How Gamification Can Ruin Your Life
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
Writing for Big Think, philosopher and journalist Jonny Thomson uses his personal experience with the running app Strava — which turned a joyful twenty-year running habit into a metrics-obsessed anxiety spiral — as the entry point for a philosophical examination of gamification. Drawing on philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s distinction between striving play (where the activity itself is the point) and achievement play (where the result is the point), Thomson argues that gamified apps and systems systematically corrupt the former into the latter, hollowing out rich human activities in the process.
The article applies economist Charles Goodhart’s 1975 law — “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” — to explain why gamification so reliably backfires. Whether in Duolingo streaks, office productivity metrics, or workplace bonuses tied to numerical targets, the same pattern repeats: the instrumental measure displaces the underlying goal it was designed to serve. Thomson concludes with a call to resist what he calls the “modern compulsion to optimize and measure,” reminding readers that the most meaningful parts of life simply cannot be captured in a spreadsheet.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Striving vs. Achievement Play
Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen distinguishes games where the journey is the point (striving play) from games where only the result matters (achievement play). Gamification dangerously converts the former into the latter.
Gamification Exploits Primal Instincts
Points, streaks, and badges work because they tap into the same competitive, reward-seeking drives that evolved to help our ancestors survive — now repurposed to sell coffee and language lessons.
Goodhart’s Law in Everyday Life
When a measure becomes a target, it stops being useful. Duolingo log-in streaks, office hours as a productivity proxy, and employee-of-the-month awards all illustrate the same perverse substitution of metric for meaning.
Goals Have Goals — Confusing Them Is the Problem
Chess has the goal of checkmate, but the point of playing chess with a parent is togetherness. Life is layered with goals within goals, and gamification dangerously flattens this hierarchy by elevating surface metrics above deeper purposes.
Gamification Works — That’s the Problem
Thomson acknowledges that gamification is genuinely effective at changing behaviour. Its danger lies precisely in its success: it can motivate people so powerfully that they end up serving the system rather than the original goal.
Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted
Sociologist William Bruce Cameron’s maxim underpins the essay’s conclusion: the richest parts of human experience — the feeling of a run, the quality of a friendship, the meaning of a career — resist reduction to numbers.
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Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
Gamification Corrupts Rich Activities by Replacing Their True Goals
Thomson’s central claim is that gamification doesn’t merely add a layer to an activity — it fundamentally replaces its underlying purpose with a measurable proxy. When running becomes logging, when language learning becomes streak maintenance, and when work becomes hitting a number, the original intrinsic motivation is displaced. This isn’t a side effect; it’s Goodhart’s Law in operation, and it happens precisely because gamification is so effective.
Purpose
To Persuade Readers to Resist the Compulsion to Measure Everything
Thomson writes to persuade — he wants readers to critically examine their relationship with gamified systems and reclaim the intrinsic rewards of their activities. He uses his personal Strava story not just to entertain, but to make the philosophical argument viscerally recognisable: most readers have felt exactly this shift from joy to compulsion. The philosophical framework then provides the vocabulary to name and understand what happened.
Structure
Personal → Contextual → Philosophical → Applied → Prescriptive
The essay opens with a personal anecdote (Strava ruining running), broadens to cultural context (the gamification boom of the 2010s), introduces philosophical framework (Nguyen’s striving vs. achievement play), applies an economic law (Goodhart’s), extends to workplace examples, and closes with a call to resist over-measurement. This five-part Personal → Contextual → Philosophical → Applied → Prescriptive structure is characteristic of the best popular philosophy writing.
Tone
Wry, Self-Deprecating & Persuasively Earnest
Thomson’s tone is consistently wry — he mocks his own Strava obsession, cheerfully admits he owns running books he’s never read, and skewers Duolingo’s “disapproving owl” with affectionate sarcasm. Yet beneath the wit lies genuine earnestness: he clearly cares about the philosophical point and wants readers to take it seriously. The combination — humour as entry point, seriousness as destination — is the signature register of accessible popular philosophy.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
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Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
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The economic principle, coined by Charles Goodhart in 1975, stating that once a measure is used as a target, it loses its value as a measure — because people optimise for the metric rather than the underlying goal it was meant to reflect.
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Adapted for or characterised by running; used in biology to describe animals structurally suited to sustained locomotion — and here, humorously, to describe the author’s identity as a dedicated runner.
“I am a cursorial being: I can jog for hours and am the master of a single directional plane.”
Perfectly steady and regular in rhythm, like a metronome — the device used in music to mark exact time. Used here to vividly describe the mechanical, clock-like action of the author’s IT band while running.
“That IT band snaps my legs back and forth with a metronomic life of its own.”
Relating to eczema — a skin condition causing persistent itching that worsens with scratching; used metaphorically here to describe the compulsive, self-reinforcing quality of the urge to log runs on Strava.
“It was a compulsive need — an eczematous itch I needed to scratch.”
The state of being filled to capacity or beyond — used here to describe the extent to which gamified products have flooded everyday life, to the point where their novelty has worn off but their psychological pull has not.
“Despite the overwhelming saturation of gamified products, despite knowing how cynical and desperate it can look, we all still fall for it.”
A goal pursued not for its own sake but as a means to achieve another, more fundamental goal — like tracking office hours as a means to the actual goal of increasing revenue. The danger is when the instrumental goal eclipses the terminal one.
“The problem is when the overall goal…is ignored in favor of some instrumental goal, like hours clocked in the office.”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1According to C. Thi Nguyen’s framework as described in the article, achievement play is always preferable to striving play because it produces more tangible, measurable outcomes.
2What does the helicopter-to-the-top-of-Everest analogy illustrate in the article?
3Which sentence best expresses the article’s core warning about the danger of over-measuring life?
4Evaluate the following statements about the article’s arguments:
The article acknowledges that there are no perfectly clear-cut boundaries between striving play and achievement play — professional players can enjoy the process, and casual players need some endpoint.
The article argues that gamification in the workplace is always harmful and that companies should eliminate numerical targets and performance metrics entirely.
Thomson attributes the psychological effectiveness of gamification to its exploitation of competitive and reward-seeking drives that evolved through human prehistory.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5What can be inferred about Thomson’s attitude toward gamification from the line “Once, it was a race to survive. Now, it’s a race to satisfy a cartoon owl”?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Coined by economist Charles Goodhart in 1975, it captures why gamification so reliably misfires: a metric designed to reflect an underlying goal — like tracking language-learning progress — is redirected by users into the end goal itself, so they log in just for the badge. The law is central because it provides the economic and philosophical mechanism behind Thomson’s entire argument about gamification corrupting striving play.
Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s distinction is straightforward: in striving play, the value lies in the activity itself — the process, the experience, the intrinsic rewards along the way. In achievement play, the result is what matters — winning a medal, earning prize money, topping a leaderboard. Neither is inherently better; both are legitimate. The problem arises when activities naturally suited to striving play — running, learning, meditation — are reconfigured by external gamification systems into achievement play without the participant’s genuine choice.
No — Thomson is careful to distinguish between legitimate achievement contexts and inappropriate metric-creep. He explicitly says that companies legitimately need targets and that ‘the problem isn’t necessarily the measurements themselves.’ His objection is specifically to gamification that displaces the underlying goal — where the instrumental measure replaces, rather than serves, the actual purpose of an activity. The Strava problem wasn’t logging per se; it was logging becoming the point of running rather than a record of it.
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This article is rated Intermediate. The prose is accessible and conversational, but readers must track the application of two distinct theoretical frameworks (Nguyen’s play typology and Goodhart’s Law) across multiple domains, distinguish between the author’s personal narrative and philosophical argument, and identify his nuanced position — neither fully condemning gamification nor endorsing it. The vocabulary includes several technical or sophisticated terms (pernicious, delineations, instrumental goal) that require careful reading.
C. Thi Nguyen is a philosopher whose book Games: Agency and Art examines how games structure human agency, value, and experience. His striving/achievement distinction matters here because it provides precise philosophical vocabulary for a problem many people experience but struggle to name. Without it, Thomson’s argument would simply be “tracking things can make them less fun” — with it, the argument becomes richer: gamification systematically converts one type of valuable human activity into a structurally different type with different goals, often without the participant’s awareness or consent.
The Ultimate Reading Course covers 9 RC question types: Multiple Choice, True/False, Multi-Statement T/F, Text Highlight, Fill in the Blanks, Matching, Sequencing, Error Spotting, and Short Answer. This comprehensive coverage prepares you for any reading comprehension format you might encounter.
