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And I hope democracies can regulate to put an end to this system before it puts an end to democracies. Because, as with most things, it’s a systemic problem not one of personal responsibility. The people being addicted to these systems are the victims.
@aral yup, increasing calls from various corners of academia (corporate responsibility, design, HCI) warning against gamification & its impacts on human behaviour and living conditions. For instance, gamifying serious issues like sustainability might make us take them less seriously than we should
@louce Also, it is inherently anthropological/colonial in nature, exploits cognitive and behavioural psychology to satisfy corporate greed, and, at best, holds an infantalising view of the people who will be using the things you’re making.
@clarinette @louce @aral I hate that "gamification" today is reduced to application of skinner-box-type anti-patterns.
There are wonderful elements of games that we could borrow from to build meaningful experiences. For example, games are great in creating immersion. We could use those techniques to build emphaty & expose people to new world-views. Games get their players to build their own narratives around mechanics. We could learn from that & build communal storytelling social networks. Etc.
@louce @aral
It's something that comes up far too often in the education space. A lot of educators feeling that they "ought" to gamify some experience to motivate and engage learners - but often in the rush to do that, we ignore the opportunity to nurture more authentic motivations in favour of turning the learning into a series of glorified Skinner boxes.
@louce @aral I didn't see twitter or other soc med platforms in this manner until it was pointed out in the thread.
I use twitter for a long time and I always notice that most tweets were just tweeted for the sake of garnering likes/rts, even the so called "woke" tweets. I'm not saying that all "woke" tweets are like that but some of them are which is much aligned with the "gamification" of soc med. That's why it is refreshing to return on Mastodon. I'm not pressured to have flawless posts
@aral Not to say that gamification is essentially bad, it's an efficient way to get people to do *something*. It reduces friction. I used it all the time in my days as a teacher. Also, look at projects like StreetComplete, who turn a menial, boring, complicated task of making maps into a fun little satisfying challenge. It still has ways to go, but supplying precious data to a socially-valuable project using SC is nowhere near as frustrating as entering it through, I dunno, Vespucci.
Intentions are the key here. That *something* is the question.