[rmvt]

> For me gamification turns some things into a slog.

same for me. i admit it still feels nice to "watch the number go up", mostly on content platforms with a social component to it (hn, reddit, stackoverflow) as you feel whatever you've said has either been useful to, or at least resonated with someone. as social creatures it's only normal to seek some sort of validation.

i think the only gamification set of features i've fallen for in the recent years has been duolingo, which has me practicing every day, even if just for 3-5 minutes. the way they've done it is quite interesting as they have what i'd call different levels of gamification you can buy into. the most basic one being your daily streak but then you have stuff like daily quests, monthly badges, league standings, friend quests and probably more stuff i can't remember now.

the article does cover quite a few examples and i like how the author hints at the chance that, at times, he'd probably be better of not maintaining his streak as that alone ends up resulting in an output that's not desirable (eg. stackoverflow answers with little value). however he left out some cases where gamification is tied to a normally positive impact like step counters (ignoring the data collection).

[itairal]

It seems to me gamification is a feature in some situations, a bug in other situations and with no uniformity between two people.

I despise the upvote/karma bullshit when it comes to discussions. It completely changes how people think and interact. The "witty" mention from the author is so cringe to me. The average person is just not a comedian and it is really the main reason I never use Reddit. To me, Reddit is an engine of non-comedians trying to be witty and funny playing an upvote game. The worst part is I imagine many are like the unfunny person who thinks they are funny because people fake laugh at their jokes because otherwise the interaction is just uncomfortable given the volume of bad jokes from the non-comedian. It all becomes self reinforcing in an awful way.

That is so different than something like duolingo that is motivating just to do a little bit of work that you might otherwise would not have and keeps bad streaks from forming. I just experienced this using Anki where all of the sudden I haven't practiced my language in 2 weeks but my language of choice is not on duolingo.

[atomicfiredoll]

I've been very skeptical of gamification ever since seeing a marketing agency constantly pitch it as a way to increase user engagement and sales. Now it's a red flag that makes me ask, "what are you trying to manipulate me in to buying or doing?" The experience has been impactful enough that even I stopped caring as much about "achievements" in actual games.

Duolingo is interesting because it shows me I'll still engage with gamification if my goals align, but all those mechanics become a bit heavy. When I want flashcards and grammar lessons, getting a game to manage pushed me away. Then, when I realized our goals didn't align due to Duolingo's ceiling, it didn't seem worth being pressed to such an uncomfortable degree. I won't let myself be mentally abused by a cartoon owl.

[scyzoryk_xyz]

You are on point I think - 10-15 years ago gamification became a generally fashionable thing to pursue to drive engagement, consumption and market shit. But most of it doesn’t really work because it’s not usually implemented very well. This is what we had initially with our medical training example - the developers just slapped some trophies and achievements and expected it to just work. Of course when we started user testing we found that people agreed with the general idea but didn’t really use it and found the clutter confusing. We’re still working on having gamification because we really do just want them to feel like it is a game, but it’s no easy feat to do it well. Thankfully with hard evidence from all the user testing we have the arguments to dial it back.