[masona]

> A game is something that you opt into doing because you want the experience of playing it. Labeling every obstacle you run into in life, a game quickly robs the term of any meaning.

This strikes at the heart of the pernicious trend 'gamification of all the things.' Those tools have nothing to do with games and everything to do with dark patterns.

> part of playing a game is taking on a responsibility that you weren't required to take.

Gamification is the opposite - pulling you into an engagement you wouldn't otherwise choose (for better or for worse).

[highfrequency]

I disagree that voluntariness and lack of real-world relevance are very central for games.

I often find that a task that I put off for a while turns out to be fun and gamelike once I get into flow and find that the problem has interesting structure to learn.

In general, finding an appropriate level of challenge is usually the limiting factor in making a good game. Our brains love learning new patterns and making new discoveries. But most tasks are either too mundane to provide any challenge, or too difficult that we can't make progress. Even games that start out as very fun generally become boring once we master the easily learned patterns and our skill plateaus.

This is where most attempts at gamification fall flat. The problem is not that the goals are meaningful to our lives, the problem is that there's just not any interesting structure to learn, so the game feels hollow.

[Supermancho]

It's useful to remember that this story is a blog posting.

Games are tools that humans use to learn about reality by performing pattern recognition to optimize in an artificially constrained environment. This can include your own arbitrary personal constraints. Gamification of things is putting arbitrary rewards and restrictions on activities. Involvement with reality (eg Pokemon Go) is orthogonal.

I believe there are actual whitepapers on this subject (what is a game?) from decades ago.