I hate gamification
That’s right. I hate fun.
For those who don’t know, ‘gamification’ is a term used to describe “the process of integrating game design elements and principles into non-game contexts”, according to Wikipedia.
‘Non-game context’ is the key here: activities that get gamified are often those that are perceived to be far from entertaining; instead, they are difficult, demanding and/or require consistent effort, such as learning a technical skill like coding or a new language, exercising, combating a negative habit, sleep management, and so on.
In general, I don’t like gamification, because of the following reasons:-
- I find it distracting. It can make people lose focus on their actual goal. For example, they may be too fixated in unlocking a certain achievement badge for completing a target number of coding exercises, but fail to understand the overall picture of programming methodology. Yes, the good old Goodhart’s law.
- It oversimplifies the learning process. Oftentimes, learning is a non-linear journey, whereby we may encounter unexpected bottlenecks, have to backtrack ourselves, or deal with nuances and grey areas. Overlooking such intricacies and reducing them to static quantitative indicators can negatively impact the learning outcome.
- It requires extra tools for the layer of gamification, which are ultimately unnecessary to the actual activity itself.
Most importantly, it gives people a false sense of ‘playfulness’.
Some may think that wihout gamification, people can lose motivation in an activity over time because they find it boring. However, things that are beneficial to us and/or require discipline, in many cases, are meant to be boring, i.e. such boredom is a feature, instead of a bug.
In my opinion, it’s precisely this kind of boredom that makes people understand the importance of the matter, so that they have an appropriate mental framing in approaching it.
Call me an old-school person, but to me, if you treat something as a game, I find it less likely that you will treat it seriously (well, unless that thing is a game by itself).