The Gamification of Life – Lab 065

Tt my thermostat empower Bill tell me like, hey, you know you're using twenty percent less electricity than your neighbor. And I would always tell people I'm not competitive, but baby, I want to be number one. Okay, I want to use so little electricity. I'm turning the lights off. I'm doing everything they taught us dark I'm just shuffling around. I'm like, oh, is it hot? I will switch into a tank top. Okay. I want to use so little electricity that they think this home is vacant.

Just so you can win.

I want to win. I want to win. I am not ashamed. I want to win.

My friends got the eye of the tiger.

I want to be the eco friendly big boss. Okay. How did gamifications sneak into my energy use? And why is it taking over my life? I'm t T and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify.

This is Dope Labs.

Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science, pop culture, and a healthy dose of friendship.

This week, we're talking all about games. Specifically, we wanted to know more about the nature of games, the gamification of life, and the difference between the two because I'm struggling.

You play a lot of games, though I do. You have a lot of games on your phone and you play video games.

How do you know what's on my phone?

Back back back, Because I know you. I've been knowing you for forty five years. We're not that long.

Okay. Sometimes I play games. I don't even realize I'm playing games. But like crossword puzzles, those are kind of games relaxing for me. Sudoku Sometimes when I send little notes in the mail out at a sadoku, if I know people are game friendly, I know not to send you a Sadoku. You don't like puzzles and things like that.

No, I don't like Wordle and things like that are okay, But now they have things like Wordle Unlimited, where it's like Wordle that's just never ending. You can play a thousand wordle games back to back to back, and I say, no way, I can focus my energy for thirty minutes to get this one word. But I'm not trying to keep going and going and going. That's just gonna stress me out. Yeah, when it's done, it's done, it's done. Go remove yourself from my eyeballs.

All right, let's get into the recitation.

What do we know TC, Well, we know that games have been a part of human life for a very long time.

Yes, this is not a very long time. But even when I was a kid, when I really reflect, you know, people in my family were playing games jacks with the ball and the little right dominoes.

Yo, that's old school.

But you know what I always think of when I think of like early early age sports, it's the Mayans. So the Mayans had this ball game.

M have you ever heard of it?

No, tell me, girl.

It's a rubber ball and the sides of the ball is like kind of like maybe a baseball size, I think, okay. And then there's this stone ring that's on a wall and the object of the game is to try and get it in there. But you can't use your hands, so you have to use other parts of your body. And this is it's like really high up. So they're using their backs, they're using their shoulders, they're using their heads.

It really is. I hadn't heard of that before. Wow, And that's really far back. I thought you were going to say, like chess, let me tell you something you didn't want to see me in the third and fourth grade, I had a little board.

I know he was hustling people. I know it.

I had some of my favorite stones. I always wanted to like I had three or four. I always want to end this one little cut out. Oh my gosh, this is making me think of so many games we played growing up, even hand games, yes, down.

From bank to banky.

How many doctors did it take you? Who was making that stuff up? And how was it spreading around so fast? Without social media?

It felt like no matter where you were in the country, everybody knew these games.

How go to my cousins, go from North Carolina to Georgia to visit them, they know the games. Go visit my cousins up in New Jersey, they know the same hand games. They're singing the same nursery rhymes or whatever those things were.

How they're just so embedded in our culture.

Yeah, game plan, Yes, it's a really great way to bond and connect with people. There are also a lot of apps out there than social media and services that have started incorporating games into them. Like the first thing I think of is the apple Watch. That's a game. You know, it's tracking your steps, it's tracking your exercise, how much you're standing, and sometimes you're just competing with you so you can see what you've been doing for the last month. So it's still a game, but it's

Yes, my friends are competitive. I lose those challenges every time. Kate from our Metals episode, Kate's closing her rings every day. Okay, well I can't keep up.

I can't keep up and stuff though up there.

Okay, you know. So you've made a really good point to see that these apps and services are bringing in different elements of gaming, like points, systems and achievements that unlocked. All of those are some of the foundational elements of gaming. But what else do we want to know?

I think it would be helpful to know or understand why we play games. I think pretty much everybody feels like they are open to playing games. But why is it that we do play games? What connections are we trying to make?

Yeah? And then I also think as we see the adoption of gamification. Is that the same thing as games? Where do we draw the line between gamification and leveraging certain parts of it and actually being a game? Yeah?

A game or trick?

I feel like that's a great starting point. There's probably so much we don't even know to ask.

Right, trick or tree, Let's jump into the dissection.

Our guest for today's lab is doctor Twin.

My name is t Newinn. I'm a associate professor of philosophy at University of Utah. I was supposed to be an expert on fairly conventional issues and epistemology and meta ethics, like old school questions like what is knowledge and what is the good? And now I've walked down some weird path where I am a philosophical expert on games, porn, trust, transparency, metrics, Twitter, and weird that I think wasn't supposed to be part of my job description.

Professor Nowan's book, Games Agency as Art explores games as a specific and very special type of art form and argues that games are essential part of our systems of communication and our art.

We started with the basics and asked Professor to win what exactly is a game.

My favorite definition of a game is from this philosopher, Bernard Suits. The book is called The Grasshopper Games Life in Utopia, and he tries to define a game. But the short version is that to play a game is to voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to make possible this activity of struggling.

Professor Newan says, with every game, you have a goal, but what makes it a game is these arbitrary challenges that make achieving that goal more difficult.

One example is a puzzle t t. You hate puzzles. I hate puzzles. The end goal is to be able to look at a complete picture. So if we didn't want to make it a game, we could just buy the picture. Why don't we do that?

That's what I do. That's exactly what I do. I'm just gonna buy a nice picture.

Well that's not the point, I guess.

The point is the obstacles in the picture is cut into a thousand tiny little pieces that we have to well not we, that you have.

To put together in order to see it. Here's another example.

So in basketball, the goal is to pass the ball through the hoop, but it's not just passing the ball through the hoop, because if that was valuable, you would just go to a basketball court by yourself with a step ladder at midnight and just infinantly do it. It's not valuable unless it was done under certain constrems.

Yes, so adding an opposing team who's also trying to score, adding a clock, all of those things, those are additional obstacles that make it a game.

That must mean that the value of the activity, whatever it is, has to lie in the character of the struggle and not just getting the stuff at the end.

Yes, the struggle is real and the struggle is fun, according to Tea.

But that's not the only value games have. Professor Nowinn says that we're also drawn to games because they give us something specific to focus on for a finite amount of time.

What games are for me are sculpted activities. The game designer is setting the goals and then giving you a set of abilities. The amazing part of a game is that you know what you're doing and for a little bit of time you just pay attention to that. When I'm rock climbing, I'm just paying attention to the rock. When I'm playing one of my absurd, stupid complex German board games. I'm just paying attention to the economic status

And in fact, a twenty nineteen study talks about the psychological benefits of playing board games. It links playing them to a decrease in depression and an increase in healthy behavior modifications like healthier eating, quitting smoking, and safe sex.

And there are even more benefits to gameplaying. Games create connection between people. In his book, Professor Nowan actually argues that games are a special technique for communication.

One of the neat things about games is because there's such tight, constrained spaces that they create this weird intimacy. I mean, I think some of the most intimate I've been with another person's mind is playing chess against them. You're like in each other's mind, and that's possible because the goals are so narrow and the space of possible

Right, wordle Okay, If you don't know a wordle is, I don't think you have access to technology or something like, you have not been on the internet. Because wordle has taken the world by storm. So it was created in October of twenty twenty one, and it gained the largest amount of its popularity in December of twenty twenty one. But people are still playing wordle two day.

Yes.

The premise is there is one word, just one word, a five letter word, each day, and you have to figure out what that word is. And with every guest you get clues based on the letters that you chose, and then you get six tries, and your goal is to get the word before the six.

Tries run out. Everyone is playing wordle. If you've seen those green squares, yellow squares, that's what it is.

I remember posting wordle on January ninth.

And I had no clue what word was.

At that point, I sent it to somebody and they sent a question mark back, and when I posted it on Instagram, yeah, a lot of people were saying they didn't know, and only maybe two or three people knew what wordle was. They knew what my squares were.

Now there's so many new iterations. There's wordle, there's qirdle, there's nerdle, there's world there's hurdle, so many.

Different types m Professor Newan actually wrote this Twitter thread about what made wordles so successful, and that thread went viral. He says, when you first played wordle, your first thought is wait, you just guess, but slowly you realize you have more agency than you thought, with clues about letter possibility and letter frequency of each word. So the experience is about discovering this power you didn't know you had

Of the graphic design, you get to see someone else's a gentile journey, like in a second. I think actually the coolest thing about word is you can look and you'd be like, oh, you were there, aren't you? And then you pulled it out. How long did it take you? Between line four and five? You can just see it.

And so once you get this definition of what a game is, like this end goal that would be completely possible and doable if you didn't have all these obstacles that are basically artificial.

In the way.

Right.

Yeah, when you start thinking about that, you really realized that, like we kind of grew up within the culture of games.

Absolutely.

I can remember playing Canasta after school with teachers of after school program.

Yeah, in high school, we were playing skip Bow, we were playing Uno, we were playing all types of card games.

And it really makes me think about video games in the portrayal of video gamers in like mainstream media. But if you were to ask most people, they probably wouldn't say they consider themselves gamers, right.

But based on what we've learned from Professor Nowan, so far we might all be gamersh feels like it.

I think there's this weird, weird inattention to play in games, and despite the fact that it's one of the oldest, most central parts of human culture. From my perspective, now it seems totally weird that the history, at least of Western European philosophy has spent so much time working on society, ethics, the meaning of life, what counts as a good life, and the shelf of stuff about games in play is

So, according to Professor t not only our games the central part of human life, and not only is it possible that we're all really gamers, but he kind of proposes that games could actually be the meaning of life.

Burner two, to the end of his book, has this funky argument that always pisses my students off, where he says, imagine utopia, we've used technology to solve all our problems. What would we do all day? We'd either play games ord be bored out of our minds. So games must be the purpose of life.

And doctor Nowe is not the first person to think about this in this way. It actually goes all the way back to Aristotle.

Aristotle thought though the value in human life was not you made, but good quality activity. So another way to put it is the meaning of life must be an activity that is valuable in and of itself. The philosopher'strength is autotelec activity, activity that's valuable not to get something else, but in doing itself. And I think Toods just saying what is the ultimate autotelecactivity, it's games, that is the struggle that you choose for its own sake.

Well, if we accept this that games are the meaning of life, and you know it is the activity for activity's sake, then they must be pretty valuable, right Like, if this is what we're all doing, If that's what the big picture is, how did we capture the value of games? And that's something Professor wid talks about in his book thinking of games as like an art form.

One of my suspicions is until lately, it was much easier to sell a painting than to sell a game if you think the painting is beautiful and you just buy the painting. But I think if you think what's beautiful in the game is your experience of doing it, that's not as transferable between people.

Right.

That's something that's going to vary from player to player.

What's cool about thinking about games is art is that it's art that we are active participants in. Looking at a painting isn't as active as playing a game.

There's this obsession with art objects that are stable, that is like the painting is the same for everyone, But true games are not stable because people are free during them. And the really remarkable thing about games is that you're free in games and what you do it becomes beautiful in identific interaction between you and the design of the game. But that's not as easily saleable.

So what he's really saying is that games are art, okay, and not even that basic stable art that y'all like to say you really love. Games are dynamic art that are unique inexperience for each person, designed with your agency in mind. This art that's created for players to move through and have their own interaction.

For example, tabletop role playing like Dungeons and Dragons often gets detegrated as very aesthetically low, and if you redescribe in a certain way, here's an activity where people who are largely passiveists who otherwise might be sitting around watching the shittiest Netflix show that repeats the same stories and not you know, digesting it, are sitting together inventing new

This way of thinking is not something that I do often. I just don't think like this. But now listening to Professor Nuhen, I'm like life, life is a game. Life is games. Every part of life you can look at it as a game.

I don't know. It feels like the short of it is you thought it was one way, but it's another. Like you know, you're living around and seeing game like activity everywhere. It does make you start to ask some questions, like is everything a game? Was the matrix for real?

I don't think everything is a game. The suit in definition is that games are voluntary you have to choose to take them up, and so game like systems that are forced on you where you have to engage in them to survive. Systems where the points are associated with I don't know, eating or having a good job that doesn't have the kind of ideal structure I'm talking about where you freely choose a goal and a game for the joy of the struggle. It's unsurprising if you see

All right. So whether you're life right now is rich in action or feeling like it's full of crap. We're going to take a break, and when we get back, we'll dive into game design, the gamification of everything from money to exercise to drinking water to flossing. We're back, and before we dive back into games and the literal meaning of life, let's tee up next week's lab. It's

Okay, back to talking about games with Professor t. Nuan.

We've been talking about what games are, why we like playing them. Now let's talk about the people who are actually designing them. There's a lot of thought that goes into creating a good game, including thinking about a player's behavior. When you're designing a game, you have to account for the freedom of the players and create space for them to have agency.

The things in the world the game design is the closest to is actually making governments and making cities. But these are sets of rules or constraints that transform people's actions inside them while still trying to leave them substantially free.

So, aside from the actual design the colors, what the interface is like, and the graphics look like, all of that, you're also thinking about how people might or might not engage with the game and all of the different scenarios that can happen.

From that, there's also figuring out the goal of the game.

So I have a figle favorite games. It's reyner Kinisia. He's the Mozart of Germany game design. He says, Yeah, So the most important thing in my toolbox is the point system because the point system tells the players what to care about during the game. It sets their desires. You literally just open up the rule bug and it tells you your desire and you.

Just do it. This makes so much sense. Yes, if I download a game and I'm playing and I feel like I can't get enough points, or I have to watch too many ads to get points, or do I'm out.

So one of the types of games that I like to have on my phone is like restaurant games. And I'll download a restaurant game, and if the point is to just make the food and that's how you get points, that's boring to me.

I want customers to have a.

Timer over their heads, and you lose points if they've had to wait for longer than fifteen minutes to order, longer than twenty minutes to get their food. Like, I want those types of points. So I will decide based on how the points are given out, whether or not I'm going to engage with a game.

Because it's telling you what to value, right. I don't want to just value making the food. I want a more complex world. I want to have to consider emotions. I want to have to consider how much time is taken for my customer?

What does that say about me?

Now?

I don't want to get into all of that. Let's skip over. That's another episode. I'll talk to about therapist about it.

People will say things like game designers tell stories or game designers create worlds, and I think that's actually underselling the issue. Game designers create alternate sells for you, which have alternate abilities, but specifically alternate desires, And the true heart of gameplay is manipulating the desires and the abilities and the obstacles in the environment so that together action in that is likely to be awesome, beautiful, funny, thrilling, dramatic,

So if games are the crystallization of everyday life, then the question I'm immediately asking is do people typically gravitate towards games with goals and desires that are secretly like baked inside? You know, like, do you really want to be a restaurant own?

I don't think so. I hate cooking for myself. I'm just going as a key South.

I think a lot of times games let you indulge or explore desire sets that you don't have it all, Like with literature. I think some people just like the literature where they recognize the character of themselves, But a lot of us like literature because we need to explore

Like?

You can explore all these different things through games.

Now that we've talked all about games, let's get into the idea of the gamification of life, like what you were talking about Zakia earlier on with your light built and wanting to win in your neighborhood. But when we say gamification, okay, what do we actually need?

It's any procedure where you take techniques from game design and you export them to ordinary life activities to make those more like a game in some way.

And we've talked about gamification in different capacities in a few different Lab forty nine when we talked about the habit equation and you know, just filling out habit trackers, Lab forty Money Moves, when we talked about some of the latest and fintech, and then even in Lab thirty seven in Denial.

There's also an even bigger thing that I really care about that's kind of vaguely gamification, which is all these cases in which metrified systems and clear rankings get into our life and then suddenly like they just take over, and we get really excited to get points by whatever points systems that is, which includes rate point average and citation rates and clicks and all the other stuff by which our achievements are measured, ranked and immediately fed back

Yes, that's what your light bild is doing, even in your car, all of these little readouts everywhere.

Yeah, even like on your phone every new update. I feel like it's more gamification where it's like, oh, how much screen time did you have? And just making you aware of these numbers, like the awareness of the numbers. I feel like innately we start to evaluate ourselves and say, maybe I should do less, and then you compare yourself, you know, week to week, or like we were talking about earlier with the Apple Watch, where that gamifies your exercise.

So on an.

Apple Watch, it tracks your heart rate, it lets you check your text messages, let you check your email, but.

It also is recording your steps.

It'll record if you exercise, and based on your settings, you can say, oh, I want to take you know, a thousand steps in a day, and if you get to those thousand steps, it closes that ring. And if you say I want to do thirty minutes of exercise every day, once you hit thirty minutes of what your Apple Watch sees it exercise, it closes that ring. And so each day you can see how much of your ring you completed and.

If you closed it or not. So it's kind of a thing where you can.

Look back over the week, over the month, over the last year and see how many times you closed your rings. And so, you know, we talked about it in the Habits episode where maybe that might not be such a good thing for some people because it's not a really great motivator. But for others, you know, the gamification of their health and wellness works.

So when we say gamification, it sounds like we are pulling some elements of games. But is it technically a game? Because I am struggling to become number one? Okay, it is hard to keep my electric use game.

Oh my goodness.

There are a lot of differences, but one of the key differences for me is that in a true game, the points are something that you know is just there to get you through an interesting struggle, and in gamifications, the points are somehow this sick motivation to get you to do something that you detest and find miserable or awful.

Another point to think about where we've talked about gamification in the past, and it's kind of the maybe not so positive version that Professor Newen is talking about, is in the ad to cart episode where Christopher Mems told us about what they call scientific management, where they were going through and looking at productivity. Right, we're still seeing that the gamification like keep your mouth or are you still there?

Such a good point?

We're seeing it of work. That's something I detest, okay, and you're trying to make me do it with stars.

This performance evaluation at the end of the year. Keep it, you can have it.

Another big difference between games and gamification is that a game has a pure set of goals that you're trying to achieve within a finite amount of time, whereas this gamification, like hey, did you go to work five days in a row? Get two hours off in the next two week block. It's infinite and sprawling.

I think that is the major difference between games and gamifications. Games end and then you step back from those narrow goals. Gamification don't end. You're in them forever, and those goals often aren't secluded but set over something like tweeting.

Yeah, I mean the gamification of social media. Likes, retweets, reposts, shares, all of that is gamification, and lots of people feel bound by those shares, likes, and all those things like that. And so what Professor Whet is saying makes so much sense because social media is so much a part of our day to day lives, and a lot of people don't feel like they can take a break from that, and so they're constantly participating in these games that aren't games that are the good type.

Of games and that artificial value. Professor Winn has done some extensive writing around Twitter, including a paper called How Twitter Gamifies Communication, where he proposes Twitter's use of artificial goals such as likes, follows, and retweets are not necessarily increasing our motivation to actually communicate with each other, but more so just the score points right, So folks are just more so trying to be viral than trying to say something that actually has meaning.

Think about all the rich values that you might have in communication. Twitter doesn't measure those. Twitter measures likes, retweets, and follows, which are basically a popularity measure. And the reason is partially because at institutional mass scale, we don't have the technology to measure empathy understanding transformation. What we have is the ability to measure likes. Similarly, the fitbit can't measure whether you're at peace through the exercise or

So it really feels like gamification is everywhere. Why is it so pervasive in modern culture? Why are we so different from the cavemen?

M They probably were keeping scores they had to. When did they go from a bunch of lines to four and then a diagonal line.

I think a lot of the other reasons aren't overt gamifications. A lot of them have to do with the need for processing information at large scale, and a lot of the things that now look like metrics that gamify our lives start their lives as attempts to keep track of and monitor complex situations, often for really good reasons.

An example Professor Nowain gives here is diversity and inclusion initiatives, which he's been involved in, and he says they try to address this huge problem of a lack of diversity by starting with simple metrics counting the number of women, people of color, etc. And corporations, and how having a simplified quota can actually hurt those efforts.

My intellectual obsession is why we respond so intensely to the presence of rankings and points, and the negative side of it is we can capture whole institutions and people and get them to do exactly what we want by tying it to our ranking system. And he's putting that

We really have to ask, like, is this gamification of everything? Is it a good thing? You know? Like there are some places where it feels good to have it in your life. I think that's good for me. I see those rings closing. Yeah, But for some people it is daunting to be like, oh, I have to close this entire ring today, right right? You know. And the other part is sometimes the ring is not even the right metric. It's like, do I feel strong today? Do I feel good today? Right?

You might have worked out really hard the day before, and so today might be a rest day and your Apple Watch telling you, hey, get up, and you're like, nah, yes, I crushed it yesterday.

Notice that part of what makes games so sexy is that they are brief moment where you know exactly what you're doing because there's this artificially clear point system which is pleasurable precisely because it's clearer than the nausea complexity of ordinary life.

A word, what are we doing here? Why is it so complex? Why isn't it clear? And where are the rings? Yeah?

Imagine imagine if we move through life.

Oh, there are some rings over there.

I'm gotta go that way, right, you know, like, just tell me which way to go.

I'm sonic. I'm just out here looking for rings.

So a lot of the gamifications I think are offering you this trade where they're like, hey, you can have the pleasure of a game in ordinary life. All you need to do is take a real world activity and orient your motivations around a simple, pre produced technological embedded points system. Then you'll get thrills.

Ooh, it doesn't sound so fun when he breaks it down like that. I'm still trying to be number one, though. Light energy use is going low.

Lou Lou.

All right, it's time for one thing, and this week's one thing is special because of this episode.

We're going to talk about our favorite game right now.

Okay, So one of them is a crossword book. That's my analog game. My analog game is my crossword puzzle. But I think my one game right now that I'm really enjoying is Farming Simulator twenty nineteen. If you want to upgrade me, I'll get you my you know, I'll give you my Xbox name. But right now, I am really enjoying playing that game. I'm learning about a lot of farming equipment. I have a lot of respect for people that are driving big equipment on regular roads. I'm

What's your favorite crop?

Right now? Its soybeans and they were selling high. Oh you gotta sell it to you can sell it. You can a lot of stuff in there. You can lease equipment. I'm learning about all these different manufacturers, so much stuff. It's really cool. What's your favorite game?

My favorite game is a game that I started playing during the pandemic.

It's a board game.

So me and Jimmy have played this game a number of times. It is called Pandemic. Oh, it sounds insensitive, but this game was created a while ago. I heard about it from someone else and I was like, Okay, this might be a really interesting game to play. Give us some perspective because this was early twenty twenty, you know, we didn't really know much. And you see the entire world and it has these city centers. You draw cards to figure out what your job is, and depending on

Oh so you're doing aid work. Yeah, you're doing it this game.

If you're a reporter, then you have the ability to inform people about what's going.

It's very involved.

We've been planning with just two people, but you can play two to four players.

It is a lot of fun.

It takes time because you have to really strategize with your team to figure out how to stop this pandemic. And we've lost so many times and it is always heartbreaking.

You lose as a team.

You lose as a team.

The whole thing is team based, so if one loses, we all losing. And so it is drama filled lot, very drama filled. But it's a really great game that makes you think a lot.

It sounds like it. That's it for Lab sixty five and we want to hear from you. Do you consider yourself a gamer? If you do? What games do you play? What type of games do you play? Are you playing games on your phone? Are you gonna delete all your game apps? After this? Call us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight and tell us what you thought. Also, you can give us an idea for a lab you think we should do this semester two.

Eight, and don't forget that.

There is so much more to dig into on our website. There'll be a cheap cheap for today's lab, additional links and resources in the show notes. Plus you can sign up for our newsletter. Check it out at Dope labspodcast dot com. Special thanks today's guest expert, c t Nowan.

You can find or follow him on Twitter at add underscore ha WK or you can read more of his work in his book Games Agency is Art and you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs Podcast. TT's on Twitter and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho.

And you can find Zakiya at z said So. Dope Labs is a Spotify original production from Mega Ownmedia Group.

Our producers are Jenny Ratlckmask and Lydia Smith of WaveRunner Studios. Our associate producer from Mega Ohmedia is Breanna Garrett.

Editing in sound design by Rob Smerciak.

Mixing by Hannes Brown.

Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugier from Spotify. Executive producer Corinne Gilliard and creative producer Miguel Contreras.

Special thanks to Shirley Ramos, Jess Borrison, Jasmine Afifi, Kamu Ilolia, Till krat Key and Brian Marquis executive producers from Mega Own Media Group, r us T T show Dia and Zakiah Wattley. And some people are still playing games even as adults, and they're not playing the right ones, all right, So you know another thing