Gamification of the polycrisis

My meditation app pings to let me know I’m in the top 10% of meditators to encourage me to log on to practice that day.

It irks me.

Firstly I find it unbelievable since I barely meditate. Secondly, please don’t gamify my meditation practice.

A few hours later my watch pings to let me know my sister has completed (yet another) workout and to checkout her stats.

Mine are way behind. I take the watch off and put it into a drawer.

Later that day on Instagram I’m apparently a few video watches away from ‘my next achievement’.

I’m being awarded points for watching videos of traumatised and distressed Palestinian families and fires and floods raging across the planet. ‘Excellent’ I mumble.

These are only a few examples of the ways we are continuously distracted and pulled back to apps to keep us engaged.

We are nudged and told to compete. To try harder. Or that we’re missing out.

All have the same aim, to bring us back to the app and to spend more time there.

We’re all aware social media has turned us into dopamine junkies - turning to it for quick hits and seeking validation and distraction with each feed refresh and like.

But this reaches beyond those platforms and gamification is built in to most apps we use, including community and course creation platforms.

Below is from an article on Mighty Networks on how to gamify your community:

‘Gamification creates the most important part of any community — people magic. By implementing competition, a reward system, or ways to get points, you are motivating your members to participate, contribute, and connect with each other.’

These ‘reward systems’ tap into and exploit the habit-forming and addictive mechanisms of our brains.

While I understand the need for some apps to do this to help us build healthy habits, I wonder what could come about when we have space to form our own habits without constant notifications and distractions.

Over New Year we went camping and I put my phone on airplane mode, still using it to take pictures. The next day it died and I tucked it away in a bag and forgot about it.

Something changed in my system in just 24 hours. There was space to digest my husband’s words and the interactions of my children, rather than reflexing for a phone during any silence. I didn't want my phone back and stayed away from the usual apps for another week.

'Scientific studies have observed the importance of “resting mental networks” meaning that, in between activities, people demonstrate “a synchronicity between different parts of the brain that has its own rhythm and breathing”. It’s likely that this state contributes to original ideas and a general sense of wellness. Like the Dutch practice of niksen, which involves setting aside time each day to do nothing, it’s about being still with your thoughts.'

In our working day we ping between emails, calls, phone notifications and newsfeeds without a pause to integrate the previous 30 minutes.

I think about the effect this has on our ability to build true, rich and meaningful communities online. If we are rewarded for logging on and liking a comment, what depth does that interaction have?

To put those who interact the most into leaderboards, their faces visible to all, is to hold some up as better than others, stunting the potential of conversations that otherwise may have come about in a more organic and natural manner.

 
‘There will be no community without first communing.’ Nora Bateson.

Our ability to be together is severely undernourished and exacerbated by platforms that make us think we are in community - just enough to have us craving more.

We have to actively choose to fight these behaviours and to act differently.

It’s hard, I’m very aware of that, but it is something we can again commit to doing together.

If you’re looking to create intentional community, away from algorithms, ads and tech bros (and constant notifications) then come build new worlds with us today.