Gamification is broken

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Mary Poppins sang that "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," meaning that boring household chores can be turned into fun activities. Being a nanny of exceptional ability, she delivered on her promise. The children had fun, and they completed their chores.

Gamification makes the same promise – it's essentially a system for turning real world activities into games, by adding challenges, prizes, leaderboards and all that. But as game designer Adrian Hon argues in his entertaining book "You've Been Played (How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All)", the key difference between Mary Poppins and many gamification applications, is that Poppins was interested in improving the lives of her charges, while most of the companies behind gamification apps are emphatically not interested in the wellbeing of their users.

While many gamification implementations do deliver – language teacher Duolingo is a fine example – many are intrusive and exploitative and are apt to make the lives of their users significantly worse, Hon argues.

Duolingo isn't really a game. It's a bunch of lessons with motivational gamification tools, like badges, achievements, and streaks. It works because "users are already highly motivated to learn, perhaps because they’re moving to another country for work," according to Hon. Duolingo's effectiveness diminishes when the user has no external motivation. The app's gamification is not powerful enough to make Duolingo an entertaining game in its own right.

This is where workplace games come into focus. Many companies ask employees to engage in games related to their labour activities. Workplace and