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