At its best, gamification is beautification. So why don’t we use it to make our democracies more enjoyable and useable, asks Adrian Hon
Some extracts from a Noema article by the games-maker Adrian Hon, based on his new book. You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All. Here Adrian focuses on how democracies and deliberation could be improved, if we use its techniques wisely:
Gamification — the use of ideas from game design for purposes beyond entertainment — is everywhere. It’s in our smartwatches, cajoling us to walk an extra thousand steps for a digital trophy. It’s in our classrooms, where teachers use apps to reward and punish children with points.
And it’s in our jobs, turning the work of Uber drivers and call center staff into quests and missions, where success comes with an achievement and $50 bonus, and failure — well, you can imagine.
Many choose to gamify parts of their lives to make them a little more fun, like learning a new language with Duolingo or going for a run with my own Zombies, Run! app. But the gamification we’re most likely to encounter in our lives is something we have no control over — in our increasingly surveilled and gamified workplaces, for instance, or through the creeping advance of manipulative gamification in financial, insurance, travel and health services.
In my new book, “You’ve Been Played,” I argue that governments must regulate gamification so that it respects workers’ privacy and dignity. Regulators must also ensure that gamified finance apps and video games don’t manipulate users into losing more money than they can afford. Crucially, I believe any gamification intended for schools and colleges must be researched and debated openly before deployment.
But I also believe gamification can strengthen democracies, by designing democratic participation to be accessible and to build consensus. The same game design ideas that have made video games the 21st century’s dominant form of entertainment — adaptive difficulty, responsive interfaces, progress indicators and multiplayer systems that encourage co-operative behaviour — can be harnessed in the service of democracies and civil society.
Wildly popular — and very different — games like Mario Kart, Minecraft and Zelda all have one thing in common: they’re exquisitely designed to be enjoyed by as broad an audience as possible.
That doesn’t mean they’re easy. It means they’re incredibly patient in giving beginners all the time and assistance they need to learn the skills required to learn the game and have fun. And they make the learning process itself fun, often eschewing tedious tutorials in favor of a simplified version of the game itself.
They recognize and reward players for every bit of progress they make, and when players are ready to venture into multiplayer activities, they encourage good sportsmanship. While all of this effort is at least partly in pursuit of profit, there are clear lessons to be drawn about how to motivate users to engage with systems that could be applied for the greater good.
Fully participating in democracy today — not just voting, but getting involved in local planning and budgeting processes, or building and sharing knowledge — involves navigating increasingly complex systems that desperately need to be made more welcoming and accessible.
So while the idea of gamifying democracy may seem to trivialize the deep problems we face today or be another instance of techno-solutionism, that’s not my intention.
It’s a recognition that we already live in a digital democracy — one where deliberation takes place on social media that’s gamified to reward and promote the hottest takes and most divisive comments by means of upvotes and karma points. Where people learn about the world through the warped lens of conspiracy theories that resemble alternate reality games. And where collective action is enabled and amplified by popularity contests on crowdfunding websites and Reddit.
Our democracies are already gamified. Our goal should be to do it better. We can look to real-world projects for the way forward: vTaiwan and Decide Madrid are gamified online deliberation platforms designed to tackle low motivation and disengagement.
The COVID Tracking Project and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) communities use crowdsourcing and radical transparency to rapidly gather vital information in an age of distrust. And citizen science projects are using game mechanics to engage thousands of volunteers in transcribing ancient scripts and classifying images from outer space.
Though these projects are far from perfect, they show the potential of going beyond gamification’s traditionally thoughtless application of points and badges and leaderboards to create new systems that promote the values upon which democracies are founded.
They reject “citizen blaming”, where low participation is attributed to laziness and apathy, and instead recognize that the systems supporting our democracy must be carefully designed to welcome universal participation. The right to vote means little if citizens can’t afford to take time off work to wait for hours in line at the polls.
Likewise, the ability to contribute your views to your city’s budgeting process means nothing if the website is too difficult to use or if you don’t believe your voice will be heard.
…Democracy requires the whole population to be involved in deliberation and collective decision-making, and this won’t happen unless systems actively foster participation in their design.
There’s a reason why Figma, a popular design app, describes its collaboration features as “multiplayer”: it’s because working with colleagues on complex designs feels as seamless and responsive as playing a multiplayer game.
One can imagine similarly quick and intuitive game-like ways to comment on proposed maps of new developments with neighbors, enhanced with the kinds of systems that encourage co-operative behaviour between strangers in games like Journey and Elden Ring.
We should build digital democracy systems that are so good, we’re proud and excited to use them. A book warehouse with no signs, no maps and no staff might technically be termed a library, but we would recognize it as inferior to an ideal library: one that’s comfortable to linger in, welcoming to all, with librarians waiting to help you.
Gamification at its best is the equivalent of beautification at its best — not merely an improvement of aesthetics, but a way to improve function and communicate what it is we value in our society.
The cost of building and maintaining these systems will be significant, if done well. But the future payoff would be great: a versatile, user-friendly platform could eventually take the place of countless more expensive citizen assemblies.
There is little point in creating a one-size-fits-all gamified democracy system when we need systems designed specifically for different applications and sizes of citizenry; a citizen assembly where hundreds of people meet for multiple weeks is run according to a very different system than a jury trial or a town hall meeting.
As such, governments should aim to cooperate on open-source solutions that are developed transparently, with rapid iteration based on citizen feedback — a little like video games’ hugely successful early access development phase.
Again, this is where nonprofits and charities can have outsized impacts by funding riskier prototypes and monitoring development so that gamified democratic systems aren’t designed to “nudge” citizens toward certain political outcomes.
Of course, my argument relies on governments that are committed to expanding democratic participation rather than enacting a sham they can ignore or use as a rubber stamp.
It also requires governments to stop ceding ground to large corporations like Facebook, Twitter and Nextdoor, who govern and warp so much of our deliberation, and start building platforms that serve the needs of democracy rather than profit.
Gamification doesn’t just give us the digital scaffolding to fulfill the promise of democracy. It can help us build ties and trust in one another, so that when our democracies encounter new situations where there’s no game to help us, we can still rise to the challenge.