Gamify, But Don't Lose Sight Of The Game

We’ve turned doing the thing into tracking the thing.

And somewhere along the line, we’ve made tracking the thing the task itself, rather than tracking the way of making sure that we actually do the thing.

So no one learns the language anymore. They maintain a Duolingo streak and they will not pay attention to what they are actually learning that day. They are not engaged in any sort of way, they are just going through the activity to say I have maintained my streak.

There’s an element of this with people’s daily steps and that they will walk to say they’ve done the steps but without getting some of the benefits of doing them by fully tuning out or tuning in depending.

People don’t rest, they keep their meditation app streak alive, they’re not actually engaged in the process of meditation.

And we see it in the fitness industry as well. People send DMs to hit a certain number of DMs rather than to actually connect with the people in the audience.

Gamification was meant to get us started, but somewhere along the line, it replaced the reason we started.

Big tech realised that their app only had to be semi useful if they could convince people of the importance of maintaining the streak that they have.

So people are now just playing the interface and not actually living the habit they’re trying to gamify.

As coaches we need to be mindful of this and definitely include some gamification but not at the expense of people actually fully engaging in the thing we want them to do.