It started innocently enough. In preparation for a trip to French Polynesia, and mindful that learning a new language is good for brain health, I decided to learn some basic French. Duolingo was the obvious place to start. I downloaded the app and was initially charmed by the graphics, sound effects and structure, making the act of learning seem fun and achievable. But after about a month I was dreading it. The notifications when I missed a day – often quite pass-agg in tone – were making me feel guilty. The onslaught of graphic features had become taxing and, I realised, nonsensical. I found myself logging in and completing a lesson half-heartedly, just to get the stupid owl to stop harassing me. It felt like a chore. I started to dread it, which is a sure-fire path to abandoning a goal. It had become joyless.
A similar thing happened with reading. Last year I began tracking the novels I’d read on my Storygraph app so I could recommend them or refer back to them later. But at the start of this year, inexplicably, I decided to gamify my reading. I vowed to read 60 books in 2026, to beat last year’s Storygraph total of 55. Initially this didn’t change my approach to reading much. I’ve always loved reading, and sitting down with a book is still my biggest priority of a weekend. Around May, I realised my favourite part of a book was no longer being immersed in it and then digesting it, it was recording it in Storygraph so I could see my progress. I had gone from a passionate reader to a competitive reader, for no good reason. Knocking off a book, instead of being wonderfully consumed by a captivating story, had become my goal. For most of this year, I proudly powered through a book a week. Currently I’ve been sitting on the same book for three weeks and have little inclination to continue. A hobby I’ve had since childhood has (temporarily) lost its appeal.
Gamification is the problem here. That’s where companies, employers and the like create rewards to incentivise us to continue on a particular path – usually, to work harder or to spend money on their product. You know the drill: keep shopping at our supermarket and you’ll earn points to redeem. Hit these workplace targets and get a bonus. It works because it keeps us motivated. Gamification isn’t wrong, but it can muddle our intentions – and that’s what’s been screwing me up.
When I read an article about gamification by Jonny Thomson on Big Think, I had a lightbulb moment. The article says:
“The problem with gamification is that it confuses one goal with another. It forces us to play a game that we don’t want to play, and it flattens rich activities into inert metrics. But as the sociologist William Bruce Cameron put it: ‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.’ So much of life cannot be plopped into a spreadsheet.”
I got sucked into the metrics and forgot why I was doing the activities in the first place. I’d started learning French to challenge myself and explore a different language, but soon I had become a slave to an app. I’d started counting books to keep track of my reading, but soon I had become more interested in metrics than the enjoyment I’d always reliably got from reading. Gamification wasn’t keeping me engaged, it was eroding my pleasure and cutting me off from my original intentions. I had lost my why. And if I’m going to invest my precious time and energy into an activity, it needs to have a clear why. Wanting to avoid harassment by a cartoon owl is not a good-enough why.
I’m using a different, non-pushy, app to learn French now, at my own pace. And I’m still reading – albeit more slowly, but with no yearly total in mind. The intentions and the actions matter, the incentives do not. Magnifique.
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