Gamification and the attention economy

In this article we’ll think about the concept of “gamification” in contemporary media culture.

Internet And Gamification in 2025. A.D.

Gamification is a process I started recently to notice as more and more present in our daily internet usage. A brief research on the topic will give you a sense of familiarity on the topic.

Just reviewing the first few websites dealing with the “gamification in business” Google Search inquiry will clarify that gamification is a way to enhance customer engagement, influence motivation¹, boost productivity², and optimize the user experience.

While I’m sure everyone is excited just by me mentioning these few keywords, the point I’m making is this: gamification is perceived as a viable strategy in today's economy and society at large.

And this context of the issue is relevant and strangely familiar. Our daily lives are largely occupied with the internet created in the like of the big-tech’s behaviour-influencing data, strategies, and tools at their disposal today. Gamification sounds like it might be just another one. To be specific, it’s because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal or Frances Haugen whistleblower testimonies that we know for a fact that “customer engagement” can be an euphemism that hides the harmful mechanisms of the Facebook platform.

So in this context, gamification is a viable option because it is effective. Effective in what?

Ultimately, gamification is effective in making a population x (your students, your customers, your employees, etc.) behave in a way you’d like. Used as a tool, it can also do this through engagement. And in today's attention economy, engagement is the holy grail of all businesses.

Firstly, it is a crucial aspect for creating what Shoshana Zuboff would call behavioural surplus - extra data collected (movements, timing, preferences) that is not essential for the service, but is monetized by turning it into insights about you and populations.

But the same logic applies for public culture, news, content etc. You get delivered on a silver platter topic of any interest tailored for your liking, in order to spend more attention, more engagement with the platform. This in turn creates a (digital) society emptied out of meaning, where algorithms create identities, and crucial political discussions are used as consumable content⁵.

For these reasons, I believe a critical examination of gamification is necessary.

What is gamification?

In essence, gamification is a design or a process of making tedious tasks into a game-like activity. It does not have to be necessarily “”bad”—plenty of research shows how gamifying difficult content makes a great learning experience in education.

Gamification, as described in the two seminal texts that academically defined it, means the use of game design elements in non-game contexts (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011) or a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences to support users’ overall value creation (Huotari & Hamari, 2012) (Vesa and Harviainen 2018).

To be more specific on the issue, gamification refers to features such as feedback (points, badges, progress); progression (levels, challenges) and social engagement (leaderboards, collaboration) to drive motivation and behavior change in a specific context.

This in turn does two things: a) triggers a motivational response from the brain, making people want to do something they usually might not do (but could do), and b) empties out the original meaning of the activity (work, posting, education, killing, existing) and replaces it with the idea of fun.

And again, the most noticeable aspect of it is it works.

Applicability of gamification

In order to understand the issue, let’s check some recognizable examples.

Mobile apps

Recently, you might have seen how Duolingo is being criticized for not delivering on the original promise of learning the language⁷; instead, it relies on creating a sentiment of progress by gamifying the language learning process.

The issue with this is that it’s convincing: you learn just enough to recognize actual progress, but far less than a leaderboard or rankings might suggest. You’re present every day at a lesson, but sometimes you select the easiest ones just to continue a streak, not to learn something new. The tedious task is being replaced by fun, but along with the tediousness of learning the language, its base purpose (to learn a language) is being replaced by virtual badges too.

Of course, Duolingo is not the only app to do it. Wolt recently implemented the change with collecting coins; a lot of brand products are implementing gamification into their apps⁸ as a way to boost sales or positively influence fitness routines.

But the real possibility is this: we’re not consuming anymore out of necessity or wants; we’re consuming because it’s fun and our brains are attracted to shiny rewards of the consuming process. Also to note, data collected from the users by Duolingo—the learning patterns, difficulties, comparisons, etc.—the behavioral surplus—is also the marketable commodity of these apps.

Social networks

This one deserves to be an issue for itself considering how major of an impact social networks have on the user behavior. Yet in this context, let’s point out one prominent example: TikTok.

TikTok as a platform is a gamified version of online presence, i.e., “influence,” visibility, reach, or, on a user level, social recognition. It relies on quantifiable data that is then expressed through leaderboards, trophies, awards, and similar.

It also features games.

TikTok battles are a live-streaming feature where two creators go live at the same time and compete against each other in real time. They don’t have to compete about anything in particular; they can just ramble and exist as they are. The winner is the one with more likes.

Harmless fun in the form of talking or hanging out is not a bad aspect at all. It’s also extremely fun and, crucially, this fun is addictive.

TikTok’s success is unprecedented, and it is one of the most downloaded apps and continually one with the most revenue⁹. At this point we need to ask what the line is between “user engagement” and addiction.

Moreover, the value of behavioral surplus is very high here—TikTok knows very well when we’re most vulnerable. It uses this motivation for advertisement purposes, in essence, exploiting people's weaknesses in order to sell a product.

Military

Gamification in the military is a clear-cut “morally ambiguous” issue.

War is a horrible process in which the most cruel atrocities are established as the best possible solution in the long run. To be clear, I’m not saying that these acts ever are the best possible solution; more that the circumstances of war dictate the conditions where such acts might seem like the best solution.

And of course, every technological advancement finds its way back to military purposes.

The way it’s used now is shown in the recent headlines of the German military using a video game to search for talent, or the Ukrainian point system for drone warfare¹⁰.

Nico Robin, when discussing the option of whipping out an island off the map by bombing the island. It might be one island, but it’s thousands of human beings that are being bombed, millions of their years, and billions of everyday interactions we recognize as life. Credits to Eiichiro Oda, One Piece, Chapter 395.

Gamifying the war makes the “user experience” less draining, as the soldiers are detached from the act they’re doing. It also strips away the sentiment of humanity from the opponent: they become an additional point in the game.

Finally, an interesting point to notice is that gamification here does increase motivational response, as if do-or-die circumstances are not motivational enough. The form of the game is another source of motivation for appropriate behavior. The proof for this is unintentional consequences of gamification: reports of soldiers hitting already disabled vehicles show how much the game mechanics can override the actual reading of the situation.

In love and war anything is allowed; so is gamification. Yet it’s a perverse point to make that we’re increasing efficiency by dehumanization made through something as innocent as game-like features.

And it’s not like the general public is excluded from this. War became a fascination, and the gamified, desensitized approach to it makes our societies less humane—not just our enemies.

Gamification and its consequences

Let’s review some of the patterns emerging from the mentioned examples.

We’ll notice that gamification, in itself, does not have to be just a manipulative practice, but that in the current economy it most likely is. It makes killing fun, it digests wars into content, it feeds on your need to connect. This ability to avoid something unwanted (tediousness, boredom, stress) and replace it with something “fun” makes gamified content unique. This ability creates comfort zones in areas where no comfort should exist.

But along with avoiding “the something unwanted”, there’s a tendency of avoiding the actual meaning of the content we consume. For example, you might be Level 70 at Duolingo (engagement), but you will not be proficient in the language you’re learning to speak (purpose). We see the statistics of taken down planes in a war, yet we disengage from the fact there were actual people dying horribly.

And to that end, I think being aware of these issues is a great step towards stopping the normalization of at best, purposeless activities to, at worst, dehumanizing activities.