for competition and who
are not who don't get sort of distraught through it. I think most people
are not actually like that. I think most people who can't find it okay.
But you know, I always compare it to when I was playing football.
While I spening soccer at school with my friends, and it wasn't part
of any organized league or anything like that. We just play five a side
soccer on the weekends. And the way we would organize it is that we
would be counting goals. You know, we would know that this side had
gone fifteen goals and this other side had gone twenty goals. But if it
got to the point where it was like fifty goals versus ten, it was
like, well, this is not fun anymore, right, We're not here
for one team to go and beat up the other team. We're here to
have fun. And so we would just swap around the teams. We'd say,
well, look, you two, you're the strongest players. You go
over the other team now, and we're going to try it even out.
And so we did keep score, but only as a way of really make
sure that it was still being fun. And so I think it's just very
very basic, very kind of starved game design to go and say, well,
okay, we're gathering all this data from you, and all we're going
to do is just say, well, you're doing better than this other person.
I mean, that is terrible. It's it's really boring, and and
you know, eventually people will just get bored by it. So it doesn't
even work on a long run, but it does work in the short run.
And I think it also taps into you know, like kind of broadening
this out from a social psychology perspective, I think it really does tappen too,
you know, a failure of sort of the American ethic which has been
now exported into a lot of the world. Or maybe I could say it's
a Western ethic, you know, maybe it maybe it predated us, but
very much this manifest destiny, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, rags to
riches, like all of these different iterations of this ethic, which ultimately culminates.
I remember reading some study and I'm going, I'm wildly misquoting because I
don't have it in front of me. So guys, like, take what
I'm saying with a massive grain of salt. But I remember reading some study
where they were like surveying kids from around the world, and they were asking
these kids, you know, what percentile do you fall in in these different
areas, these skill areas, And it's like in America, like eighty percent
of the kids thought they were in the eightieth percentile. And I'm like,
well, sadly, that's just not possible. And I think it's it is
that American exceptionalism thing where it can be motivating for a lot of people to
be like, I want to win. But it's also so it's it's you
know, it's the dark side of social media for teens as we see it
right now, Like it is so bad for self esteem. It is so
detrimental to self efficacy when you're comparing yourself to others, And why not make
a small tweak and just compare yourself to yourself? Well, why can't you
just show improvement within your own game? Well I would go even beyond that
and say, I don't even know that you have to ensure improvement at all,
right, YEA progress can't keep going exactly. You know, when I
was starting out running, you know, I mentioned I had this GPS tracker
and I had this very rudimentary game on it, or not even the game.
It was just called ghost mode. Basically what you could do is you
could race against your previous rundogs. So this was really fun. Actually when
I really motivating when I started running, because I was just beating my previous
self all the time, and then you were also in a growth phase.
Yeah, exactly. I was just building the muscle, I was building up
stamina. It was great. And then of course there came a moment in
a few months later when I don't know what it was, I was getting
ill or I was just plateauing, and then my past self was beating me,
and I was like, wow, this sucks, Like I don't want
to do it anymore, you know. And of course the answer is that
the point of running is not to just go and keep on getting faster,
because it's actually an impossible but you can't do that. You need to do
something that you find enjoyable and satisfying. And I think that where we have
ended up is that a lot of people feel obliged to certain things that they
don't actually find fun or find enjoyable. Right. I really think that there
is at least one form of exercise out there, or one sport out there
that everyone would actually really like doing, even if they weren't very good at
it. Right, That is not the same thing. You can like doing
something that you're not good at, but you're still getting something out of And
that's why I feel about rowing. Yeah I'm not good at it, but
I find, for whatever reason, when I row in the gym versus running
on a treadmill in a gym, which you know apples to apples you can't
really but whatever, you get the cardio and you get all the things,
and people will argue that this is better, that's better, but ultimately it's
good for you, right, And I find that when I'm rowing it,
I'm not in pain and I'm not like angry the whole time, and I'm
like, oh, I think probably i am just this is the right thing
for me. Yes. And so what I think where gamification can work best
is when it helps ease people into these things, or it helps make things
that are not fun for people more fun. You know. The crucial thing
is is that you know, Zombies Run is not going to work for everyone,
partly because a lot of people don't like zombies, but also a lot
of people don't like audio stories. They don't like that sort of thing.
They don't they just or they might actually just feel stressed by it instead of
motivated exactly. And what I would hope happens is not that Zombies Run takes
over the world. It's more that we get a thousand zombies runs, you
know, that are made for the right thing, for the right tastes.
And they might not even be smartphone apps. They might not be video games.
They might just be football clubs or things like that, because you know,
football is a game and basketball is a game, and you know we
shouldn't forget that. So I think that's where like I end up, which
is we need to figure out ways of making activities satisfying in a lot of
themselves, outside of improvement, outside of competition, outside of points. Even
we can use that as a kind of scaffold to get people there, but
the goal should be that people don't really need it actually interesting. So kind
of tell me of what I'm hearing. Tell me if you agree with this
sort of takeaway that ultimately we can quibble about the how and what is maybe
more effective, more efficient, healthier, more detrimental. But unless we enter
into it with a clear, almost a priori decision about why, it could
kind of run away from us. But if we always go in with an
a priori decision about why, then we're always going to be thinking about getting
back to that goal, maintaining the right constraints, the right guard rails,
and ultimately we can be proud of, you know, a gamification utilization and
not be afraid of it. I think that's really good. I think that
people need to know why they're going into it, and I think designers need
to know why they're designing it. So you know that there's a in the
book I sort of praise Duolingo a fair bit, and if I were writing
it now, I probably take that back. Actually interesting, So Duolingo,
obviously extremely popular language learning app uses a lot of gamification. If you used
it before, then you know that everything you do in it, you know,
like doing vocabulary and doing games and tests and things that that gets your
points and um they you know, my my partner's mom started using it,
and she would occasionally disappear, um just a weird point in the evening,
like during dinner or like in conversations and things, and then go off to
another room. And then during lingo sound effects would appear from that room and
eventually, you know, we'd be like, why are you going off and
just doing during lingo now of all times? And she'd be saying, Oh,
this is you know, dur Lingo XP happy Hour where for this hour,
every completed test gets you double XP. And it's like, well,
okay, but how does that really help you learn French? Right? And
it helps them make money, you know, it helps them make money.
And and crucially I think that she probably if she started using due lingo and
it said by the way, um, we're going to do this thing where
you're going to feel compelled to abandon your dinner for an hour because you want
extra XP? Does that sound okay to you? You probably say that sounds
absolutely bonkous. I don't want that. So that is a thing where they're
not really sure what they're doing. And I think the designers don't know what
they're doing either, because I've looked at blog post on social media posts by
the designers of you and they go and all they can talk about is engagement.
It's just engagement, it's just attention, it's just all these things.
And I'm like, you are assuming that the more time people spend with your
app, it equals better learning, and I don't think that's justified. And
it just feels really horrible, honestly, Like it just feels like you've lost
sight of what you're trying to do here. Yea, And yeah, it's
like the Instagram, Facebook, Twitter model. You know, it's just but
that the point of all of that is just to serve more ads, to
get more data, to make more money, right, Like, ultimately,
it's keep you on the system and keep you engaged so that you know,
the actual corporate whatever, the money making component of this can keep churning,
right, And I totally believe that at the start they were like, well,
we are here to go and help people learn a new language. But
by the end, it's like, we just need the number to go up,
you know, we need more users spending more time and making us more
money from this. And it doesn't really matter ultimately whether they're learning anything.
What matters is if they're spending more time a bit. So what I'm hearing
is that one of the fundamental problems here really is capitalism, right, is
this idea? I mean, yeah, we mentioned it earlier, Just like
you can't always become faster and faster and faster as a runner. But for
some reason, built into the capitalist system that we live in, there's an
expectation that corporations will make more money quarter after a quarter. And it's like,
that's not sustainable, but for some is, and everybody's just pretending it
is. Well, yeah, and I think it is. It's really it's
sad because when game designers get into this business, you know, you know,
I'll often talk to game designers who who basically they start gamifying their own
games, which sounds weird, but what it means is what it means is
basically making games less fun but making more money by adding in loop boxes and
things like that. And I would always say to them, look, none
of us got into this business to become rich. You don't. You don't
try and become rich by being a game designer, right, if you want
to do that and you get a math going to finance or something. But
we got into game design because we want to entertain people, you know,
we want to make their lives fun. We want to do something unique and
special and kind of technically impressive, or tell an amazing story, all these
things, right, and you need to make money as a game designer.
Otherwise you can't pay the bells, you know. But at the same time,
we didn't get into it necessarily to become billionaires. But that's where we
get driven to by the wider culture, even if you don't have shareholders saying
that. And so I think that is what ends up happening, where people
stop with these really good intentions and they just start thinking, well, actually,
what we really need to do is just make more money, and gamification
is a way of manipulating people's behavior to do that, at least in the
short term. Yeah, I think just like we think about social psychology,
we think about you know, persuasion science, and these are tools, right,
and they can be used really, you know, kind of beneficently.
We can use them for social good or they can really be misused for manipulation
and for social control. And the sad thing about these tools, like the
things we learn from so psychology, persuasion science, and gamification being a very
very effective tool, is that it can even be utilized when the when the
user is unsuspecting, like they don't even know they're engaging in it, And
that's where things become really ethically nebulous. So I'm curious in the book,
you know, what are some examples that you um that you offer for people
where kind of we don't have any choice but to use this system and we
don't even really realize that we're being played. UM. I mean, the
the workplaces is probably the most frequent example of this, where um, you
know, some of the most obvious examples will be in um gig economy jobs
like uber um and delivery jobs and things like that. These these jobs,
because they are sort of um, they tend to be mediated by smart homes.
So if you are a yeah, yeah, they're app based, and
so you don't really have you don't have like a boss, you don't have
a human you can talk to. Really all your jobs and your instructions are
coming from the app, and your conversation is coming from the app. And
so that means that if they want to try and motivate you to do certain
things, they could either just go and give you an order, or they
can try and turn it into a game. And that is what happens in
uber where they will offer drivers quests every week or so. And and I
sort of use that term very specifically. It's not like here's your objective or
here's your your job or whatever, it's your quest. It's a it's a
name for a video game. And the idea is you can sign up to
drive forty trips in a week and you get a bonus, or fifty trips
in a week and you get a different bonus. And you know, I've
spoken to some drivers about this and I said, look, isn't this a
good thing, because like you get more money, And they say, no,
I just feel like I'm being manipulated because I don't actually want to do
that, right, And and they are suspicious of it because when they feel
that, when they get close to the target, then the jobs dry up,
you know, and they don't they can't see behind the curtain. They
don't know, like right now, that might not be true. You know,
maybe maybe that's not what's happening. But it's completely trying to a pike.
And what would obviously be better, would be fairer, is they just
paid more money, right, That would be a really easy way of doing
things. Um so, so you know, it is really it's just really
interesting seeing people talk about this. I saw one worker talking about the gamification
on their delivery app and they said, at the start, they found that
really motivating. You know, they would deliver, you know, some food
and there'll be fireworks on their phone, and they get all these points and
they'd level up and all this stuff and they just felt really energized to do
the next job. And then the same app the same gamification six months later.
We just feel absolutely crushing and a manipulative where it would just be like,
well, just thirty more jobs to maintain your current level for this week,
right, and you think, oh my god, I have to keep
on doing this, like, you know, I need to keep on playing
this game. And so that is a case where like it is the same
thing, the same thing that they liked at the start is the thing that
they hate by the end. It's just so black mirror. I just can't
not feel that way. And the funny thing is it's I can just hear
these people in these in these boardrooms having conversations about how do we motivate these
people to like, how do we motivate them to do more into it.
It's like, how about you just pay them a living wage and you're nice
to them and you give them like time off. Like it's kind of amazing
that we already know the answer to this question, but we're not willing to
accept it and we'd rather try to force it through like trickery. Well,
well it's you know, we know what the answer is, but it's not
acceptable, you know. And oh right, that's that's part of It's like,
yeah, but but no, I need to still pay them less.
Come on, man, we gotta have a better way. Yeah, And
I think that, I mean, some of this comes back to like the
idea that work should be fun. And I think, you know, on
the face of you think, wow, what fun's good? Why shouldn't work
be fun? And then you start interrogating that. I think, actually that
doesn't make any sense at all, Like should should being a dog to be
fun? Should being a nurse be fun? I don't think that they we
would think that that actually has to be fun. People are giving it should
be somewhat maybe fulfilling and not sohing, but why yeah, why does it
have to be fun? And you see this too, I see this all
over corporate America. I used to work at HuffPost before they were bought by
AOL. I have friends who work at like Google up in Silicon Valley,
and you go to the campuses and there's like pool tables, tap and no
one's using any of them. By the way, well like a neglected fun
thing. Yeah. I have a story to tell from when I was working
at my first games company, and when we were there at the very start
and there were just a very few people. We were in the most boring
office park imaginable. There was nothing there at all. It was just you
know, just bare walls and computers. But we were having I was gonna
say, we're having fun. I mean, we were having fun, but
it was just very fulfilling because we're getting to do some really exciting, really
original game design work and we were able to sort of get it done very
quickly. And then after the company had become successful, it moved to East
London and I got the ball pit, and I got the slide, it
got the ping ball table, it got all that stuff, and people were
saying, wow, this is a secret of having innovation and having happy workforce.
I was like, we did all the work before we had you know,
the fun stuff. It's got nothing to do of that. Like,
you know, we don't come to work to go and play ping pong.
We come to work for do cool stuff. I can play the play ping
pong at home. Yeah, I'd rather leave here and go home to my
house. But of course that's not the point, right. The point is
how do we keep you at work longer? Well, it's also people not
really understanding what makes for satisfying work, you know, and it's not even
just being a game design it. It's just like people want to have an
agency, you know. We know from self determination theory people want to have
agency. They want to have they want to feel like what they're doing is
meaningful to other people. But they're not just digging ditches for their reason,
right, they want to feel that they're good at it and their skills are
being valued. And I think that you can get that from work that is
not fun, that doesn't need a ping pong table, So you see.
I mean another example of gamification of the workplaces and Amazon, Amazon warehouses,
fulfillment centers, they have this thing where if you're working at a work stage
and there will be a screen in front of you and either you can keep
the screen off that's your choice, or you can turn it on and it
will show you a game. And this is what we've heard for reports.
At least, Amazon is not very open about these things, and the game
is linked to your performance at your job. So basically, if you're picking
you know, items off a conveyor belt and you put it into boxes,
and every time you do that, you'll progress in the game. And so
they are all sorts of games. One of them is flying virtual dragons across
the world and you're competing against other people in the warehouse and around the world,
or there might there's a game called Tamazilla, which is a cross between
like Tamagotchi and Pokemon, where by working you very very very slowly capture and
upgrade animals. And the idea is this rewards you for working faster and for
taking shorter breaks and for just being at the company longer. You know.
There's a viral TikTok video that went around showing someone who kind of had surreptitiously
recorded Tamazilla, and they said, this is a feeling when you want to
you're leaving Amazon, but you don't want to leave behind all your virtual pets.
Wow. Powerful, Yeah, I mean it's like a attention mechanism almost
where they're like, well, you're not going to want to leave because you've
you've got all your virtual Amazon pets that you've unlocked. And it's such an
interesting thing because, like I say, you don't actually have to play these
games. You can turn them off, but then you can't do anything.
It's not like you can watch Netflix on these screens. You know, you
just have to play the game that is designed to make you work harder,
so and and and supposed to need to make them more fun. And I
just find it fascinating. You know. This is and Amazon knows what they're
doing. They're very smart, you know, and they're trying to gamify their
work work force in this way. How is the word dystopian not anywhere in
the title of your book? This is like the thing that just keeps coming
up for me. Well, it's because I still feel hopeful. You know.
It is not surprising to me that people use game design and gamification for
bad purposes. But I'm not about you know, people are like, wow,
you're a Pollyanna or you're someone who has has abandoned the games in the
street, right, And It's like, no, I'm still working there,
you know, like I still believe in what we're doing. I think we
were doing good stuff, and I think they're more people should make gamification actually
but they should do it well, and that's hard. It's harder than doing
it badly, and it probably makes less money than make it doing it badly,
but it's far more satisfying, you know, and it's far better thing
to do. So it is a it is a pessimistic book, full seventy
percent of the book, you know. But um, but I hope it's
also inspiring, you know, to people who who won't help people one hundred
percent. I mean, I think that so many of the fundamental concerns in
this book are not about the tool itself, but about the thing that the
tool is allowing people to do which would have existed without the tool. Of
course, the tool might exacerbate or you know, increase the effectiveness or efficiency
of these choices, but ultimately, you know, the indictment here is not
gaming or gamification. The indictment is like these societal priorities, right, and
and the way that we're we're utilizing these social psychology components to to continue along
that route. Yeah, and so you know, I'm curious kind of I
don't know, as we're closing things up, so I don't keep you for
too long. I do close my episodes by asking my guests always the same
two questions, and now at episode four hundred, I don't know what number
I'm on, but it's been years and years and years. I still have
done nothing with these closing bits. I mean they air in the show,
but I always imagine doing some sort of super cut that i've you know,
don't have the bandwidth to do. But before we get to that, those
closing questions, I'm curious, is there anything that we didn't I mean,
obviously there's a ton we didn't touch on, but is there anything that you
would be remiss if we didn't talk about any big takeaways or important I don't
know, messages that you hope that potential readers here. I mean, I
think that I would acknowledge that a lot of these principles are really old,
right. You know. The thing that I always get from people who think
they're very smart is, well, we've had gamification for like centuries, because
we know his X, Y, and Z at example, I'm like,
I'm very well aware that that there are examples of gamification going back quite a
long time. One is different about gamification now is partner capitalism, but mostly
technology is that it is possible to track people's behavior all the time down to
the millisecond down to the millimeter, and to feedback results and instructions that packed
them in real time. You just couldn't do that like twenty years ago,
let alone two hundred years ago. And there is a mass difference in the
effect that it has on behavior. So, yes, we did have these
things before, but no, it is way worse and it's way more powerful
than they used to be. Yeah, I think that is such an important
point, and so so listen, you know, when I close my episode,
I always want to know two things. And you may have already touched
on them, or maybe they are you know, a complete left turn from
the conversation that we've been having today, and regardless, it's okay. So
I want you to answer these questions in whatever context feels relevant to you right
now in this moment. It could be personal, it could be societal,
it could be global, it could be cosmic. It could have to do
with your book or not. The first one is when you think about the
future, you know, kind of setting your eyes forward, what is the
thing that is keeping you up the most at night, the thing that you
are most concerned worried. Maybe you're finding yourself feeling cynical or pessimistic, you
know, what are what are you most concerned about? And then on the
flip side of that to end on a more positive note, which which it
sounds like you are you tend towards where are you finding your hope and your
optimism? What are you kind of genuinely looking forward to? Um. You
know this is going to sound boring, but I am. I'm like so
preoccupied by AI, you know, and not like in that sort of it's
necessarily going to like destroy the world. More the it is really unclear to
me what's going to happen. And and if I were twenty years younger,
I'd be like, this is so exciting. And now I'm like, I'm
I'm not sure what this means for my job and what I do. Like,
um, and I'm a writer, I'm a game designer, I run
a company. I think some of those things, it doesn't really have anything
to do with another of those things. I'm like, hmm, I don't
want to become the person who refuses to use a computer, who refuses use
a typewriter, you know, But I also don't want to be the person
who forgets what what they'd like doing. So that's that's kind of for the
first first question. Um for the second question, I am just so excited
by games coming into their own as an art form. Video games. I
think that it is we haven't seen anything like it in any other of art.
How vibrant they are, how easy it is for people to make games,
how easy it is for people to go and distribute them, how different
they are from each other. I mean, it is the most exciting art
form of this century, and I wish that people would take them more seriously.
I didn't think game designers and gameplayers take themselves very seriously. I think
they just din't think it's a bit silly. But it's like, no,
this is the newest, the best, the most interesting art form, and
yeah, I can't wait to see what happens with it the next in a
few decades. Do you feel and sorry, this is just kind of a
weird turn, but do you feel like seeing games turned into these like big
Hollywood blockbuster media experiences like The Last of Us is doing a kindness to the
video game industry or do you think it's taking away from it. I think
games are bigger than that. It doesn't really matter like, you know,
it's like, you know, Super Mary Brothers made like a billion dollars in
the box office. Legends of Zella made that in three days. I mean,
it's just like it. You know, people keep on saying, well,
games are bigger than the box office. I mean that's really true.
It just doesn't really register culturally. Registers more because you know, certain parts
of the media are very interested in movies and very interested in TV shows than
I understand that. But I think that it doesn't matter for games whether they
get turned into TV shows or not, because they'll do perfectly well anyway.
I mean, it's cool, it's cool, it's interested in that perspective.
Yeah, because I guess I wonder if it's like a depth versus a breadth
breadth I can't really say that word clearly. Thing you know, like like
gaming goes deep, but it goes deep with a particular sort of client or
a particular user, whereas there's more breadth with like, you know, Hollywood
stuff. You're seeing it on billboards, and whether people watch it or not,
there's is more of a cultural awareness. It's easier to watch a two
hour movie than it is to get good at Mario I mean, you have
to get good a mirror. You have to spend probably dozens, if not
hundreds of hours of practice. And that's not people don't have time for that.
You know, most people don't have time for that. Yeah, it's
the same reason people watch the movie but they don't read the book. Yes,
yes, I know. Well everybody the book is you've been played How
corporations, governments, and schools use games to control us. All by Adrian
Han. Adrian, thank you so much for being here with us. Thank
you, it's been a pleasure, and everyone listening, thank you for coming
back week after week. I'm really looking forward to the next time we all
get together to talk purity.