Skip to main content

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 Firstly it's based on behavioural theory that is largely outdated.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.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more