I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark as a software developer, enterprise architect and later manager, and you wouldn’t believe the

I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark as a software developer, enterprise architect and later manager, and you wouldn’t believe the amount of gamification attempts that I have seen fail. I’m not sure where they come from. Ok, maybe I should clarify that. I understand how gamification is a very effective psychological tool to get people to spend a lot of time on things they wouldn’t otherwise spend time on. Which means they are great tools for making money on various things, but I never understood how gamification made its way into anything “positive”. Positive is maybe the wrong word, but I’m not sure how else to put it. The incentive to put gamification into public sector digitisation is basically always good. You did it because you wanted better surgeons. We did it because we wanted people to take their medicine, the jobless to get jobs, parents to take more interest in their children and so on. Basically all good intentions, but the tool isn’t for good intentions. It’s a tool to make people spend time on something they might not want to spend time on, so why did we ever think it would be a fitting tool for our good intentions? The results were always somewhat similar to yours. Recipients engaged more on the whole. There were rebels, people who gamed the systems and a range of other outliners, but as a whole people engaged more. The process also failed to cultivate any of the developments that the process people had hoped for. I was never really surprised to see the attempts fail. I know I’m a little “special” in that I have ADHD, and that it manifests in a way where it’s basically impossible for me to engage in anything I find boring. So aside from being terrible at meetings (and yes, I quickly quit management), it also renders me sort of immune to gamification while also being weirdly inflicted by it as anyone with ADHD will likely attest to. Anyway, those systems, the ones that give you a “win-streak” for taking your medicine every day, they aren’t fun. I want the streak, but I also don’t care because it’s not fun, and so I forget to take my medicine just as much, and at some point, it becomes more fun to break the streak. All of this is obviously very anecdotal, but my personal experience with these systems, and how they aren’t actually fun, seems to correlate with how they seem to fail to incentivise the development their creators want, unless that development is for people to spend a lot of money on video games. I do wonder if there is any actual science on the subject, it would be interesting to see if my anecdotal stories here are just silly stories. They likely are, there must be a reason “gamification” won the hearts and minds of good intended, highly educated and very professional people who want to use the methods for good things.