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0 pointsforgottenpass7y ago0 comments

>This all happened by chance

Nobody fell down the stairs and discovered that the tumble accidentally linked their KPIs to engagement metrics.

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andrewla7y ago· 2 in thread

No -- a thousand people fell down the stairs, nine hundred and ninety nine of them found no link between their KPIs and engagement metrics, and the one that did thought that they figured out how the human brain works, instead of just realizing that they were successful for reasons that they likely will never understand or be able to replicate.

And a thousand of those .1%'ers will try a second time, and the .1% that succeed that time will be hailed as geniuses and people will set about copying their open plan offices and terrible management styles in the hopes of replicating their success.

whycombinater7y ago

I'm not a data scientist nor a psychologist nor an addiction expert nor ...

But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" (roguelikes, MMOs, MOBAs, FTL) is an extremely strong addiction factor. League of Legends, that free game whose net worth is among the highest of all time.

In real life, you study->grades->job->promote->takeoverworld. Or liftweights->liftmoreweights->liftmoreweights. Or climbmountain->climbhighermountain...

In games, you do that in 1/100 the time and effort. Tap a few buttons and "you win!!!!"

A sweeping statement to the effect of "people don't understand addiction" is basically malicious and I accuse you of being the inventor of gamification or one of their PR folk.

andrewla7y ago

> But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" ... is an extremely strong addiction factor.

Try playing more unsuccessful games. You'll find that most boring, unaddictive, terrible games that you'll never play more than once have the same leveling up mechanic.

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