Chương 41: [That Time I Had to Really Shoehorn In a Gurren Lagann Reference]

It was all well and good that my stats and such were immeasurable. And by 'well and good' I meant 'really sucked with no perceivable upsides'. Was this what the scribble goddess meant when she said she'd give me a special skill that was actually ass? Because this was actually ass. Not only did it prevent me from learning vital information about my growth and my abilities, it also sort of boxed me in from a satirical standpoint. There were so many other jokes we could be telling if only we could see the numbers…

"Feh. What am I talking about? The solution is obvious," I snapped my hands into the closest fist-approximate shape my deformed hands could manage.

"There's only one thing to do: grind. And I mean that in the most literal sense. That's basically the only kind of solution available to me in this kind of story." So I grinded. Apropos of nothing, are you familiar with the term 'Gamification'?. There's a decent chance you are, I'd wager. While the exact source of the word can't be concisely pinned, British-born videogame developer Nick Pelling has claimed to have coined the term in 2002 as part of his startup Conundra Ltd, a UK-based consulting firm.

The purpose of this firm was to introduce the same psychological tricks and ploys video games use to increase engagement and generate fun outside of that specific space to fields such as health care, education, and the workplace. A simple example would be a point system: as you do tasks at work, you get points for each task completed.

Then, at the end of the day, the employee who got the most points might get a special reward — perhaps a gift card or the opportunity to leave early the next shift, or even just a place on the office 'high score'. But there are countless ways the theory can be executed, and once you know what to look out for, you'll see it everywhere. For example, have you ever wondered why there are 'levels' and 'exp' in Duolingo?

Or why some laboratories have turned menial scientific tasks, like folding proteins, into games anyone can play? Or why some health apps have leaderboards? It's not just because it's cute — it's because it works. Study after study has shown that when you introduce elements of play to a space, it increases engagement, attention, effort, and results. But it's all well and good we know how gamification works and from a capital perspective that's all that matters. But let's take a step back and ask why it works.

There's no exact answer to that question because despite the practices' best efforts, psychology still has more in common with its philosophical roots than the scientific fields it so desperately emulates.

We do know for certain that for most people (you'd be hard pressed to find a true universal when it comes to the inner working of the human mind), there is a physical release of dopamine when they accomplish a goal and Gamification is ultimately the art of breaking accomplishments up into increasingly smaller yet well-defined pieces. The end goal of this is so people can microdose accomplishments for a constant 'reward buzz'. Additionally, gamification can layer accomplishments onto each other.

So you're not just doing a task for work, you're completing a mission for EXP. You get the satisfaction of finishing a task, plus the additional satisfaction of progressing your exp bar. And if you happen to 'level up' in the process, that's a third, longer-term accomplishment you can celebrate at the same time. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. This is important to note because Gamification does not make the task more fun, just more rewarding.

In fact, nothing about the task changes at all. It's entirely a matter of presentation and context. This all works because it's assumed humans are goal-oriented and social creatures. Because we're goal-oriented, our brain rewards us with the aforementioned dopamine when we accomplish tasks — a little biological trick that probably helped catapult us to being the dominant mammal on the planet.

Because we're social creatures, we crave validation and recognition from peers and gamified systems make it easy to communicate our contributions and accomplishments within a system. Explaining how you're a top-performing employee is a lot easier if you can just point to your name at the top of a leaderboard. It all seems so obvious in hindsight, but there's a funny little observation there if you're keen to pick up on it: Gamification got its name from video games, not the other way around.

That is to say, we knew about video games before we knew about this psychological trick, so it was the former that inspired the latter. We needed to play with our minds before we could work with them. Millions of years of biological evolution… hacked by accident. But of course, nothing is perfect. Once you hack into a system as delicate as the human brain, mistakes are bound to happen. Issues are bound to arise.

We are not tender enough with our own deeply malleable minds as we really ought to be, and that manifests with Gamification as well. Overreliance on it can cause people to become dependent on the immediate positive feedback offered by extrinsic motivation, and undervalue — or even ignore — intrinsic motivators.

It can create an atmosphere of intense competition and stress as people vie for higher numbers and #1 spots that can only be held by one person, erasing the nuanced reality that people are a tapestry of various skills and abilities instead of flat number-pumping generators. It oversimplifies complex tasks and can cause people to struggle to understand things that aren't as cleanly or clearly communicated in number form.

Indeed, while you won't find this in any scientific paper on the subject, I would argue personally that one of the most horrifying things about Gamification is how it turns rich, complex, beautiful, and amazing human beings into little more than numbers. Every accomplishment? A number on an EXP bar. Every skill? Measured and compared to your peers with no respect for nuance, effort, and the little quirks that can make your talent shine, even if it's not as technically good as others.

Your core attributes as a person — numbers next to words. Gamification can truly make anyone and anything utterly… and completely… flat. All because we can't trust we're strong or we're growing if a system isn't telling us. All in the service of a cheap dopamine hit. All because we need to make a number go up. Anyway. Like I said. Apropos of nothing. I'm not even sure why I brought it up.

"Yay now I did the impossible and can see the invisible row row fight the power cuz I can touch the untouchable and measure the unmeasuable." I said as I threw the ruler I had been grinding with out the window.

"Now let's go have more adventures and tell more jokes: D"