You've Been Played

Adrian Hon takes a critical look at how our lives have become increasingly Gamified, and how we have increasingly lost some element of control of that gamification, from social media to our workplaces to our civic lives.

Working as a consultant and contractor, I've been responsible for implementing some of the approaches Adrian talks about in his book. It's a comprehensive and insightful read whether you're inside or outside of the industry looking in, seeing the inside view on these practices, their motivations and whether they're always in your interests.

Adrian provides some outlines of what good gamification looks like. I would have liked to see more time here, and his approach to ethical gamification felt like an introduction where I believed we could do with a whole treatise on that alone.

I appreciated Hon's willingness to avoid oversimplification in favor of accepting nuance throughout the book, which otherwise could have come across as an extended TED talk. I found the chapters on workplace and educational gamification particularly relevant and galling, and thought the exploration of ARGs as an insight into Qanon was fascinating.

One minor source of eye-rolling is Hon comes back a bit too often to his own small business as a counterexample for how gamification can be resisted or done well. His bona fides were established early in the book, so it could have gone a long way to have some more variety in the "Do" column.