📑 How Twitter Gamifies Communication

C. Thi Nguyen discusses how Twitter gamifies communication. He explains that games are about creating agency within a contrived structure.

Games, I’ve argued, are the art form that works in the medium of agency. The game designer doesn’t just create characters, stories, and environments. The game designer sculpts the temporary agency that the player will occupy during the game. They design, not only a world, but who the player will be in that world. I do not just mean that the game designer provides a fictional backstory for a character. They design the essential agential structure of the in-game actor. They designate what the in-game agent’s abilities and affordances will be — whether they will be a jumper, a shooter, a builder or an information gatherer. And, most importantly, the game designer sets the in-game agent’s motivations by setting the goals of the game. (Page 8)

In contrast, gamification is about adding goals to real-life activities:

But gamification is an entirely different matter. In gamification, the designers are instrumentalizing the goals of our real-life activities. FitBit, by gamifying exercise, invites us to change our goals for our health and fitness. And Twitter, by gamifying discourse, invites us to change our goals for conversation, communication, and declaration. Instrumentalizing one’s goals is fine in striving games, because the goals in games were never valuable, in and of themselves, in the first place. But in real life activity, the goals are often independently valuable. So when we gamify those activities and instrumentalize those ends for the sake of pleasure, we risk losing sight of the real importance of the activity. Twitter’s gamification changes our communicative goals away from understanding, connection, and the collective pursuit of truth, and bends them towards something much more impoverished. (Page 30 – 31)

Nguyen raises the question whether gamification really is an ‘unalloyed good’:

In McGonigal’s picture, gamification is an unalloyed good: it simply removes drudgery and adds pleasure. But her optimism depends on believing that gamification can achieve these psychological goods while adequately preserving the value of the activity. (Page 7)

With gamification, the focus then becomes about the greatest number:

We will prefer those communications that appeal to the greatest number — even if that appeal is marginally positive — rather than those communications that might reach a smaller number more deeply. (Page 13)

The problem with such a focus is that things like slow appreciation of ideas and diversity of perspectives is often overlooked in light of the short term instant focus:

Slow appreciation is far less likely to be captured by the system and be counted towards that tweet’s score. (Page 12)

Along with this, the focus is also on what can be counted.

a life of gamification will tend to draw us towards those activities which have clearly measurable goals, or can be transformed into something with clearly measurable goals. When we demand the pleasures of gamification in our activities, then the range of activities available to us diminishes – and the degrees of freedom we have within the activity also diminishes. (Page 17)

Focusing on what can be counted tempts users to change their goals to match.

We aim to express what we think of as true, and to question and challenge each other’s expressions, as part of our quest to understand the world. But gamification tempts us to change our goals — to aim at expressions which maximize our score, rather than those which aid our collective understanding. And it promises to reward us for that change with pleasure. Twitter tempts us to subvert the activity of earnest conversation for hedonistic reasons. (Page 25)

First, Twitter’s makers are designing for gamification for the sake of profit, which they pursue by making their design seductively pleasurable to its end-users. And second, those users are accepting the seduction, and gamifying their discourse for the sake of pleasure. At both levels, we find people willing to forsake the original goals of discourse for some other end. (Page 34)

Overall, Nguyen summarises the situation by comparing gamification, moral outrage porn, and echo chambers with junk food and nutrition.

Gamification, echo chambers, and moral outrage porn go together like junk food. Different kinds of junk food are unhealthy in different ways — some are too high in salt, some too high in fat, some too high in sugar. But the reason they are often consumed together is that they are all likely to be consumed by somebody who is willing to trade off health and nutrition in return for a certain kind of quick pleasure. The same is true of gamification, moral outrage porn, and echo chambers. They are all readily available sources of a certain quick and easy pleasure, available to anybody willing to relax with their moral and epistemic standards.

…

Echo chambers instrumentalize our trust; moral outrage porn instrumentalizes our morality; and gamification instrumentalizes our goals (Page 37 – 38)

This reminds me of danah boyd’s questions about the merit and meaning of measuring endless amounts of stats online.

Stats have this terrible way of turning you — or, at least, me — into a zombie. I know that they don’t say anything. I know that huge chunks of my Twitter followers are bots, that I could’ve bought my way to a higher Amazon ranking, that my Medium stats say nothing about the quality of my work, and that I should not treat any number out there as a mechanism for self-evaluation of my worth as a human being.

It is also interesting to consider this whole discussion of numbers in regards to education and what discourse looks like in places like Twitter.