In 2004, I started running. Like some British Forrest Gump, I put on some cheap trainers and went jogging out into the night. But unlike Forrest, I found myself bent over and wheezing into some bushes within minutes. Running is hard if you’ve never done it before.
I stuck at it. I put on the same shoes and went out at the same time every evening, and after a while, things got easier. I started to run for longer, wheeze a bit less, and could walk like a normal human being the next day. And ever since, I’ve never gone more than a few days without going for a run.
I am a cursorial being: I can jog for hours and am the master of a single directional plane. In the words of one masseuse, “You have the tightest IT band I’ve ever felt!” She meant it as a bad thing. I wore it as a badge of running pride. That IT band snaps my legs back and forth with a metronomic life of its own. It has gotten me through two marathons and three overnight trail runs, and earned more race medals than my wife lets me keep.
Then, about ten years ago, someone introduced me to Strava.
“You have to get it, Jonny, you’ll love it. We’re all on it.”
They were all on it. I did get it. I didn’t love it.
The problem was that I became addicted to logging my journeys. I wasted hours of my working day hunting out routes, seeing who liked my runs, and commenting on a stranger’s run in Auckland. “Well done, bro!”
I became obsessed with metrics. At first, I fixated on the calories — I tried my best to look as svelte as possible. Then I looked at the pace, time, and elevation. I divided my week into tempo runs, hill sprints, intervals, and endurance jogs. Strava was the gateway drug that led me to heart rate monitors, running clubs, and a small library of books I’ve never read.
And then I noticed something worrying: I wasn’t enjoying running anymore. Logging an activity became a chore. It was a compulsive need — an eczematous itch I needed to scratch. I had always used running as a kind of headspace. Therapy in trainers. But now it was making me more anxious than ever before.
So, I deleted the app. I took off the monitor. And I’m back to being Forrest Gump again.
A day full of games
Everyone plays games of some kind. Since Ludwig Wittgenstein made a big deal of it, it’s been a bit of a philosophical in-joke to try to define “a game.” And while Ludwig might forever have the last laugh, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that everyone plays games.
This might be something obvious, like chess, charades, football, poker, Fortnite, Call of Duty, and so on. But it could also be more subtle: Can I beat that traffic light? Can you guess who I saw today? Can you hold your breath in this tunnel? There are a lot of games, and they’ve worked their way into almost everything we do.
In the early 2010s, the world went mad for “gamification.” Psychology graduates and marketing strategists called a meeting, and everyone agreed that giving people points, medals, or celebratory pop-ups was a great way to motivate people. Starbucks gave you a badge if you visited loads of branches — more branches, more discounts! Nike+ allowed users to track runs and join a competitive leaderboard with unlockable trophies. Since then, we all dance to the song of gamification: Duolingo for languages, Blinkist for learning, and Headspace for meditation all sprinkle shiny things for turning up and carrying on.
It works. Despite the overwhelming saturation of gamified products, despite knowing how cynical and desperate it can look, we all still fall for it. We buy McDonald’s to get Monopoly cards. We buy the chocolate bar to win the $10,000 prize. We love to win — to compete and watch our score tick, tick, tick up. Gamification exploits all of those primal, competitive urges that got us this far along the evolutionary game.
Once, it was a race to survive. Now, it’s a race to satisfy a cartoon owl.
The two games we play
In his book, Games: Agency and Art, C. Thi Nguyen describes two different kinds of games: some are built around “striving play” and others around “achievement play.”
Striving play is where the “point” of the game is some benefit that you win along the way. So, when I play chess with my dad, the point isn’t really to beat him but rather to enjoy ourselves and spend time together. When I go for a run, the point isn’t just to get from A to B — it’s the exercise and state of mind I feel.
In contrast, achievement play is where the result is the point. An Olympic swimmer is in it to win a medal. A football coach wants to win the league. There are poker players who earn their living by playing, and the eSports World Cup now has a total prize pool of around $75 million.
As with anything in philosophy (and as was Wittgenstein’s point), there are no clear-cut delineations here. A professional poker player can still enjoy being in Vegas and talking with their friends around the table. An Olympic swimmer probably enjoys swimming. Likewise, I couldn’t play chess with my dad if there wasn’t some endpoint. The joy of playing a computer game might not be completing it, but beating the final boss is certainly part of the game.
The measure becomes the target
The problem is that relentlessly gamifying every aspect of our lives risks turning striving play into achievement play.
When I go running, the point is what happens along the way: the endorphins it releases, the fitness it improves, and the strange and wonderful things I get to see when I’m outside. But when I was running with Strava in my pocket, I was running for Strava.
In 1975, the economist Charles Goodhart coined what has now come to be known as “Goodhart’s Law.” This states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” So, for example, Duolingo’s gamification — the streaks, the badges, the disapproving owl — is a set of measurements designed to help us become better at languages. But when people log on only to claim the log-in bonus, what is the point? In the same way that getting a helicopter to the top of Mount Everest somewhat defeats the point, opening a language-learning app to pay libations to a multilingual owl seems silly.
Goodhart’s Law is most obvious in the working world. Companies all over the world have long introduced gamification methods to improve their workers’ efficiency or morale. “Employee of the month” awards and even Christmas bonuses (*if you meet your target) are a kind of gamification. But it becomes most pernicious when numbers and measurements become mistakenly attached to actual worth. Someone has to meet a certain target or get a certain number, or else. Play the game, but if you lose, you’ll miss that promotion, you’ll be cast out, and you’ll be fired.
The problem isn’t necessarily the measurements themselves — all companies need to meet targets and be as efficient as is reasonable. The problem is when the overall goal — for example, increasing revenue — is ignored in favor of some instrumental goal, like hours clocked in the office. It might well be that increased office time does increase revenue, but if someone working from home is twice as capable as an office worker, why bend over backward to satisfy an inadequate metric?
Games and life both have goals. But there are different kinds of goals, and there are goals within goals. The goal of chess is to checkmate the king, but the point of playing chess with my dad is to spend some time with the old sod. The goal of running might be to run to Edgeworth Farm and back, but the point is to get fit and feel better. In life, we have professional goals: get a promotion, retrain, earn a certain salary. We have family goals: marriage, kids, a house. We have personal goals: run a marathon, join an amateur dramatics group, floss more. Life is an onion of goal-setting and box-ticking.
The problem with gamification is that it confuses one goal with another. It forces us to play a game that we don’t want to play, and it flattens rich activities into inert metrics. But as the sociologist William Bruce Cameron put it, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” So much of life cannot be plopped into a spreadsheet.
It’s a modern compulsion to optimize and measure. But the world is almost always more complicated than a neat measurement can present it, and it’s a foolish — and unhappy — person who reduces their life and relationships to a point-scoring game. Sometimes it’s better to leave the fitness tracker at home and just go for a run.
This article How gamification can ruin your life is featured on Big Think.
