Corporations weaponize game mechanics purely to engineer customer and employee behavior

Evidence

Most research on games concludes that these structures can be effective at motivating action, and researchers generally predict that games will increasingly be used as the methodology of choice to change individual behavior. In practice, this has meant that the power of games to change behavior is shamelessly instrumentalized as gamification spreads to thousands of situations in which a company merely wants to tune, herd, and condition the behavior of its customers or employees toward its own objectives. Typically, this involves importing a few components, such as reward points and levels of advancement, in order to engineer behaviors that serve the company’s immediate interests, with programs such as customer loyalty schemes or internal sales competitions. One analyst compiled a survey of more than ninety such “gamification cases,” complete with return-on-investment statistics. Ian Bogost, a professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech and a digital culture observer, insists that these systems should be called “exploitationware” rather than games because their sole aim is behavior manipulation and modification. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 984

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to behaviorist conditioning traditions and to Zuboff’s broader argument that behavioral modification is the core of surveillance capitalism. — connects to: Game design can deliberately nudge real-world physical behavior. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 982; Games achieve behavioral engineering through three tiers of dynamics, mechanics, and components — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 983; Corporate corruption of employees is often deliberately engineered by management — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4024 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Games achieve behavioral engineering through three tiers of dynamics, mechanics, and components #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 983
• The gaming industry pioneered the addiction design model Facebook later adopted. #exemplifies (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1433
• Corporate objectives define the correct policies guiding automated behavioral modification #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1316
• Corporate corruption of employees is often deliberately engineered by management #corroborates (0.78) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4024