You've Been Played - Adrian Hon ***

There's some interesting material in You've Been Played, waiting to be discovered - but it could have been a lot better if Adrian Hon had gone with a co-author: unfortunately, as a book it's no great shakes.

Let's do the interesting thing first. Hon is talking about gamification - the (clumsily named) idea of using game-like elements outside of games, where they are supposed to encourage us, for example, to exercise more, to work more efficiently, or to follow some government edict. The idea is to provide some game-like rewards (or punishments) for certain behaviours, and as a result to either change the way we act or to make a routine chore more fun.

Unfortunately, as Hon makes clear, this is rarely a good thing. Firstly it's based on behavioural theory that is largely outdated. But also it's manipulative, and even if it does generate a degree of fun to begin with it rapidly becomes a chore and loses its positive contribution. Hon is good at showing us the negatives, but also making clear the limits of what has been achieved so far - so, for example, he highlights the Chinese social credit system, which has been portrayed as a Big Brother system that gamifies everyday life. This is done by supposedly rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad as seen by the Communist Party, but has only been implemented piecemeal and has generated a significant amount of rebellion. (Hon is not saying it's good, just that it's not yet as dystopian as it could be and is usually portrayed.)

Without doubt, some employers' use of gamification to exploit workers as Hon describes is disturbing and needs action. Equally, a lot of gamification, while relatively benign, is irritating and infantilises the users of the system. So we get a strong and disturbing message. Oddly, apart from the basic threat of gamification being misused, the most interesting chapter in the book wasn't about gamification, but about modern conspiracy theories. Hon draws decidedly tenuous links between the two, but his discussion of how and why modern conspiracy theories succeed was genuinely interesting. But after a while, the main theme becomes very repetitive - this is close to being an article that has been stretched to fit a book format. 

Perhaps the biggest problem with the book is that there is far too much about Hon and his company, which he puts forward unconvincingly as a paragon of good gamification - sometimes the text sounds more like a prospectus for investors than useful analysis. I can see the argument for using game features that are entertaining, rather than taking basic game elements like leaderboards and scores and applying them with nothing that the users will really enjoy, but it's hard not to see a vested interest at play when the best example is usually one of Hon's own products.

The other problem is that Hon is a big enthusiast for role playing games, and seems to assume that they are universally enjoyed, and hence can provide a model for how gamification should be done. He describes an online conference that was positively transformed by being gamified. To give the beneficial experiences of an in-person conference, for example, attendees could drink a 'polymorph potion' at the online bar that would 'add a random and inevitably silly emoji to their name' which apparently is a great conversation opener. Similarly 'The Haunted Foyer had a mysterious portal leading to a miniature choose your own adventure game that changed the colour of your name, a swag table that gave away items like a generic sword or official conference socks, and vending machines dispensed unique procedurally generated items'. Hmm.

This is great if you love cosplay or pretending to be a wizard, but for many people (certainly for me) it would be a huge turn off. Whenever there's role play in training, for instance, my inclination is to try to subvert it by cheating the system - or ideally to swerve it entirely. Hon is suffering from the assumption that because he loves this kind of thing it would make experiences better for the rest of the world - to be honest, I prefer generic gamification to this kind of stuff. (I ought to say it's not that I hate games - I regularly play and used to review them professionally, but I don't want to pretend to be someone/something else in a fantasy world.)

Overall, there is interesting material in here, but it's a shame it wasn't presented better.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here