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- Gurwinder Bhogal: Insights into Gamification and Human Behavior in 2024
Gurwinder Bhogal: Insights into Gamification and Human Behavior in 2024
Explore the intriguing world of gamification and human psychology with researcher and writer Gurwinder Bhogal. Discover the motivations behind our interactions with the internet and comfort in this thought-provoking discussion. Welcome to Game World, where resistance is futile!
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Video Transcript
Today I'm joined by Gowinder Bagaal. He is a researcher, a writer. He used to be involved in quite the spicy world of extremism research in algorithm research for Bing.
being absolutely interesting, thinker across tech, across human psychology. And if you've
ever encountered his writing on the internet, which I'm pretty sure you probably have, because
he's quite a popular writer and for good reason, you have also been impressed, like I have
been, by the insisiveness, the broadness of his interest, and how he manages to bring
insights that are fairly complex into understandable language. So welcome,
welcome, Biroinder. Pleasure to be here, Alex. Thank you. I'm glad to have you on. Like I said,
I've been following your work for a while. You have been kind enough to forward me an essay that's
not out yet. And I think by the time this comes out on sub-stakes, also not going to be out yet,
because I hope to release this next week. It's an essay about gamification, about
our relationship to the internet, our relationship to comfort, what motivates us, what does motivate
us, what should motivate us, and essentially kind of being human in 2024 and from now on.
So I think maybe, can you just tell me what led you to think about this whole sphere?
What struck you as interesting about gamification?
So I was working on Intek sort of around 2010 and at that time, gamification was a buzzword
in Silicon Valley.
It was everywhere.
Everybody was talking about, oh, how can we gamify this?
How can we gamify that?
And it was because there'd been sort of some research which had shown that you can basically
make people do what you want them to do by just making it fun.
And it was actually extremely powerful.
There were some examples around around that time.
For instance, Volkswagen had this program,
which they called the FUN theory, which
was a marketing campaign where they
decided to turn certain desirable behaviors into games.
So for instance, they turned staircases into pianos
so that when you were walking along them, you could make music.
and this led to a massive increase in the number of people who were using stairs rather than escalators.
And they thought, oh, we can make people healthier just by doing this, you know.
So that was one example. But there were many examples of this in tech at the time.
And so it became a very, very popular in Silicon Valley, and it promised to completely radically change society for the better.
There was a lot of TED talks. If you go on YouTube and you type in TED gamification,
you're just seeing greens of talks being given in Silicon Valley by sort of futurists who are saying
that this is going to radically just make everything better, you know, it's going to make humanity fit
here, it's going to make them greener, it's going to make them kinder and more ethical, it's going
to do all of these things, right? Unfortunately that didn't happen. So what actually happened instead
was gamification was used in order to manipulate us in order to bring out our worst impulses
in order to addictus to apps and to social media. I mean social media was the greatest success
of gamification. Facebook added the like button in sort of early 2009. It rolled out everywhere
in 2009. And the moment that Facebook did that, Facebook changed from a place where you could
visit your old friends and see what they were up to, your old school friends. It changed it from
that into a status game where you were now competing to get the most likes. You were competing to have
the best posts, the coolest posts, or whatever. And so this really made everybody addicted. This was
the thing I think that really got everybody hooked to social media because now everybody
wanted the status and everybody was competing with everybody else to post the best content.
So basically what I've seen happen over the past 10 years is I've seen apps and not just
apps but mainly apps. We'll talk about other stuff in a moment but the apps is probably
probably the most important thing, because it's,
