Gadgetory

does it ever feel to you like life is just one big game where other people are NPCs exercising is a way to max out a skill tree and the developers or whatever deities you happen to believe in well that's kind of an extreme way to look at things but with the rise of gamification the border between real life and gaming is getting a little more blurry and no I'm not talking about augmented reality games or sticking your head inside of an HTC vive gamification is when someone whether it's a software developer or business or even government tries to make real-life actions game-like in some way you may have already seen examples of this in your daily life through apps like Fatah cracy which gives experience points for completing workouts or alternatively reputation scores and custom titles on your favorite forums the point of gamification is to appeal to or exploit our natural affinity for achievement competition and showing off games are fun because they incorporate these things that our brains really like so maybe it's not too surprising that people have figured out how to make things that seem more mundane feel more like games of course like anything that taps into some of our more basic instincts gamification can and has been used for things that are considered both helpful and shady things that have been cited as examples of good gamification are apps like habit RPG which is essentially a to-do list that lets you level up when you complete important tasks special badges on online communities like TripAdvisor given out for helping other users or even titles on LinkedIn that encourage users to make their profile pages more appealing to potential employers but perhaps unsurprisingly gamification --zz use in marketing has attracted criticism that isn't to say that it's all bad for example a well-designed customer loyalty program that gives free rewards or apps like Foursquare which drive traffic to local businesses by giving titles and badges to users that go to lots of different places have been generally well-received but the marketing industry is replete with plenty of examples of bad games vocation from those awful banner ads from the 2000s that made you shoot snowballs at to win something - loyalty schemes that take forever to win some useless knick-knack - the infamous Pepsi commercial that advertised how you could trade in labels for a hairier fighter jet if you drank enough freakin soda which actually resulted in a lawsuit in fact that gamification can hurt a marketers bottom line by either drawing attention away from the thing they're actually trying to sell or to alienate customers due to bad experiences that gamification also exists outside of marketing there are those arcades that gamify games themselves encouraging you to play like 500 rounds of skee-ball so you can trade in your tickets for a novelty penciler something else rather lame as well as the downright weird such as the weird workplace productivity programs like the one Linus forces us all to participate in like I 150 Linus coins this morning for putting thermal paste back in the correct drawer but all I can get with that is lunch with Dennis but on a serious note workplace gamification has been tried by various companies and we're even seeing larger organizations get involved with this trend like the Chinese government which is working on a credit system to gamify and reward behavior that the government deems desirable and although this is a creepy and a little bit extreme example our own susceptibility to want to achieve and win things means that I don't expect the gamification trend to slow down with things a lot more mundane than government spying but if gaining virtual XP points will help you lose weight or save you money on your next trip maybe taking part in this brave new gamified world might not be so bad audible.com is the leading provider of audiobooks with more than 180,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature including fiction nonfiction and periodicals audiobooks are great for when you're walking around driving around sitting around basically doing whatever you need to do as long as it doesn't require your ears to do that thing and luckily for our audience members audible is offering a free 30-day trial just go to audible.com slash tech quickie and within those 30 days pick a book and then you can listen to it and anytime you want I check out Harry Paul in the Philosopher's Stone there's more books and more movies coming out in that series so if you haven't read the Harry Potter books I would get caught up now before the new stuff comes out and you're just left in the duct if you liked this video like it give us some suggestions down below on other stuff we can check out in the future and get subscribed if you just like the video dislike it and maybe check out another one of our channels like channel super fun where we do game stuff this was gamification video that's a valid reference also to go Linus tech tips because we make things that can do game stuff that reference also worked time to leave