Discussion
"... nudge users toward consistency scores. The gamification of leisure has turned into work everything that used to exist as its counterpoint. Leisure has become a third shift with its own metrics, its own guilt, and its own sense of falling behind." /2
"... leaderboard replaces the reason you started running, that’s value capture. The metric ate the meaning." /2
"Huizinga worried that the play element had been declining in Western civilisation since the end of the 18th century, eroded by industrialisation and professionalisation. What he feared has now been fulfilled. It’s not that we killed play; we captured it and harnessed it to a productivity framework. Then we packaged and sold it for passive consumption. The magic circle was instrumentalised into a dopamine hit."
"But boredom isn’t a problem; rather, it’s the condition in which the mind, left alone, begins to play by itself, to wander, associate, drift toward the transitional space where unexpected connections assemble unbidden. Every moment that we fill with a screen forecloses the free play of the mind. We don’t just need different games. We need more nothing."
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"The philosopher C Thi Nguyen calls this ‘value capture’: the process by which a game’s simplified, legible values start to colonise the real-world activity the game was supposed to serve. Their power arises from the fact that games don’t just create worlds, but new visions of the good, telling players what to care about by virtue of what the game rewards through scores. When you’re doing Duolingo to maintain your streak, or when your place on the running app’s..." 1/