Activities requiring maturity and duration cannot be gamified.
Evidence
But what matures over time cannot be gamified. Whatever is long, anything that lasts a long time, proves incompatible with the game’s temporality. Hunting, for instance, matches the mode of the game, whereas farming, which depends on slow processes of ripening and quiet growth, cannot be gamified at all. Life cannot be turned into hunting alone. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 112
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the author’s broader argument that gamification serve quick rewards, resonating with how bureaucratic/ritual time works differently; also echoes enduring-vs-ephemeral themes in the author’s Confucian-influenced thinking on ‘the long’.
- SEED: Article angle: gamification as the victory of hunting over farming in attention and knowledge work — what genuinely slows down and resists optimization.