Written by Michael Kiser, then illustrated by Kyle Fletcher

When I was a sophomore in college, as an elementary education major, I recall an announcement that the state was raising the minimum test score requirements a few percentage points, which would eliminate some people from graduation with a teaching certificate, and make it slightly more difficult to obtain one in the coming year. While this announcement was met with anger by many of my peers, I remember thinking “good, let’s trim the fat.”

I recall feeling like an outsider for not being outraged or concerned by the change in requirements. Even people who were in no danger of being impacted by the change seemed to have a default disposition to stand against the system getting more challenging. And there I was, and a few others I suspect, wondering why it was so bad that we raise the stakes from time to time.

Humans all respond to systems. But we can have differing responses depending on our predilection for, and definition of, achievement. Since I was in pre-school, I can recall having a healthy sense of competition. Maybe too healthy at times. I loved understanding the rules and outpacing expectations. In first grade, I started working on the second grade math book in my spare time, and when I found out a girl in the class was doing the same, I set out to beat her too. I came home from my kindergarten field day covered in 1st place ribbons — but I’ll never forget losing the 40-yard dash to that same girl. I never got down about these competitions, but I sure wanted to give it another go. Immediately. 

I was in love with the system. The system was set up to award merit. Clear rules and milestones made it possible for me to satisfy minimum requirements quickly and then pursue greater goals. But systems sometimes fail us. And for anyone geared to compete and excel, these faulty systems can cause a great deal of anxiety. As I grew older, I began to realize that almost all systems outside of a sheltered academic construct (and sometimes even those) were incredibly subtle and undefined. This realization put me on my heels.

How do I compete without clear standards of achievement? How do I excel above a system with no real boundaries? When is the goal reached at all?

My grad school operated on a pass/fail system, no more grades. My job at the time was retail management for an owner that was aging and uninvolved. I was newly married and living in a city where I knew no one and was woefully unprepared for relationship conflicts— I was making it up as I went along. There were few constraints (except financial of course) and there was no evaluation of my progress (except of my own judgement) and suddenly I felt completely unprepared by my experiences with achievement and failure to do anything constructive. I experienced unending anxiety.

Eventually I came to realize this wasn’t a phase, this was forever. Not the anxiety necessarily, but the openness and vagueness of achievement and progress in life. It was time to get along. And sometimes even that wouldn’t be enough. Sometimes stuff is just hard and it’s agnostic to who you are and what you’re feeling. Your discipline might pay off, it might not, but you’re only real choices are to try, or not try. Your effort and discipline will define the system by which you judge yourself and experience your own personal dignity. No one can give you that — at least not sustainably — no gold stars, 1st place ribbons or pats on the ass will do anything more than mask the true complexity and existential range of human life.

And that brings me to gamification. At the IxD conference this past week in Boulder, much of the final day of talks was geared towards motivating and creating loyalty in interactions through the use of game elements. Badges and scoring, competitions between users and rewards for finishing tiny tasks, and of course the word “delight” came up in every third sentence. As it turns out, and good number of interaction designers want to see more “delight” in users’ interactions to make things more approachable and desirable, especially for things like to-do lists (Epic Win app) or hard-to-commit-to goals (Nike+). Give the user a fun little ladder to climb and they’ll happily play the game that helps them accomplish real-world goals. 

Fine. I have no problem adding game layers to mundane tasks in order to motivate some users. Hell, if it makes them buy your products or visit your retail locations in order to be “mayor” on Foursquare, I’m fine with that too. In the end, these are trivial things. Where I squirm is when I sense that designers feel they can extend these game layers to more meaningful experiences. That’s when things feel cheap.

Creating a folder system to achieve inbox zero, or tracking every minute of a run to compare with your friends — these are all fine on the surface, but in the end, they do little to train you for inevitable disruptions to the game. It’s when the games let you down, or your lack of motivation is too intense that the game is suddenly exposed for the crutch it truly is. All you’ve learned how to do it satisfy the game, not your self. And you have no dignity to show for it. 

There’s another camp at IxD that felt strong about the damage that gamification of meaningful experiences can do to our persons. For them, this was a question of discipline and dignity. 

Should we all be reduced to Congressman tweeting during the State of the Union? That’s how gamification affects our weakened, approval-seeking minds, but turning loyalty into mindless addiction. Social networking has undoubtedly employed gamification rules to almost every aspect of their interaction style, and won both mass adoption and unending loyalty as a result. And while Zynga may be laughing all the way to the bank, what does anyone else really have to show for it? And are we really talking about extending these interaction styles to our email inboxes and calendars? How long before we start looking for the gamification layer in our real lives, with our families and friends? Are you the mayor of your own home yet? God, I hope not.

Beyond petty loyalty and fleeting self-motivation, I’m looking for the long term commitment in compelling experiences. And that means it’s sometimes up to me, as the primary participant and actor in these experiences, to bring meaning and “delight” to the stage. I’m looking for more open platforms upon which I can express a fuller version of my self. It’s not until we feel that an interaction involved our real selves that we feel any real sense of loyalty, which unsurprisingly turns out to be not loyalty exactly, but responsibility and a sense of contribution, even sacrifice or surrender. If our interaction styles only recognize the simple ladder style of impossible-to-fail achievement, we’re not really achieving anything. We’re just leveling up to master sergeant third battalion, or growing virtual potatoes on some pixel farm.

An open platform that welcomes ambition but doesn’t necessarily offer a path to completion or codify ideas of success and failure can actually achieve something far greater — transcendence. These systems teach us to rise above. Be more than your inbox number. Be more than your check-ins. Be more than your RTs. Don’t fortify a vague, nuanced system or experience with immature desires for short-term level-ups. Instead, get some intestinal fortitude and seek out the intimate victories in your interactions, digital or otherwise, to learn a little something about yourself and the world around you.

Compare the number of tweets for Brenda Laurel’s incisive and prescient speech at IxD with any other talk. The lack of quotes that would fit into 140 character tweets tells you something about true engagement vs grabbing attention. She didn’t gamify her topic the way so many others did. She was undoubtedly aware of the simple rules to which she could play, and get a short term burst of approval from the Twitter game, but in the end, she had much more important goals. She wanted understanding and connection, even if that meant not winning the obvious game. She transcended the construct. As a result, she won a victory almost no one else came close to achieving — she silenced the hundreds of phones and thousands of apps vying for our gamed attention from our iPads and iPhones. And in that way, she took us with her.