You've Been Played
How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation—and what we can do about it
Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet.
Points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. In You’ve Been Played, game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations, schools, and governments use games and gamification as tools for profit and coercion. These are games that we often have no choice but to play, where losing has heavy penalties. You’ve Been Played is a scathing indictment of a tech-driven world that wants to convince us that misery is fun, and a call to arms for anyone who hopes to preserve their dignity and autonomy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hon (A History of the Future in 100 Objects), CEO and founder of game developer Six to Start, warns in this convincing outing that gamification—using "ideas from game design to make difficult or dull activities more fun"—has "become the twenty-first century's most advanced form of behavioural control." Tools purportedly designed to motivate students or increase worker productivity actually have insidious psychological effects, he suggests, often resulting in covert wage decreases, as employees are pressured into working more for no increased pay. Myriad examples bolster his case: he describes classroom behavior-monitoring apps that function as an "on-ramp to Foucault's panopticon," games used at Amazon that incentivize "returning from break faster," race-against-the-clock timers that gives McDonald's managers leverage to "discipline and punish poor performers," and the "veritable bonanza of quests and bonuses" at Uber, "all to entice drivers into working as long as they possibly can." Hon ends with detailed, practical steps to combat this trend: designers ought to "act ethically" and accept responsibility when their games cause harm, and legislation should be passed to mandate transparency regarding business productivity quotas and to protect workers' privacy. This passionate survey is a wake-up call for workers and political leaders alike.
