On Gurwinder Bhogal's “Why Everything is Becoming a Game"

An idea worth drawing for.

This visual essay is a tribute to Gurwinder Bhogal. It’s part of an ongoing series called Ideas Worth Drawing For, in which I make hand-drawn images to honor the excellence of essayists I admire.

In ancient Greek and Roman myths, King Minos of Crete commissioned the celebrated architect Daedalus to create a labyrinth. Ovid described a maze so serpentine that it nearly consumed its own inventor:¹

A labyrinth built by Daedalus, an artist
Famous in building, who could set in stone
Confusion and conflict, and deceive the eye
With devious aisles and passages. As Maeander
Plays in the Phrygian fields, a doubtful river,
Flowing and looping back and sends its waters
Either to source or sea, so Daedalus
Made those innumerable windings wander,
And hardly found his own way out again,
Through the deceptive twistings of that prison.

After Daedalus betrayed the king, Minos imprisoned him and his son Icarus in the labyrinth.² So dire was their plight that Daedalus concocted a bold and dangerous scheme to escape the knot of treacherous paths:

Daedalus said, “surely the sky is open,
And that's the way we'll go. Minos' dominion
Does not include the air.” He turned his thinking
Toward unknown arts, changing the laws of nature.

Daedalus fashioned wings by gluing feathers together with beeswax, so that they could bypass the maze by flying out of it. Famously, Icarus ignored his father's instructions not to soar so high that sunlight would melt the wax:

…And the boy
Thought This is wonderful! And left his father,
Soared higher, higher, drawn to the vast heaven,
Nearer the sun, and the wax that held the wings
Melted in that fierce heat, and the bare arms
Beat up and down in air, and lacking oarage
Took hold of nothing. Father! he cried, and Father!
Until the blue sea hushed him, the dark water
Men call the Icarian now. And Daedalus,
Father no more, called “Icarus, where are you!
Where are you, Icarus? Tell me where to find you!”
And saw the wings on the waves, and cursed his talents…

Ovid's poetry stings us with the anguish of a father so desperate to quit the labyrinth that he risked — and lost — the life of his young son. The stakes may have been high enough to justify Daedalus’s gamble, for the alternative was indefinite confusion and confinement. This story compels us to wonder: How far will we go to outsmart our own labyrinths?

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Gurwinder

Bhogal explores this question in  “Why Everything is Becoming a Game.” He delineates the labyrinth built into contemporary life, recounts the lengths one man went to destroy it, and offers clues for finding our way out of the maze:

For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games. Not merely to amuse you, but because they realized that the easiest way to make you do what they want is to make it fun. To escape their control, you must understand the creeping phenomenon of gamification, and how it makes you act against your own interests.

The term “gamification" means injecting game play into activities that may otherwise be a slog, so that point scoring, leveling up, and competition can motivate us — even addict us — to a task that had previously felt tiresome or uninspiring. Bhogal details how businessmen have used gamification to get people to “buy more stuff and work more hours,” while others used the technique less cynically. Games have spurred people to donate 20 billion grains of rice to the UN World Food Programme; to compete with their neighbors to conserve over $3 billion worth of energy; to crack a scientific problem in 10 days that had frustrated biochemists for 15 years; to eschew the escalator and take the stairs; and to follow the speed limit.

The tone was generally utopian, because back then gamification seemed to be mostly a force for good.

…

It all seemed so simple: if we could only create the right games, we could make humanity fitter, greener, kinder, smarter. We could repopulate forests and even cure cancers simply by making it fun.

One early researcher in the history of gamification never wanted to build a labyrinth full of confusing dead-ends. Quite the contrary, zoologist James V. McConnell wanted to create efficient paths toward a thriving society:

We should reshape our society so that we all would be trained from birth to want to do what society wants us to do. We have the techniques now to do it. Only by using them can we hope to maximize human potentiality.

This idea is both naïve and sinister. The merits of “what society wants us to do" depend entirely on the character of that community — and who decides? How can we trust others to shape our behavior? McConnell’s hubris is glaring. He seems a quintessential example of a man who would pave the road to hell with his good intentions.

McConnell was inspired by the work of B. F. Skinner, who pioneered “behaviorism.” Bhogal summarizes:

B. F. Skinner believed environment determines behavior, and a person could therefore be controlled simply by controlling their environment. He began testing this theory, known as behaviorism, mainly on pigeons. For his experiments, he developed the “Skinner box”, a cage with a food dispenser controlled by a sensor or button.

Skinner’s goal was to make his pigeons peck the button as many times as possible. From his experiments, he made three discoveries. First, the pigeons pecked most when doing so yielded immediate, rather than delayed, rewards. Second, the pigeons pecked most when it rewarded them randomly, rather than every time. Skinner’s third discovery occurred when he noticed the pigeons continued to peck the button long after the food dispenser was empty, provided they could hear it click. He realized the pigeons had become conditioned to associate the click with the food, and now valued the click as a reward in itself.

…

Skinner’s three key insights — immediate rewards work better than delayed, unpredictable rewards work better than fixed, and conditioned rewards work better than primary — were found to also apply to humans, and in the 20th Century would be used by businesses to shape consumer behavior. From Frequent Flyer loyalty points to mystery toys in McDonalds Happy Meals, purchases were turned into games, spurring consumers to purchase more.

Even the humble pigeon, with its ability to take wing, can evoke themes of freedom. It is cliché to picture a caged bird when we long for liberation. Skinner’s decision to confine pigeons for study (rather than, say, lab rats) engaged symbolism at least as ancient as the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. And when McConnell started applying Skinner's manipulations to human beings, he laid the foundations for a labyrinth built out of dopamine pathways instead of stone walls. As Bhogal writes:

In short, he wanted to turn society into a Skinner box.

Throughout the Seventies, McConnell used Skinnerian techniques to create rehabilitation programs for prisoners and psychiatric patients, some of which were successful. But his most ambitious scheme emerged in the early Eighties, when he witnessed people being captivated by video games like Donkey Kong and Pac Man, and realized their addictive mechanics could be translated to other, more productive activities. He pitched an ambitious project to gamify education to tech companies like Microsoft and IBM, but he was 30 years too early, and they couldn’t yet see its promise.

Gamification is like a labyrinth because it can trap people within mental corridors. Unlike the intimidating stone walls of Daedalus's mythical prison, this modern maze is alluring, and therefore insidious. Bhogal articulates one of the great anxieties of our time: how technology can hijack our psychology to compromise a life worth living.

Namely, humanity became addicted to social media apps that condition us to seek rewards “in the form of ‘likes' and ‘followers’… And thus, just as pigeons were made to chase clicks, so eventually were we.” Bhogal delves into myriad examples of apps that use points, badges, levels, streaks, progress bars, and leaderboards to hook people. (But who among us needs examples outside our own experience to know that this is true?) Feeling trapped, we invented new apps to gamify freedom from gamification, by tracking an “addiction score" so that putting down our phones becomes the next contest.

…playing digital games give us a false sense of progression and accomplishment, a neurochemical high that feels like victory but is not, and which, if it becomes a habit, risks placating our ambitions to pursue true fulfilment.

It explains why so many young men have lost themselves in video games, and are no longer in employment or relationships. The false signals they’re getting from video game progress, combined with the sexual reward of online porn, are convincing their dopamine pathways that they’re winning in life, even as their minds and futures atrophy.

It’s easy to persuade people into tying their sense of progress to fake or trivial goals.

Daedalus lost his child while trying to free him from a game, whereas at least one modern father lost his because he couldn't stop playing one:

In South Korea, a young couple became so addicted to raising a virtual baby that they let their real baby starve to death. The parents prioritized what they could quantify — levelling up their virtual baby — over that which they couldn’t — the life of their real one.

What makes pathological gameplaying so dangerous is that the more harm it does, the more alluring it becomes. If your baby is dead, why not raise a virtual one? If your life of playing video games has stopped you finding a girlfriend, why not play the AI girlfriend game? Thus, bad games form a feedback loop: they distract us from pursuing the things that will bring us lasting contentment, and without this lasting contentment, we become ever more dependent on false, transient metrics like scores and leaderboards to imbue our lives with meaning.

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This existential crisis was foreseen by Ted Kaczynski in the ‘70s, back when McConnell was laying the foundation of gamification. But his warnings were subverted by his dichotomous thinking and violent zealotry. Bhogal explains that Kaczynski was a Luddite who “wanted to demolish industrial society and return humanity to an agrarian life”:

Kaczynski believed modern society made us docile and miserable by depriving us of fulfilling challenges and eroding our sense of purpose… Most of us can now obtain all our basic necessities simply by being obedient, like a pigeon pecking a button. Kaczynski argued that such conveniences didn't make us happy, only aimless.

…

Kaczynski’s theories eerily prophesize the capture of society by gamification. While he overlooked the benefits of technology, he diligently noted its dangers, recognizing its role in depriving us of purpose and meaning.

It was a volatile mixture of prescience and disgust. Kaczynski mailed a bomb to McConnell in a botched attempt at killing him. For decades, he continued targeting those he accused of building the modern labyrinth, and his later victims were not so lucky. Three died, and nearly two dozen were injured. Bhogal details how Kaczynski transformed himself into the Unabomber in a monstrous bid to heal society through bloodletting.

But his terrorism failed his cause, and Kaczynski could not escape the labyrinth:

In the end, even Kaczynski, with his IQ of 167, was led astray by red herring goals. In 1995 he enacted his endgame, demanding the New York Times and Washington Post print his anti-technology manifesto to prevent further bloodshed. All along, his goal had been to get the widest possible newspaper coverage, to maximize how many people would see his manifesto, but… he didn’t account for what couldn’t be quantified, such as how people would see his manifesto. Skinner’s pigeons had learned to desire the click of the food dispenser because it had been accompanied by food, and Kaczynski’s intended audience learned to hate his arguments because they’d been accompanied by violence. By maximizing audience size at the expense of everything else, Kaczynski gained a massive audience unwilling to give him a fair hearing.

…

And so, by fixating on the most obvious metric — the size of his audience — Kaczynski lost the one thing he’d been fighting for all along: freedom.

Kaczynski played the wrong game, and was trapped by it.

His deranged mind did not grasp how similar he was to his first victim. Like McConnell, the Unabomber wanted to shape society by applying psychological pressures that compel behavior. They were playing the same game with different strategies. Kaczynski’s strategy was to undo technological progress and impose civilizational stasis by threat of violence. Frightened by ingenuity, he tried to punish humanity for bad behavior.

And he did not realize that labyrinths constructed out of dopamine pathways and technological progress cannot be dismantled, for our neurology and inventiveness help compose human nature. Just like the behaviorists he so loathed, Kaczynski thought he could reform our nature. He shared in McConnell's hubris by assuming he had enough wisdom to guide civilization.

Kaczynski should have emulated Daedalus, the consummate inventor who created both the game that trapped him, and, when he refused to continue playing that game, a genuine means of escape. For although Icarus died in the attempt, Daedalus played by the rules of his new game (to fly neither too high nor too low) and achieved liberation. The myth emphasizes that innovation carries risk — even gambling with the life of one's child — yet also the power to fundamentally change the rules.

Instead, Kaczynski squanderd his ingenuity on building clever bombs. By rejecting inventiveness for causing modernity, he couldn't figure out how to stop playing the behaviorism game. Resorting to violence is a prosaic solution.

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In his essay, Bhogal shares strategies that Kaczynski sorely needed. He cautions that, “Fun is not the pursuit of happiness, but the happiness of pursuit, and literally anything can be pursued. By now there’s a way to keep any kind of score and play any kind of game,” and then tries to help us outsmart our own labyrinths:

Games can motivate us to destroy ourselves, but they can also motivate us to better ourselves. In a gamified world, it’s possible to play without getting played, if one only chooses the right games. As Liv Boeree said: “Intelligence is knowing how to win the game. Wisdom is knowing which game to play.” Not playing is not an option; if you don’t play your own games, you’ll inevitably play someone else’s. So how do you decide which games to play? The story of gamification offers five broad rules.

Of these rules, the first is the overarching framework for sorting this out:

First: choose long-term goals over short-term ones. Short, frequent feedback loops offer regular reinforcement, which helps motivate us. But what is made to motivate us too often addicts us. So consider the long-term outcomes of the games you’re playing: if you did the same thing you did today for the next 10 years, where would you be? Play games the 90-year-old you would be proud of having played.

Bhogal identifies creativity as humanity's best tool for managing the problems we invent for ourselves. Then he challenges us to be more like Daedalus:

Kaczynski’s game is over; he committed suicide last summer, still adamant humanity was doomed. His fearful legacy has since passed to his disciples, like Liverpool man Jacob Graham, who was recently jailed for terrorism after trying to emulate his idol. Graham may have thought he was saving the world, but, with all his talk of maximizing kill counts, he too was just playing a bad game.

In the end, Kaczynski and his followers made the same mistake as Skinner: they viewed us as mere puppets of our environment, devoid of agency and the ability to adapt. They needn’t have feared the world becoming a Skinner box, because, among all the papers written about that troublesome contraption, one fact is always overlooked: Skinner’s pigeons only kept pecking the button because they were trapped in a cage — they had nothing else to do. But you are still free. Even in a world where everything is a game, you don’t have to play by other people’s rules; you have a wide open world to create your own.

Your move.

1. Ovid, and Rolfe Humphries. “Book Eight.” Metamorphoses, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1955, pp. 186–189.

2. Apollodorus, and R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma. “Events and Genealogies from Theseus to the End of the Trojan War.” Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Green Mythology, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2007, p. 73