“I don’t think that anyone is going to be surprised by the fact that companies are trying to maximise profit,” says Adrian Hon. Neither does he think that people will be shocked to hear that authoritarian governments are “interested in controlling and manipulating citizens”. None of this is new, says the author of ‘You’ve Been Played’, “and it certainly existed long before the arrival of gamification”.
What’s interesting, he says, is that gamification – the application of game-design elements and principles in non-game contexts – is becoming a new tool to achieve these pre-existing aims. The difference is that the incentives for modifying user behaviour are “styled deliberately to look like video games, with missions and quests, using interface symbols and elements that people are familiar with”.
More than that, if we are turning box-packing for Amazon or driving for Uber into a game, then employers are presenting work as both fun and fair, which means...