The Game(boy) Edition

It's all fun and games until someone gets addicted...

Hello friends, and welcome to a new type of special edition. First off, thank you to everyone who completed last week's survey. It was so helpful to hear your feedback, and I'll be implementing some changes in the coming weeks, but the first one is that I will shorten the articles a bit and aim for a five-minute reading time. This way, you don't leave the buffet stuffed, just perfectly satiated. So what does that mean for this week? It means you get an article today AND one tomorrow. My first two-parter! 

But now, onto the grub: this week's edition is inspired by an article written by Gurwinder that my brother sent me a few weeks back. I included it in last week's roundup and will include it here again. I will summarize a fair bit of it, but if you have the time (25 minutes), it's worth the read. It's brilliantly constructed and very informative. 

The article's thesis is that over the last few decades, companies have been slowly turning everything into a series of games because the easiest way to get consumers (us) to do something is to make it fun. The story begins with a Harvard psychologist named B.F. Skinner in the 1930s. Skinner believed that by controlling an environment, you could control a person, and he tested his theory with pigeons. He would put the pigeons in a cage with a food dispenser controlled by a button. He wanted to make the pigeons peck the button as many times as possible and found three things. The pigeons pecked most when they got an immediate reward, the pigeons pecked most when the reward was random rather than consistent, and the pigeons would peck long after the food dispenser was empty. The pigeons' behavior changed, so they ended up valuing the button click as a reward, too. 

Pigeons in a Skinner Box

These central tenets have formed how companies control our behavior in the digital age. Social media and digital companies give us different versions of the same immediate gratification and random rewards and have made us value this digital ephemera more than tangibility. These don't always look like games, per se, but are indeed gamified.

Think about the random mystery of Happy Meals, the points system and prize tiers used by almost all loyalty programs, and likes, followers, streaks, and view counts across socials. You can see now, too, that almost every digital app has become gamified. Shopping app Temu has games to play that reward customers with special deals, the dating app Tinder lets you buy power-ups to boost your profile, and Duolingo is probably the best-known gamifier, getting people to learn languages through the use of streaks, points, and prizelike rewards. 

Screenshots of Duolingo using gamification to encourage language learning.

Gurwinder posits that the reason we are so easily influenced by these gamifications boils down to one thing: status. Going back hundreds of years, games were ways to establish status and gain respect; just look at the bloody games of the gladiators. It's even been documented that "games have historically functioned to organize societies into hierarchies of competence, with score acting as a reinforcer of status" (Will Storr). So, while you may not see follower counts and likes as a game, we can all agree they're huge markers of status. These markers make us so concerned with making content, going viral, gaining followers, and spending more time on the apps while slowly taking us away from the things that make us actually happy. 

And this gamification is rampant in the gay corners of the internet, too. Scruff, one of the largest gay dating apps, is chock full of features to keep you on the app. The home screen of Scruff opens to the most globally woof'd individuals (a woof is a tap that Scruff equates to the digital version of eye contact cruising). Underneath that global leaderboard is New & Nearby and then Verified & Most Woof'd, New & Most Woof'd, people with New pictures, and lastly, people who viewed your profile. And that's just the first screen. In addition, the woof’d leaderboards generally reward whiteness, muscularity, and hair. So, it reinforces some of the more toxic behaviors that are rampant in the gay community anyway. Throughout the rest of the app, there are pop-up ads, pull-to-refresh, a Tinder-esque Match section, and the explore section (which is actually a great place to find out about gay events near you). But the influence of gamification is everywhere, and it is not actually designed to connect you but to keep you online. 

In contrast, the other major player in the gay dating (sex) app world is Grindr. I expected Grindr to have similar gamified aspects but was hard-pressed to find as many. Grindr, for all its faults, is still designed to connect you with people first and foremost. It makes certain features only available to those who pay, but those features like more profiles, no ads, advanced filters, read receipts, etc, are still in line to make it easier to find and connect to someone. The only two gamified features I could find are the boost feature (which it could be argued still helps you connect) and pull-to-refresh. 

Pull-to-refresh is such an interesting feature to me because it's so ubiquitous and started with good intentions but is actually deeply addicting. It was first introduced in 2008 on Tweetie, the iOS application for Twitter. Designer Loren Brichter needed a place to put the refresh button and was frustrated by the lack of real estate. So he scrapped the button and made an action instead. The move was met with universal acclaim, as it was a brilliant solution to the problem. But in the intervening years, it's become native to almost every app and has a more complicated existence. 

According to Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist for Google, the pull-to-refresh feature is remarkably similar to a mini-slot machine. "You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize [new content]!) or nothing," Harris wrote. "The rewards are what psychologists refer to as variable reinforcement schedules and is the key to social media users repeatedly checking their screens," said Dr. Mark Griffiths, a professor of behavioral addiction and director of Nottingham Trent University. And this takes us all the way back to Skinner's pigeons. We are all enticed by these easy and convenient solutions even as they slowly warp our thinking and shift our behaviors. But as with anything, the first step towards recovery is to see the patterns we're being governed by. 

That's why Gurwinder, after almost 5,000 words about the dangers of this gamified world, says there's still hope and gives five ways to resist within a gamified society. 

• "First, choose long-term goals over short-term ones... If you did the same thing you did today for the next ten years, where would you be? Play games the 90-year-old you would be proud of having played. They won't care how many progress bars you filled; they will care how many times you saw your parents.

• Second, choose hard games over easy ones. Since the long-term value of games lies in their ability to hone skills and build character, easy games are usually a trap. 

• Third, choose positive-sum games over zero-sum or negative-sum ones. Educational games are one example. Wealth creation is another. Positive-sum games — where every player benefits by playing — are a form of competition that brings people together instead of driving them apart.

• Fourth, choose atelic games over telic ones. Atelic games are those you play because you enjoy them. Telic games are those you play only to obtain a reward. 

• Finally, the fifth rule is to choose immeasurable rewards over measurable ones. Seeing numerical scores increase is satisfying in the short term, but the most valuable things in life — freedom, meaning, love — can't be quantified."

Gurwinder ends his article with hope because we are not pigeons. The pigeons could not get out of their cages, but we have the ability to see the cage and leave it. We have the power to make our own rules and play our own games. 

And now, before I talk to you again tomorrow, I leave you with a quote to ponder.

"Intelligence is knowing how to win the game.
Wisdom is knowing which game to play." 

-Liv Boeree