January 14, 2026 • 32 mins
From language learning to investments to Amazon leaderboards, it seems like everything has become a game. But are these gamified things actually fun, or are we the ones being played? Dexter talks to philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who recently wrote a book about why gamification can suck the life out of things called The Score. They talk about why the same mechanism in games and gamified metrics – the scoring system – works so differently, why gamification can trick you into caring about the wrong thing, and how this phenomenon hits everything… even baptisms.
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Read:
- C. Thi Nguyen’s book, The Score: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735252/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You can get a high score on anything nowadays, Duel
lingo gives you a streak, fitness trackers give you health scores,
and before you post that TikTok, you're probably thinking about
how far you can push up that number of likes
and follows. It seems like everything in life has become
a game.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
The world is constantly scoring us, and the scoring systems
in games and the scoring systems in the world are
actually weirdly similar.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Teenwin is an associate professor of philosophy at the University
of Utah. He just wrote a book called The Score
that's about why scoring systems work for games, but how
they don't work when other things are gamified.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
So the scoring system is some kind of official declaration of
how we're going to count things together and or how
we're going to count success together. The weird puzzle that
got me writing this whole book was that I had
one story I'd built over a book and some papers
about solf scoring systems and games made it possible to
play and be free and be fluid and explore. And
(01:10):
then that another story built in thinking about bureaucracies of
how how scoring systems were pernicious trained the life out
of communities, drained the joy out of things, and then
I was like, crap, wait, are these things opposite or
is there a bigger picture?
Speaker 1 (01:27):
You might have felt this yourself. Maybe it's a gamified
app that's supposed to motivate you to exercise or learn,
but then you end up just hyper focusing on the numbers,
or you just get addicted to the app and the
activity itself isn't even fun anymore. A lot of times
gamification leads to you getting played. So in today's episode,
we talk about when gamification works, when it doesn't, and
(01:49):
also some of the weird things that can happen when
a philosopher decides to study video games from Kaleidoscope and
IHEARTPI cast. This is kill switch.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Discronized.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
I'm Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
I'm sorry, m m m M, I'm sorry, sorry, goodbye.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Is there a point where you have noticed that we
really started as a society started using the raise gamification
and really bringing that into everything else.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Yeah, the I'm not sure when it started, but the
moment it got really popular was Jane mcgonagall's book Reality
Is Broken, which really pushed the idea that you know,
games are fun, they're really engaging, and other parts of
life are grinding and boring, and so if we apply
those things, we can make things more fun.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
In twenty eleven, a game designer and researcher named Jane
McGonagall put out a book called Reality Is Broken. Why
Games make Us Better and How they Can Change the World,
And one of her main arguments was that we could
apply game mechanics to various parts of.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Our life and then we get all this positive feedback.
You guys have heard of leveling up and plus one's
strength and plus once intelligence. We don't get that kind
of constant feedback in real life. When I get off
the stage, I'm not going to have, you know, plus
one speaking and plus one crazy idea plus twenty crazy idea.
I don't get that feedback in real life.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
That's Jane McGonagall and her ted talk back in twenty ten,
and her thesis back then about Game of Vacation was
really optimistic. She proposed that we could use the structure
of games to solve real world problems like depression or obesity,
even all the way up to global issues like climate change.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
When I look.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Forward to the next decade, I know two things for
sure that we can make any future we can imagine,
and we can play any games we want. So I say,
let the world changing games begin.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
She was not the first person to start. But for me,
this book is like the moment where it goes from
a background thing to like something that is on the
tip of everyone's tongue.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
And really, this gamification stuff was already everywhere. A few
days before that Ted talk was posted online, Starbucks announced
that if you checked into a Starbucks location five times,
you would get a barista badge on the four Square app.
At that point, that was all you would get, just
a badge, not even a discount on a latte. They
eventually did add those perks too, but for a while
(04:54):
it was just gamification for gamification's sake. It's gotten more
sophisticated since then, and gamification is in every part of
our lives now, exercises, gamified household chores, of gamified man.
I logged into my bank app today and it told
me that if I read their little article about password security,
I could get a security scholar badge. And it kind
(05:14):
of makes sense. Games are fun. A lot of us
like playing games, so why can't we bring some of
that fun into ordinary life.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
A lot of what I've been trying to figure out
is why that doesn't work. This is probably a familiar
story for a lot of people. Like I wanted to
get healthier. I started exercising a little bit, I started
watching my nutrition a bit. I got better. Then I
got an app that tracked my nutrition, and I started
losing weight. And then I just became obsessed with losing
weight and maximizing my whatever, like my macro count, and
(05:45):
it made me miserable. I stopped having any joy in
eating or like like, I just became obsessed with this
dry app tracking weight loss thing, and I don't think
I got particularly healthier. I just made my weight numbers
go down and got miserable.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
This phenomenon is what teen Winging calls value capture.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Value capture is the term I came up with while
trying to understand why I was so uncomfortable with gamifications,
even though I love games. So value capture is any
case where your values are rich and subtle and dynamic
or developing that way, and then you get parked in
a social setting or an institution that gives you a simplified,
(06:29):
typically quantified version of your values, and then the simplified
version takes over. Right. You start exercising for health and joy,
and you come out obsessed with either your weight or
your step count or your vo two max. Right. You
go into academia like me, for the love of philosophy,
and you come out obsessed with your citation rate and
your publication rate. Right. So it's something where it seems
(06:51):
like your values collapse around a very simplified external target.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And value capture can hit everything and everyone.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
I was talking to a pastor and he was like, yeah,
you know, like his church had developed an internal leaderboard
of who is getting more baptisms and he had found yes. Right.
He said that he had started realizing he stopped tuning
his sermons for spiritual growth and started tuning them for
(07:23):
popularity so we could go up the baptism leaderboard.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yo, we have algorithmatized Jesus Like, come on, man, are
you surprised? No, I'm not. I'm not, but yo, yo,
gamify baptisms is wild.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Okay, I'm gonna give you one of my favorite examples
that actually has gotten cut from the book because there
was dissent about whether it was too gross or not.
But I think I have to I was doing, I
need to talk to it. So the thing we're really
interested in is the way that the invasion of scoring
system changes our targets and undermines what we were actually
trying to do. And one place where this becomes incredibly
(08:01):
obvious is pick up artists, because pick up artists are
I mean, it's even in the language, like what do
people talk about when they're competing in this way? They
talk about scoring, right, that's even the term we use,
yes or people use. So really interestingly, I found that
there's a little literature of sociologists and anthropologists so it
studied pick up artists, and it's depressing because what I
(08:25):
found out was that pick up artists typically compete for
romantic success in some way. So some of the things
that are typically competed for are like number of phone numbers,
number of sexual act, speed for meeting someone to having
a sexual act, like, they compete for all kinds of things,
and things they don't compete for. This is the important thing.
(08:45):
Things pick up artists never compete for are number of
healthy relationships. They don't compete for like romance, and they
don't even and this is something that I found out
from an anthropologist named Eric Hendrix, who embedded with pick
up artists royile they don't compete for how much they
enjoyed a sexual encounter. In fact, a general theme, he says,
of pick up artists culture is the need to cleanse
(09:07):
yourself of any like being willing to suffer and work
hard and stop having to think about pleasure or enjoyment
in order to win, to win? What exactly? Okay? And
so I mean? I had thought when I started reading
this stuff that it would turn out that pick up
artists were evil, but at least enjoying themselves. And what
(09:27):
I found was so much worse, Like even enjoyment and
pleasure has been sacrificed on the alter of number go up.
My worry is that in some way we are all
pick up artists. We have all sacrificed what matters on
the altar of going up in a publicly accountable, agreed
upon way.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
So why is it that games can be fun and rewarding,
but gamification of real world activity can screw up your
internal value system? We'll get into that after the The
thing that games and game of five metrics have in
(10:12):
common is that they've both created a measurable goal and
a way to get there. In other words, a scoring
system in basketball that can look like putting the ball
through the hoop more than the other team. Of Twitter,
that can look like getting a certain number of likes
and retweets.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
There's something really pleasing and clarifying about having that scoring system.
There is a pleasure to knowing like, oh shit, my
tweet went viral and I can tell you very clearly
that this is like ten times more popular. But I
think there's a deep difference between them. So one of
my favorite game designers, Ryan or Knittia, who's this incredible
German board game designer. He says the most important part
(10:48):
in his game designer toolkit is the scoring system because
it sets the player's motivations. But what a game designer
does is they screw around with the score.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
To get the effect they want. What Team means by
this is that a game designer will tweak a scoring
system to get you, the player, to have the kind
of experience that they want you to have. One of
the examples that he lays on his book is the
difference between dungeons and dragons and this other variant called
Lady Blackbird. So one of the problems that some people
have with Dungeons and Dragons is that some people just
(11:20):
don't get into the story all that much. They just
spin the whole game killing stuff. You're incentivized to do
that because that's how you get points. So someone made
this game called Lady Blackbird where you get points for
acting in character and for getting in trouble with other characters.
So instead of focusing on your kill rate, you focus
on telling an interesting story along with everyone else.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
For the game designer, the scoring system is part of
their artistic medium right. Their medium is agency. They are
changing what you can do and what you're trying to do,
but not because of the outcome necessarily, but to build
some like really interesting activity.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
And this also applies to Game of five metrics too.
The designers of Dual Lingo are using the artistic medium
of a scoring system by giving you a goal and
kind of nudging you toward that goal with certain behavior,
just like the designer of Lady Blackbird is. Lady Blackbird
wants you to have fun with your friends by telling
a wild story, and at least on the surface, Dual
Lingo wants you to learn language by keeping up a
(12:22):
consistent streak of days on their app.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
First thing it's clear is that game designers are pushing
things around for you, and most bureaucratic systems are not.
Amazon is not tweaking its leaderboard for the sake of
the joy of its warehouse workers, right, It's tweaking it
for some other purpose, for its own, for corporate efficiency.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
So this is where things start to break down. A
scoring system in a game gives you an objective to
work towards. It can make a game fun and rewarding.
But when the gamification's objective is not fun but instead
its engagement or efficiency, it can start to get manipult
or even exploitative.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
So, going back to.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Duo Lingo, a few years ago, they changed the way
that their streak counter worked. Du Lingo has a daily goal,
which is usually made up of a handful of lessons,
maybe speaking, reading, and so on, and to keep that
streak going, you had to do all those lessons to
fulfill the daily goal. But then they changed it so
that you don't have to hit that daily goal. You
could just complete one single lesson and the streak would
(13:26):
keep going. This leads to more people using the app
every day, which is great for dual Lingo But on
the other hand, less people were actually reaching their daily
goals after that change. If the point of using duo
Lingo is to learn a language, then not pushing you
towards hitting those daily goals seems counterproductive. I mean, you
could very easily do just one short lesson a day
(13:48):
and you're not really moving any closer to being able
to speak French or Japanese. But what if the point
of dual Lingo isn't actually to teach you that language.
What if it's just to keep you using their app
every day so they can make money. In that case,
that change would be a big success. And okay, maybe
dual Lingo's use of gamification is pretty harmless. I mean,
(14:09):
maybe you can't order baguettes like a native Parisian or
you gotta watch dubbed anime. But there are more insidious
versions of this, like, as Tina went mentioned, the Amazon
leader board, How's it damn.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (14:24):
So, for those of y'all listening to the audio version
of the podcast, that was a TikTok video from twenty
twenty one that showed a leaderboard of one of Amazon's warehouses,
and according to the video, some of the achievements that
you could strive for were punctual picking up Speed or
the big one, make History, and in order to get
that one, you had to pick up one million products.
(14:46):
Amazon calls US leaderboard programs FC games for fulfillment centered games,
and it started testing it back in twenty seventeen, and
by twenty twenty one, it had expanded these games to
fulfillment centers in at least twenty states. If gamifying work
sounds weird to you, well yeah, it sounds weird to
me too, So to be fair, an Amazon spokesperson told
(15:06):
the magazine The Independent that quote, employees have told us
they enjoy having the option to join in these workstation games,
which are completely optional. They can switch in or out
of different games depending on their preference, can play anonymously,
or not play at all. The choice is theirs end quote.
So yeah, if my employer put a leaderboard up on
(15:28):
the wall, I'm not sure if I would feel like
it was actually completely optional.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
The right spirit to play games, and that makes them
deeply fun instead of merely addictive, is a spirit of playfulness,
and that's the spirit that you might try on a
party game with your friend. But it sure isn't the
spirit of what happened. When you force your students or
workers under a leader board that they have no control
over and tell them that they're going to lose their
(15:54):
jobs or get promotions based on how they do on
this leaderboard, that is the opposite of the spirit of
play lifeless.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
But that thing you said, I think that's really important, though,
that's a distinction that almost is really hard to make
because addictiveness looks like fun at first, because at first,
when you start, I mean, shoot, yeah, let's look at
one of those leader boards at you know, the factory
or whatever. Who moved the most boxes? It's kind of
fun to try to go up the leaderboard, right, And
(16:24):
there is a certain kind of person who single mindedly
will dedicate their entire life to moving up that leaderboard
for who moved the most boxes. But for the most
of us, it's something that you're kind of it kind
of feels like you're being tricked into doing it.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Yeah. One of the starting points for me trying to
figure all the stuff out was losing months of my
life to the computer game Civilization m CIF gruelingly addictive, Yeah,
and thinking I had fun, telling myself I had fun
until and I think a lot of people out of
this experience. You walk out and you're like, I've just
lost months of my life and I can't remember it,
(17:00):
and I feel bad.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
So this kind of thing can happen in games too.
There's this hit of dopamine that becomes addictive, and it
manipulates you into continuing to play or to engage, and
it makes you start to believe that you really do
want whatever it is of the game or the app
or the leader board is making you work for that.
Right there, That is value capture and action.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
So I actually end up thinking that the way to
think about it is that you are outsourcing your values
instead of deciding for yourself. You're letting like Mark Zuckerberg
set your values for you.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Even if you've managed to stay away from scrolling endlessly
on your phone, you've definitely been a victim of what,
for me, is probably one of the most insidious examples
of value capture the school system, or more specifically grades.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
So there is a great paper called Making the Grade,
The History of the A to F marking scheme in
American Education that points out that we have plenty of
research that clear grades are not good for education. They
narrow students curiosity. They make students competitive instead of open minded.
They kind of like kill students interest in anything but
(18:11):
doing well in the test. We actually have known this
since the eighteen hundreds. The United States actually went off
numerical grading in the eighteen hundreds. This article will teach
you really, yes, okay, for these reasons, we knew we
had ample evidence that it didn't work for education. The
reason it came back was employer interest in having clear
(18:31):
certificates that would prove that someone could do the work,
so they could quickly hire someone that would be capable
of doing the work. So the grading system is a
system that embodies the interests of employers, not of students.
So my worry is if you become captured by GPA,
then you will be guiding yourself by a value system
(18:53):
that wasn't made by you for you, for your own
health and well being. But you'll be captured by an
evaluative system that was engineered from the ground up to
serve the purpose of employers who want to quickly hire
and fire people replaceably.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
It's so interesting to say that because when I teach
college classes, basically every time I do it, I will
go up in the beginning of the session, I will say, listen,
I don't do grades. At the end of the semestery
tell me what you want. I'll give it to you.
I don't care. And you would think that students would
love this, And everybody I tell this too, says, oh, well,
they probably just ask for A's right. Everybody gets extra nervous.
(19:35):
And the more elite institutions that I teach at, the
more nervous they get about it, because it's like, wait, huh.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
What do you mean.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
I can just have an a like I don't really
understand what we're doing here. The thing that I'm trying
to do is say, hey, I want to take that
pressure off. But that actually it's not as successful as
you would think it is.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Yeah. So I have been trying to ungrade forever. And
I mean I actually literally teach in my intro ethics
class a unit called is grading Bullshit? We read a
famous philosophy favor from Harry Frankfurt called what is Bullshit?
And then I teach them this making the great stuff?
And I'm like, Okay, he's grading bullshit and they have
a lot to say about that. But I think one
(20:18):
thing that as educators we have to confront is the
fact that it would be one thing to have an
ungraded world and the other to ungrade your classroom where
the rest of the world wants grades and students have
been brought up to expect them.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
This is another fundamental difference between a gamified system and
an actual game. In a game, you can choose and
tweak the game you're playing. Like I played a version
of soccer where nobody gets to use their hands, even
the goalies. It's more challenging and it's kind of fun.
In an actual game, players can come together and agree
to change something, but in real life that choice isn't
(20:54):
always up to you.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
So the anthropologist Johann Husinga, who is one of the
early games, he has this book Homolludence not Homosopians, Homolludens.
We are the playing creature. He says that what games
are and what play is is something that occurs in
a magic circle. A magic circle is an isolated domain
of meaning where you enter into it, and the meanings
and reasons you do things change what he means, It's like,
(21:18):
you know, we might hate each other, but we're from
the same team with basketball. Suddenly it doesn't matter that
we hate each other. We're going to co operate, and
it doesn't matter if I love my spouse. If she's
on the opposite team, I'm going to block the pass.
But more importantly, they're disconnected from each other. So an
important thing about say, like a metric like GPA, you
(21:38):
don't have a lot of freedom. If I try to
take my class off of the GPA standard and like
not give letter grades, my students are screwed. Right. That
system is designed so that it's the point is that
everything is locked together. For games, there's no lock. It
doesn't matter if I don't like Mario and I want
to speed run it. I've created a different game with
(21:59):
an independent scoring system. So there's a freedom to manipulate
the scoring system for different reasons, which creates an ecosystem
of different experiences. You can house rule dungeons and dragons.
You can't house rule GPA. You can't house rule subscriber accounts.
You can't house rule KPIs. You cannot tweak them in
the light of some subtler. Beautiful good.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Okay, So a big problem with gamification is that the
scoring system isn't aligned with our actual values. So couldn't
we just fix that by changing the scoring system. Well,
it's not that easy. We get into why after the break. Okay,
(22:44):
so social media platforms are making us value likes and
follower counts. But what if they switched the incentive to
I don't know how many hugs you got last week,
like something you should actually care about, something more wholesome.
Couldn't we theoretically solve this problem of value capture by
just changing those knobs that were twisting teen Win says,
this probably won't work.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
So sometimes when I talk about this stuff, I give
examples of bad metrics, and people want to be like,
oh my god, like those are bad, but let's just
get better ones. And I'm really interested in the possibility
that there are no metrics that would make good human values,
because there's something about bureaucratic metrics that's inimical to human values.
What the world of metrics pushes us towards is paying
(23:26):
attention to what's easy to count together and what we
can consistently count together, and not what we actually care about.
Gamification ties us to only targeting the things that are
easy to count together. It ties us to maxing out
engagement hours in say, making our TV programs and not
(23:47):
like making good art. It ties us to like steps
instead of a rich emotional experience with a weird trail
that you are on.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
What ten Win is arguing is that by definition of
being able to score something, to have a simple enough
metric to track that we have to lose some of
the complexity of real life, and that will always lead
to a flattening of your experience of being a human
and losing sight of how complicated real life actually is.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
The first place I started studying this was in what
are called public transparency metrics, like metrics that are trying
to take some institution that's kind of private and insular
and elite and expose it to get rid of bias
and corruption. I was brought up to think, and I
still halfway think that transparency is great. It does get
rid of bias and corruption. But there's another effect. So
(24:37):
charity navigators are really good case. So for a long
time I guided my charitable giving using Charity Navigator, which
was a nonprofit watchdog that rated charities on how good
they were, how did they count good. Turns out, they
counted good for a really long time in terms of
something called a throughput metric. The throughput metric was the
ratio of how many donations were sent to the nonprofit
(24:59):
and how much went out the other end. So the
more efficient the charity, the better it was. An efficiency
meant most of the donations went out and were sent
out as resources on the other end. What this actually
does is it forces nonprofits to compete for how little
internal spending they do, so any internal spending counts as waste,
(25:20):
which means, for example, if you're trying to build better
houses and you hire an expert and housing construction, or
you hire an expert in the local environment, that count
is waste and it makes your through pet metric fall.
It's a terrible measure, but it looks good from the outside,
and it looks objective because it looks at accounting, which
(25:41):
is something that everyone can assess in the same way,
and it ignores the actual on the ground efficacy of
building better housing, improving ecosystems, because those things are really
complicated and expert matters to assess, and accounting is something
that looks pretty much the same across nonprofits. One way
to put it is, I think there's a lot of
(26:03):
life that has a structure where a lot of what
we're doing has this natural, open ended value to it.
And then we enter into official environments that said, no, no, right,
here's the rubric, here's your key performance indicators, here's your
subscriber accounts or follower accounts. And then we suddenly get
a mechanical thing that is ultra clear that everyone can
(26:26):
key in on.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Is there a way that gamification can be used actually
for good? Basically, I'm asking if his gamification is all
bad because it feels like it's all bad right now.
It feels like it's all manipulative.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
So here's a great way to interact with scoring systems
and with gamifications. You try them on and you see
if they work for you, and if they don't, you
change them. So a lot of people use fitbit well,
I think they start it and it helps them and
they feel good about it. But the crucial thing I
mean is to check in and keep asking is it
still making me feel good? Is it still making me healthy?
(27:00):
Is it still giving me a joy in life? And
it doesn't you change it? Like rock climbing, the scoring
system of rock climbing really helped me at first. It
pushes you to do more difficult things, and that's what
forced me to understand like the subtleties of my body.
And for the first like five or six or seven years,
the standard given scoring system of rock climbing worked great
for me. And then I got older and I became
(27:21):
a parent, and I didn't progress. It was impossible for
you progress and more difficult climbs were just frustrating, and
so I changed to trying to climb more elegantly. The
problem here is not just that scoring systems are clear,
but that they are given from some alien, distant personage
(27:42):
or institution for some alien or distant reason. Then if
you keep picking and modding and changing the scoring systems
to suit yourself or your particular community, that's the opposite
of large scale bureaucratic gamification.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Well it seems like a hard to do that, right, I
mean coming back to you know, say social media, right,
something that exists now, like, for example, TikTok. TikTok was
the first thing that I saw that in the app
it would tell you, hey, here's how to make your
posts more popular, and then all the other ones started
to do them, and so we've gotten really used to
(28:21):
like the point of taking a picture or the point
of taking a short video is getting numbers to go up. Yeah, exactly,
how do we get out of that? Like, is there
a way out of that? Is that an individual thing?
Is that a societal level thing? How do you get
out of that?
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Give and I've been talking about things so far today
there's like a bad lesson and the bad lesson, the
lesson I don't want people to hear is like, it's
all on you. Just about grit man, Just be playful
and you'll be fine. And I actually think it's like,
you know, some structures make life deeply and more easily playful,
and other structures make it really hard. Push and incentivize
(29:00):
and unify these external presentations of value. Example, is exactly
the point. It's a very different spirit to walk into
a game store and be like, hey, I could play anything,
I could walk away from everything. The structure of social
media and the structure of grades and the structure of
key performance indicators is the opposite. It makes a world
that is inimical to freedom. It makes a world that's
constantly pressing on us and telling us like, ooh, just
(29:22):
care about this little thing and you won't have to worry.
You'll be able to communicate, easy to lead to everyone
you'll be completely comprehensible, like you'll be unified. Right. The
world is constantly pushing and I'm like, you can take steps,
but it's hard because of the perfasiveness of these presentations. Look,
there are things that we can do and things that
(29:44):
we can't do. Like, for example, I'm also a teacher,
and in the college classes that I teach, I tell
the students don't worry about the grades. If you want
an A, I'll give you an A. It doesn't matter
to me. But that's just one class out of the
five classes that a student might be taken that semester.
So I can do whatever I want in my little
corner of the classroom, but I'm not fundamentally changing the system.
(30:06):
And you can decide to post a selfie on Instagram
and not look at the likes or the comments that follows,
but that doesn't stop other people from looking at your
post and judging how popular or pretty or interesting you are,
just based on those dumb little numbers under the picture.
These are the systems that have been put into place,
however arbitrary they might be by people with more money
(30:27):
and more power than you or me. But I do
feel like being aware that these systems are there and
that they don't always have your best interest.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
At heart is helpful. I mean, this conversation definitely helped me.
So I'm not saying don't use a fitness tracker, don't
use a language learning app or whatever, but being aware
of your ultimate goal when you start using those apps
might help prevent the app from tricking you into playing
a game you never wanted to play.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Word a moment where I see the two extremes getting
more extreme. On the one hand, I see the deeper
and greater intrusiveness of KPIs and metrics, and on the
other hand, I see the flourishing of these wild, weird
ass indie games And I don't know. This is the
(31:15):
fight we're participating in. A like you get to be
part of this titanic struggle between the most beautiful and
the most horrible use of scoring systems to bend Soul's.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Great everybody's playing the game.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, I hope we win. I hope we do too.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Thank you so much for listening to another episode kill Switch.
If you want to talk to us, you can email
us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC, or if
you want to follow us, on Instagram or at kill
Switch Pod and while you still got your podcast open,
maybe leave us a review. It helps other people find
the show, which helps us keep doing our thing. Kill
Switch is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas, produced by Sena Ozaki,
(32:01):
darlv Potts and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by
me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show.
From Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswa Lashin, Mangesh Hajigador,
and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina
Norbl and Nikki E. Tor Catch On the next One, Goodbye,
You can get a high score on anything nowadays, Duel
lingo gives you a streak, fitness trackers give you health scores,
and before you post that TikTok, you're probably thinking about
how far you can push up that number of likes
and follows. It seems like everything in life has become
a game.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
The world is constantly scoring us, and the scoring systems
in games and the scoring systems in the world are
actually weirdly similar.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Teenwin is an associate professor of philosophy at the University
of Utah. He just wrote a book called The Score
that's about why scoring systems work for games, but how
they don't work when other things are gamified.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
So the scoring system is some kind of official declaration of
how we're going to count things together and or how
we're going to count success together. The weird puzzle that
got me writing this whole book was that I had
one story I'd built over a book and some papers
about solf scoring systems and games made it possible to
play and be free and be fluid and explore. And
(01:10):
then that another story built in thinking about bureaucracies of
how how scoring systems were pernicious trained the life out
of communities, drained the joy out of things, and then
I was like, crap, wait, are these things opposite or
is there a bigger picture?
Speaker 1 (01:27):
You might have felt this yourself. Maybe it's a gamified
app that's supposed to motivate you to exercise or learn,
but then you end up just hyper focusing on the numbers,
or you just get addicted to the app and the
activity itself isn't even fun anymore. A lot of times
gamification leads to you getting played. So in today's episode,
we talk about when gamification works, when it doesn't, and
(01:49):
also some of the weird things that can happen when
a philosopher decides to study video games from Kaleidoscope and
IHEARTPI cast. This is kill switch.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Discronized.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
I'm Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
I'm sorry, m m m M, I'm sorry, sorry, goodbye.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Is there a point where you have noticed that we
really started as a society started using the raise gamification
and really bringing that into everything else.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Yeah, the I'm not sure when it started, but the
moment it got really popular was Jane mcgonagall's book Reality
Is Broken, which really pushed the idea that you know,
games are fun, they're really engaging, and other parts of
life are grinding and boring, and so if we apply
those things, we can make things more fun.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
In twenty eleven, a game designer and researcher named Jane
McGonagall put out a book called Reality Is Broken. Why
Games make Us Better and How they Can Change the World,
And one of her main arguments was that we could
apply game mechanics to various parts of.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Our life and then we get all this positive feedback.
You guys have heard of leveling up and plus one's
strength and plus once intelligence. We don't get that kind
of constant feedback in real life. When I get off
the stage, I'm not going to have, you know, plus
one speaking and plus one crazy idea plus twenty crazy idea.
I don't get that feedback in real life.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
That's Jane McGonagall and her ted talk back in twenty ten,
and her thesis back then about Game of Vacation was
really optimistic. She proposed that we could use the structure
of games to solve real world problems like depression or obesity,
even all the way up to global issues like climate change.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
When I look.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Forward to the next decade, I know two things for
sure that we can make any future we can imagine,
and we can play any games we want. So I say,
let the world changing games begin.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
She was not the first person to start. But for me,
this book is like the moment where it goes from
a background thing to like something that is on the
tip of everyone's tongue.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
And really, this gamification stuff was already everywhere. A few
days before that Ted talk was posted online, Starbucks announced
that if you checked into a Starbucks location five times,
you would get a barista badge on the four Square app.
At that point, that was all you would get, just
a badge, not even a discount on a latte. They
eventually did add those perks too, but for a while
(04:54):
it was just gamification for gamification's sake. It's gotten more
sophisticated since then, and gamification is in every part of
our lives now, exercises, gamified household chores, of gamified man.
I logged into my bank app today and it told
me that if I read their little article about password security,
I could get a security scholar badge. And it kind
(05:14):
of makes sense. Games are fun. A lot of us
like playing games, so why can't we bring some of
that fun into ordinary life.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
A lot of what I've been trying to figure out
is why that doesn't work. This is probably a familiar
story for a lot of people. Like I wanted to
get healthier. I started exercising a little bit, I started
watching my nutrition a bit. I got better. Then I
got an app that tracked my nutrition, and I started
losing weight. And then I just became obsessed with losing
weight and maximizing my whatever, like my macro count, and
(05:45):
it made me miserable. I stopped having any joy in
eating or like like, I just became obsessed with this
dry app tracking weight loss thing, and I don't think
I got particularly healthier. I just made my weight numbers
go down and got miserable.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
This phenomenon is what teen Winging calls value capture.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Value capture is the term I came up with while
trying to understand why I was so uncomfortable with gamifications,
even though I love games. So value capture is any
case where your values are rich and subtle and dynamic
or developing that way, and then you get parked in
a social setting or an institution that gives you a simplified,
(06:29):
typically quantified version of your values, and then the simplified
version takes over. Right. You start exercising for health and joy,
and you come out obsessed with either your weight or
your step count or your vo two max. Right. You
go into academia like me, for the love of philosophy,
and you come out obsessed with your citation rate and
your publication rate. Right. So it's something where it seems
(06:51):
like your values collapse around a very simplified external target.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And value capture can hit everything and everyone.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
I was talking to a pastor and he was like, yeah,
you know, like his church had developed an internal leaderboard
of who is getting more baptisms and he had found yes. Right.
He said that he had started realizing he stopped tuning
his sermons for spiritual growth and started tuning them for
(07:23):
popularity so we could go up the baptism leaderboard.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yo, we have algorithmatized Jesus Like, come on, man, are
you surprised? No, I'm not. I'm not, but yo, yo,
gamify baptisms is wild.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Okay, I'm gonna give you one of my favorite examples
that actually has gotten cut from the book because there
was dissent about whether it was too gross or not.
But I think I have to I was doing, I
need to talk to it. So the thing we're really
interested in is the way that the invasion of scoring
system changes our targets and undermines what we were actually
trying to do. And one place where this becomes incredibly
(08:01):
obvious is pick up artists, because pick up artists are
I mean, it's even in the language, like what do
people talk about when they're competing in this way? They
talk about scoring, right, that's even the term we use,
yes or people use. So really interestingly, I found that
there's a little literature of sociologists and anthropologists so it
studied pick up artists, and it's depressing because what I
(08:25):
found out was that pick up artists typically compete for
romantic success in some way. So some of the things
that are typically competed for are like number of phone numbers,
number of sexual act, speed for meeting someone to having
a sexual act, like, they compete for all kinds of things,
and things they don't compete for. This is the important thing.
(08:45):
Things pick up artists never compete for are number of
healthy relationships. They don't compete for like romance, and they
don't even and this is something that I found out
from an anthropologist named Eric Hendrix, who embedded with pick
up artists royile they don't compete for how much they
enjoyed a sexual encounter. In fact, a general theme, he says,
of pick up artists culture is the need to cleanse
(09:07):
yourself of any like being willing to suffer and work
hard and stop having to think about pleasure or enjoyment
in order to win, to win? What exactly? Okay? And
so I mean? I had thought when I started reading
this stuff that it would turn out that pick up
artists were evil, but at least enjoying themselves. And what
(09:27):
I found was so much worse, Like even enjoyment and
pleasure has been sacrificed on the alter of number go up.
My worry is that in some way we are all
pick up artists. We have all sacrificed what matters on
the altar of going up in a publicly accountable, agreed
upon way.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
So why is it that games can be fun and rewarding,
but gamification of real world activity can screw up your
internal value system? We'll get into that after the The
thing that games and game of five metrics have in
(10:12):
common is that they've both created a measurable goal and
a way to get there. In other words, a scoring
system in basketball that can look like putting the ball
through the hoop more than the other team. Of Twitter,
that can look like getting a certain number of likes
and retweets.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
There's something really pleasing and clarifying about having that scoring system.
There is a pleasure to knowing like, oh shit, my
tweet went viral and I can tell you very clearly
that this is like ten times more popular. But I
think there's a deep difference between them. So one of
my favorite game designers, Ryan or Knittia, who's this incredible
German board game designer. He says the most important part
(10:48):
in his game designer toolkit is the scoring system because
it sets the player's motivations. But what a game designer
does is they screw around with the score.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
To get the effect they want. What Team means by
this is that a game designer will tweak a scoring
system to get you, the player, to have the kind
of experience that they want you to have. One of
the examples that he lays on his book is the
difference between dungeons and dragons and this other variant called
Lady Blackbird. So one of the problems that some people
have with Dungeons and Dragons is that some people just
(11:20):
don't get into the story all that much. They just
spin the whole game killing stuff. You're incentivized to do
that because that's how you get points. So someone made
this game called Lady Blackbird where you get points for
acting in character and for getting in trouble with other characters.
So instead of focusing on your kill rate, you focus
on telling an interesting story along with everyone else.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
For the game designer, the scoring system is part of
their artistic medium right. Their medium is agency. They are
changing what you can do and what you're trying to do,
but not because of the outcome necessarily, but to build
some like really interesting activity.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
And this also applies to Game of five metrics too.
The designers of Dual Lingo are using the artistic medium
of a scoring system by giving you a goal and
kind of nudging you toward that goal with certain behavior,
just like the designer of Lady Blackbird is. Lady Blackbird
wants you to have fun with your friends by telling
a wild story, and at least on the surface, Dual
Lingo wants you to learn language by keeping up a
(12:22):
consistent streak of days on their app.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
First thing it's clear is that game designers are pushing
things around for you, and most bureaucratic systems are not.
Amazon is not tweaking its leaderboard for the sake of
the joy of its warehouse workers, right, It's tweaking it
for some other purpose, for its own, for corporate efficiency.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
So this is where things start to break down. A
scoring system in a game gives you an objective to
work towards. It can make a game fun and rewarding.
But when the gamification's objective is not fun but instead
its engagement or efficiency, it can start to get manipult
or even exploitative.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
So, going back to.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Duo Lingo, a few years ago, they changed the way
that their streak counter worked. Du Lingo has a daily goal,
which is usually made up of a handful of lessons,
maybe speaking, reading, and so on, and to keep that
streak going, you had to do all those lessons to
fulfill the daily goal. But then they changed it so
that you don't have to hit that daily goal. You
could just complete one single lesson and the streak would
(13:26):
keep going. This leads to more people using the app
every day, which is great for dual Lingo But on
the other hand, less people were actually reaching their daily
goals after that change. If the point of using duo
Lingo is to learn a language, then not pushing you
towards hitting those daily goals seems counterproductive. I mean, you
could very easily do just one short lesson a day
(13:48):
and you're not really moving any closer to being able
to speak French or Japanese. But what if the point
of dual Lingo isn't actually to teach you that language.
What if it's just to keep you using their app
every day so they can make money. In that case,
that change would be a big success. And okay, maybe
dual Lingo's use of gamification is pretty harmless. I mean,
(14:09):
maybe you can't order baguettes like a native Parisian or
you gotta watch dubbed anime. But there are more insidious
versions of this, like, as Tina went mentioned, the Amazon
leader board, How's it damn.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (14:24):
So, for those of y'all listening to the audio version
of the podcast, that was a TikTok video from twenty
twenty one that showed a leaderboard of one of Amazon's warehouses,
and according to the video, some of the achievements that
you could strive for were punctual picking up Speed or
the big one, make History, and in order to get
that one, you had to pick up one million products.
(14:46):
Amazon calls US leaderboard programs FC games for fulfillment centered games,
and it started testing it back in twenty seventeen, and
by twenty twenty one, it had expanded these games to
fulfillment centers in at least twenty states. If gamifying work
sounds weird to you, well yeah, it sounds weird to
me too, So to be fair, an Amazon spokesperson told
(15:06):
the magazine The Independent that quote, employees have told us
they enjoy having the option to join in these workstation games,
which are completely optional. They can switch in or out
of different games depending on their preference, can play anonymously,
or not play at all. The choice is theirs end quote.
So yeah, if my employer put a leaderboard up on
(15:28):
the wall, I'm not sure if I would feel like
it was actually completely optional.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
The right spirit to play games, and that makes them
deeply fun instead of merely addictive, is a spirit of playfulness,
and that's the spirit that you might try on a
party game with your friend. But it sure isn't the
spirit of what happened. When you force your students or
workers under a leader board that they have no control
over and tell them that they're going to lose their
(15:54):
jobs or get promotions based on how they do on
this leaderboard, that is the opposite of the spirit of
play lifeless.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
But that thing you said, I think that's really important, though,
that's a distinction that almost is really hard to make
because addictiveness looks like fun at first, because at first,
when you start, I mean, shoot, yeah, let's look at
one of those leader boards at you know, the factory
or whatever. Who moved the most boxes? It's kind of
fun to try to go up the leaderboard, right, And
(16:24):
there is a certain kind of person who single mindedly
will dedicate their entire life to moving up that leaderboard
for who moved the most boxes. But for the most
of us, it's something that you're kind of it kind
of feels like you're being tricked into doing it.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Yeah. One of the starting points for me trying to
figure all the stuff out was losing months of my
life to the computer game Civilization m CIF gruelingly addictive, Yeah,
and thinking I had fun, telling myself I had fun
until and I think a lot of people out of
this experience. You walk out and you're like, I've just
lost months of my life and I can't remember it,
(17:00):
and I feel bad.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
So this kind of thing can happen in games too.
There's this hit of dopamine that becomes addictive, and it
manipulates you into continuing to play or to engage, and
it makes you start to believe that you really do
want whatever it is of the game or the app
or the leader board is making you work for that.
Right there, That is value capture and action.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
So I actually end up thinking that the way to
think about it is that you are outsourcing your values
instead of deciding for yourself. You're letting like Mark Zuckerberg
set your values for you.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Even if you've managed to stay away from scrolling endlessly
on your phone, you've definitely been a victim of what,
for me, is probably one of the most insidious examples
of value capture the school system, or more specifically grades.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
So there is a great paper called Making the Grade,
The History of the A to F marking scheme in
American Education that points out that we have plenty of
research that clear grades are not good for education. They
narrow students curiosity. They make students competitive instead of open minded.
They kind of like kill students interest in anything but
(18:11):
doing well in the test. We actually have known this
since the eighteen hundreds. The United States actually went off
numerical grading in the eighteen hundreds. This article will teach
you really, yes, okay, for these reasons, we knew we
had ample evidence that it didn't work for education. The
reason it came back was employer interest in having clear
(18:31):
certificates that would prove that someone could do the work,
so they could quickly hire someone that would be capable
of doing the work. So the grading system is a
system that embodies the interests of employers, not of students.
So my worry is if you become captured by GPA,
then you will be guiding yourself by a value system
(18:53):
that wasn't made by you for you, for your own
health and well being. But you'll be captured by an
evaluative system that was engineered from the ground up to
serve the purpose of employers who want to quickly hire
and fire people replaceably.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
It's so interesting to say that because when I teach
college classes, basically every time I do it, I will
go up in the beginning of the session, I will say, listen,
I don't do grades. At the end of the semestery
tell me what you want. I'll give it to you.
I don't care. And you would think that students would
love this, And everybody I tell this too, says, oh, well,
they probably just ask for A's right. Everybody gets extra nervous.
(19:35):
And the more elite institutions that I teach at, the
more nervous they get about it, because it's like, wait, huh.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
What do you mean.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
I can just have an a like I don't really
understand what we're doing here. The thing that I'm trying
to do is say, hey, I want to take that
pressure off. But that actually it's not as successful as
you would think it is.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Yeah. So I have been trying to ungrade forever. And
I mean I actually literally teach in my intro ethics
class a unit called is grading Bullshit? We read a
famous philosophy favor from Harry Frankfurt called what is Bullshit?
And then I teach them this making the great stuff?
And I'm like, Okay, he's grading bullshit and they have
a lot to say about that. But I think one
(20:18):
thing that as educators we have to confront is the
fact that it would be one thing to have an
ungraded world and the other to ungrade your classroom where
the rest of the world wants grades and students have
been brought up to expect them.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
This is another fundamental difference between a gamified system and
an actual game. In a game, you can choose and
tweak the game you're playing. Like I played a version
of soccer where nobody gets to use their hands, even
the goalies. It's more challenging and it's kind of fun.
In an actual game, players can come together and agree
to change something, but in real life that choice isn't
(20:54):
always up to you.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
So the anthropologist Johann Husinga, who is one of the
early games, he has this book Homolludence not Homosopians, Homolludens.
We are the playing creature. He says that what games
are and what play is is something that occurs in
a magic circle. A magic circle is an isolated domain
of meaning where you enter into it, and the meanings
and reasons you do things change what he means, It's like,
(21:18):
you know, we might hate each other, but we're from
the same team with basketball. Suddenly it doesn't matter that
we hate each other. We're going to co operate, and
it doesn't matter if I love my spouse. If she's
on the opposite team, I'm going to block the pass.
But more importantly, they're disconnected from each other. So an
important thing about say, like a metric like GPA, you
(21:38):
don't have a lot of freedom. If I try to
take my class off of the GPA standard and like
not give letter grades, my students are screwed. Right. That
system is designed so that it's the point is that
everything is locked together. For games, there's no lock. It
doesn't matter if I don't like Mario and I want
to speed run it. I've created a different game with
(21:59):
an independent scoring system. So there's a freedom to manipulate
the scoring system for different reasons, which creates an ecosystem
of different experiences. You can house rule dungeons and dragons.
You can't house rule GPA. You can't house rule subscriber accounts.
You can't house rule KPIs. You cannot tweak them in
the light of some subtler. Beautiful good.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Okay, So a big problem with gamification is that the
scoring system isn't aligned with our actual values. So couldn't
we just fix that by changing the scoring system. Well,
it's not that easy. We get into why after the break. Okay,
(22:44):
so social media platforms are making us value likes and
follower counts. But what if they switched the incentive to
I don't know how many hugs you got last week,
like something you should actually care about, something more wholesome.
Couldn't we theoretically solve this problem of value capture by
just changing those knobs that were twisting teen Win says,
this probably won't work.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
So sometimes when I talk about this stuff, I give
examples of bad metrics, and people want to be like,
oh my god, like those are bad, but let's just
get better ones. And I'm really interested in the possibility
that there are no metrics that would make good human values,
because there's something about bureaucratic metrics that's inimical to human values.
What the world of metrics pushes us towards is paying
(23:26):
attention to what's easy to count together and what we
can consistently count together, and not what we actually care about.
Gamification ties us to only targeting the things that are
easy to count together. It ties us to maxing out
engagement hours in say, making our TV programs and not
(23:47):
like making good art. It ties us to like steps
instead of a rich emotional experience with a weird trail
that you are on.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
What ten Win is arguing is that by definition of
being able to score something, to have a simple enough
metric to track that we have to lose some of
the complexity of real life, and that will always lead
to a flattening of your experience of being a human
and losing sight of how complicated real life actually is.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
The first place I started studying this was in what
are called public transparency metrics, like metrics that are trying
to take some institution that's kind of private and insular
and elite and expose it to get rid of bias
and corruption. I was brought up to think, and I
still halfway think that transparency is great. It does get
rid of bias and corruption. But there's another effect. So
(24:37):
charity navigators are really good case. So for a long
time I guided my charitable giving using Charity Navigator, which
was a nonprofit watchdog that rated charities on how good
they were, how did they count good. Turns out, they
counted good for a really long time in terms of
something called a throughput metric. The throughput metric was the
ratio of how many donations were sent to the nonprofit
(24:59):
and how much went out the other end. So the
more efficient the charity, the better it was. An efficiency
meant most of the donations went out and were sent
out as resources on the other end. What this actually
does is it forces nonprofits to compete for how little
internal spending they do, so any internal spending counts as waste,
(25:20):
which means, for example, if you're trying to build better
houses and you hire an expert and housing construction, or
you hire an expert in the local environment, that count
is waste and it makes your through pet metric fall.
It's a terrible measure, but it looks good from the outside,
and it looks objective because it looks at accounting, which
(25:41):
is something that everyone can assess in the same way,
and it ignores the actual on the ground efficacy of
building better housing, improving ecosystems, because those things are really
complicated and expert matters to assess, and accounting is something
that looks pretty much the same across nonprofits. One way
to put it is, I think there's a lot of
(26:03):
life that has a structure where a lot of what
we're doing has this natural, open ended value to it.
And then we enter into official environments that said, no, no, right,
here's the rubric, here's your key performance indicators, here's your
subscriber accounts or follower accounts. And then we suddenly get
a mechanical thing that is ultra clear that everyone can
(26:26):
key in on.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Is there a way that gamification can be used actually
for good? Basically, I'm asking if his gamification is all
bad because it feels like it's all bad right now.
It feels like it's all manipulative.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
So here's a great way to interact with scoring systems
and with gamifications. You try them on and you see
if they work for you, and if they don't, you
change them. So a lot of people use fitbit well,
I think they start it and it helps them and
they feel good about it. But the crucial thing I
mean is to check in and keep asking is it
still making me feel good? Is it still making me healthy?
(27:00):
Is it still giving me a joy in life? And
it doesn't you change it? Like rock climbing, the scoring
system of rock climbing really helped me at first. It
pushes you to do more difficult things, and that's what
forced me to understand like the subtleties of my body.
And for the first like five or six or seven years,
the standard given scoring system of rock climbing worked great
for me. And then I got older and I became
(27:21):
a parent, and I didn't progress. It was impossible for
you progress and more difficult climbs were just frustrating, and
so I changed to trying to climb more elegantly. The
problem here is not just that scoring systems are clear,
but that they are given from some alien, distant personage
(27:42):
or institution for some alien or distant reason. Then if
you keep picking and modding and changing the scoring systems
to suit yourself or your particular community, that's the opposite
of large scale bureaucratic gamification.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Well it seems like a hard to do that, right, I
mean coming back to you know, say social media, right,
something that exists now, like, for example, TikTok. TikTok was
the first thing that I saw that in the app
it would tell you, hey, here's how to make your
posts more popular, and then all the other ones started
to do them, and so we've gotten really used to
(28:21):
like the point of taking a picture or the point
of taking a short video is getting numbers to go up. Yeah, exactly,
how do we get out of that? Like, is there
a way out of that? Is that an individual thing?
Is that a societal level thing? How do you get
out of that?
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Give and I've been talking about things so far today
there's like a bad lesson and the bad lesson, the
lesson I don't want people to hear is like, it's
all on you. Just about grit man, Just be playful
and you'll be fine. And I actually think it's like,
you know, some structures make life deeply and more easily playful,
and other structures make it really hard. Push and incentivize
(29:00):
and unify these external presentations of value. Example, is exactly
the point. It's a very different spirit to walk into
a game store and be like, hey, I could play anything,
I could walk away from everything. The structure of social
media and the structure of grades and the structure of
key performance indicators is the opposite. It makes a world
that is inimical to freedom. It makes a world that's
constantly pressing on us and telling us like, ooh, just
(29:22):
care about this little thing and you won't have to worry.
You'll be able to communicate, easy to lead to everyone
you'll be completely comprehensible, like you'll be unified. Right. The
world is constantly pushing and I'm like, you can take steps,
but it's hard because of the perfasiveness of these presentations. Look,
there are things that we can do and things that
(29:44):
we can't do. Like, for example, I'm also a teacher,
and in the college classes that I teach, I tell
the students don't worry about the grades. If you want
an A, I'll give you an A. It doesn't matter
to me. But that's just one class out of the
five classes that a student might be taken that semester.
So I can do whatever I want in my little
corner of the classroom, but I'm not fundamentally changing the system.
(30:06):
And you can decide to post a selfie on Instagram
and not look at the likes or the comments that follows,
but that doesn't stop other people from looking at your
post and judging how popular or pretty or interesting you are,
just based on those dumb little numbers under the picture.
These are the systems that have been put into place,
however arbitrary they might be by people with more money
(30:27):
and more power than you or me. But I do
feel like being aware that these systems are there and
that they don't always have your best interest.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
At heart is helpful. I mean, this conversation definitely helped me.
So I'm not saying don't use a fitness tracker, don't
use a language learning app or whatever, but being aware
of your ultimate goal when you start using those apps
might help prevent the app from tricking you into playing
a game you never wanted to play.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Word a moment where I see the two extremes getting
more extreme. On the one hand, I see the deeper
and greater intrusiveness of KPIs and metrics, and on the
other hand, I see the flourishing of these wild, weird
ass indie games And I don't know. This is the
(31:15):
fight we're participating in. A like you get to be
part of this titanic struggle between the most beautiful and
the most horrible use of scoring systems to bend Soul's.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Great everybody's playing the game.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, I hope we win. I hope we do too.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Thank you so much for listening to another episode kill Switch.
If you want to talk to us, you can email
us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC, or if
you want to follow us, on Instagram or at kill
Switch Pod and while you still got your podcast open,
maybe leave us a review. It helps other people find
the show, which helps us keep doing our thing. Kill
Switch is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas, produced by Sena Ozaki,
(32:01):
darlv Potts and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by
me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show.
From Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswa Lashin, Mangesh Hajigador,
and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina
Norbl and Nikki E. Tor Catch On the next One, Goodbye,
kill switch News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Show Links
AboutPopular Podcasts
Two Guys, Five Rings: Matt, Bowen & The Olympics
Two Guys (Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers). Five Rings (you know, from the Olympics logo). One essential podcast for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Bowen Yang (SNL, Wicked) and Matt Rogers (Palm Royale, No Good Deed) of Las Culturistas are back for a second season of Two Guys, Five Rings, a collaboration with NBC Sports and iHeartRadio. In this 15-episode event, Bowen and Matt discuss the top storylines, obsess over Italian culture, and find out what really goes on in the Olympic Village.
iHeartOlympics: The Latest
Listen to the latest news from the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Milan Cortina Winter Olympics
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina are here and have everyone talking. iHeartPodcasts is buzzing with content in honor of the XXV Winter Olympics We’re bringing you episodes from a variety of iHeartPodcast shows to help you keep up with the action. Follow Milan Cortina Winter Olympics so you don’t miss any coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics, and if you like what you hear, be sure to follow each Podcast in the feed for more great content from iHeartPodcasts.