Reading Response: When should we gamify?

On the whole, I agree with the principles laid out in Chapter 6: the MDA decomposition (Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics) for understanding the player-designer relationship, and the core values that underlie good game design such as expression, challenge, narrative, and flow.

However, as I read the chapter, I couldn’t help but think that Ge was pushing for a broad gamification of our daily lives. As the chapter’s Design Etude suggests: “take something in your daily life or work [and] design rules around that to change behaviors”—for instance, “achievements for household tasks” or “incentives for exercising.”

While I believe that gamifying behaviors through adding extra rules or peripheral stimuli can make mundane everyday tasks more fun, there are cases when gamification can detract from the spirit of the task at hand.

Most recently, my college dorm held a discussion about kitchen duties and community norms since the residents must cook and clean-up after themselves (I live in a cooperative-living house aka a “co-op”). One of the topics of contention was (and continues to be) the division of labor for putting away dishes. While everyone has to wash their own dishes, just one person might be responsible for putting away the dishes when the dish rack is full of clean dishes. People complained that they were clearing the dish rack up to 2 or 3 times a day whereas others stacked up dishes like a game of Tetris, ignoring the other option of putting away the dishes themselves!

One resident suggested gamification: add a leaderboard in the kitchen to track the number of times each person put away a rack of dishes. At the end of the quarter, the highest-scoring resident would get a prize!

However, this idea was quickly shut down by the other residents who worried that a leaderboard was antithetical to the collaborative values of the house. Others were worried about the leaderboard being gamed—people could artificially inflate their numbers to get the end-of-the-quarter prize! Both of these concerns are important to consider.

The second concern echoes Goodhart’s law that “once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Though born from the principles of creating a more equitable work distribution, a leaderboard to track work distribution can inadvertently shift people’s behaviors towards competition and corruption. The first concern echoes a discussion from Chapter 7 of Brafman’s Sway: the Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior about the competing relationship between altruism and pleasure. Brafman spotlights several studies showing that once adding pleasure (e.g. monetary rewards) to a task that was originally altruistic (e.g. raising money towards charity) can deactivate the part of the brain responsible for altruistic behavior. That’s to say, adding a leaderboard to do dishes can disincentivize people from doing the dishes on their own accord! What was originally a community-oriented task becomes a mundane task that only one person can “win.”

All in all, gamification is not the end-all-be-all solution to our everyday problems, and sometimes, gamifying certain tasks can actually backfire by countering the core ethos. Just like the rest of design, we must approach game design with care: our designs may have impacts beyond our original intentions!