Adrian Hon - Youve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

A WAREHOUSE WORKER PICKS A BOOK FROM A TRAY AND HER VIRTUAL dragon speeds up on a screen beside her. If she works faster and longer than her colleagues, shell win the race and get an award. Its a distraction from the tedium, but its hardly fun.

Not far away, an exhausted Uber driver is about to sign off when a new Quest pops up on his app: if he completes another three trips, hell get a six-dollar bonus. Hes barely making enough to cover the payments on his car, so he sighsand accepts.

At home, his partner obsessively researches the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory on obscure forums, videos, and blogs. Its not as relaxing as watching TV, but uncovering clues and drawing connections makes him feel like hes playing an exclusive game.

Next door, a retiree buys a subscription to a brain training game. It tells her that if she plays its scientific minigames every day, shell get smarter and avoid dementia. The game doesnt tell her that going for a walk outside would be just as helpful.

Ive spent the last decade making one of the most popular gamified apps in the world, so youd expect me to be the first person to spread the gospel of gamification. Yet today, nothing makes me more worried.

Gamification should be a delight. We all choose to play video games and board games and jigsaw puzzles and sports in our spare time. Who wouldnt want to use ideas from game design to make difficult or dull activities more funto gamify them? Thats what led me to cocreate Zombies, Run!, a game thats turned running into an adventure for over ten million players. Its why I admire Rock Band, Kerbal Space Program, and Pokmon GO for making it enjoyable to learn the guitar, understand orbital mechanics, and walk more every day.

But these apps and games arent the gamification were most likely to encounter in our lives. Our phones and watches now come with built-in missions and achievements for hitting ever-increasing fitness and productivity goals. In the classroom, teachers reward and punish children with behavioural management apps, doling out points at the tap of a button. Everyone from Uber drivers and call centre agents to programmers and investment bankers is having their work subjected to gamification, the latest friendly face on labour practices that exploit millions. And with gamification spreading to social networks, trading apps, credit scores, conspiracy theories, and social credit systems, our world feels increasingly like a game we cant stop playing, where the stakes are so high, failure isnt met with a cheery try again but the loss of your livelihoodand worse.

Its bad enough that gamification has become the twenty-first centurys most advanced form of behavioural control, but theres even worse news: its also deadly boring. It turns out that wrapping a veneer of missions and points and challenges around the job of a warehouse worker doesnt change its crushing repetitiveness, though Amazon continues to try.

Over the years, Ive found little evidence that most gamification actually works or anyone finds it fun, and so I assumed that it would eventually be abandoned or rejected. But since its beginnings in the early 2000s, when apps like Foursquare, Nike, and Strava introduced badges and levels to encourage people to exercise more and share their favourite shops and restaurants, gamification has only grown and grown. Practically anything that can be monitored and recorded has been gamified, and as technology has become cheaper, smaller, and ever more powerful, colonising our homes, our workplaces, and even our bodies, so too have the opportunities for gamification expanded to occupy every part of our lives.

Sometimes gamification really is fun: you can only smile at a game like Chore Wars that turns vacuuming the carpet and washing the dishes into quests for your family. More often, gamification is used to manipulate and control, whether thats unscientific brain training games promising to make you smarter, or propaganda games spreading dangerous misinformation online, or video games tricking players into spending thousands of dollars on in-game items they cant afford. For these games, helping you is far down their list of priorities.

Thats why Im writing this book. With todays gamification, youre no longer the playeryoure being played.

I became a game designer by an unusual route. Like all my friends, I loved playing video games growing up in the 1980s and 90s, and secretly hoped I might one day make games for a living. When it came to deciding what to study at university, however, I took what I thought was a more sensible option: experimental psychology and neuroscience at Cambridge University. I found my studies fascinating, but video games never lost their attraction. Whenever I wasnt writing code to analyse brain activity or researching synaesthesia, I wrote about something even more fascinating to me: the burgeoning genre of alternate reality games (ARGs) which combined the real world and the internet.

Not long after I began a PhD in neuroscience at Oxford University, I left to become Director of Play for one of the worlds biggest ARGs, Perplex City. A few years later, I cofounded Six to Start in 2007 with my brother Dan Hon, where I designed games for the BBC, Penguin Books, Walt Disney Imagineering, the British Museum, Microsoft, and Death Cab for Cutie.