Gamified World: Blurring The Lines Between Education, Work, And Leisure
Pietro Michelucci
Today we quantify everything: work performance, school grades, credit ratings, social reputations, and daily steps. While such metrics may not be new, the algorithms that mediate success opportunities are integrating these metrics in sophisticated ways. These algorithms represent an emerging set of complex rules that blur the boundaries of traditional activity categories and influence behaviors in our increasingly gamified lives. For example, citizen science extracts research value from hobbies while educating and credentialing participants. Indeed, the very future of how we learn, have fun, and are credited is shifting before our eyes, with economic, social, and individual impacts. Moreover, the recent emergence of technologies that enable language synthesis, mixed reality, and hybrid intelligence will further deepen our integration into a coalescent hybrid human/AI supercomputer, which is needed to tackle the complex existential challenges before us. However, as there is a difference between surviving and thriving, defining how humans contribute to such a system will be critical to the future of human experience. We can entertain multiple futures that lead the survival of the human species, but not all of them seek to preserve humanity. For example, we can envision a dystopian future, in which addictive game mechanics are employed to maximally extract productivity from humans. Or we might prefer a brighter future in which algorithms gives primacy to human agency, contentment, and well-being. Allowing this coalescence to evolve unattended may not select for the human-centered values we seek to embed. Thus, to remain proactive in this pursuit, we will consider a game design approach that celebrates individual differences by continuously tuning to the specific capabilities, limitations, and desires of each person, yet remain mindful of unintended adverse effects, such as game addiction, malicious exploitation, and co-opting human agency. In the end, the game master will be the puppet master. Humans will optimize their behaviors to the mechanism design of the gamified world. And, as always, the curator of those rules, whether machine or human, will determine our destiny.