So how do you decide which games to play? The story of gamification offers five broad rules.

There is, after all, a vacancy in heaven. When God is dead, and nations are atomized, and family seems burdensome, and machines can beat us at our jobs and even at art, and trust and truth are lost in a roiling sea of AI-generated clickbait — what is left but games?

Companies that exploit our gameplaying compulsion will have an edge over those who don’t, so every company that wishes to compete must gamify in ever more addictive ways, even though in the long term this harms everyone. As such, gamification is not just a fad; it’s the fate of a digital capitalist society. Anything that can be turned into a game sooner or later will be. And the games won’t just be confined to our phones — “extended reality” eyewear like Meta Quest and Apple Vision, once they become normalized, will make playing even harder to avoid.

On X, meanwhile, there is a self-propagating system known as “the culture war”. This game consists of trying to score points (likes and retweets) by attacking the enemy political tribe. Unlike in a regular war, the combatants can’t kill each other, only make each other angrier, so little is ever achieved, except that all players become stressed by constant bickering. And yet they persist in bickering, if only because their opponents do, in an endless state of mutually assured distraction.

On Instagram, the main self-propagating system is a beauty pageant. Young women compete to be as pretty as possible, going to increasingly extreme lengths: makeup, filters, fillers, surgery. The result is that all women begin to feel ugly, online and off.

To illustrate his point, Kaczynski describes a thought experiment involving a forested region occupied by several rival kingdoms. The kingdoms that clear the most land for agriculture can support a larger population, affording them a military advantage. Every kingdom must therefore clear as much forest as possible, or face being conquered by its rivals. The resulting deforestation eventually leads to ecological disaster and the collapse of all the kingdoms. Thus, a trait that is advantageous for every kingdom’s short-term survival leads in the long term to every kingdom’s demise.Kaczynski was describing a “social trap”, a term coined by a student of Skinner, John Platt, who’d theorized that an entire population behaving like pigeons in a Skinner box, each acting only for the next immediate reward, would eventually overexploit a resource, causing ruin for everyone. What Platt called “social traps”, Kaczynski called “self-propagating systems”, because he viewed them as negative-sum games that took on a life of their own, defeating every player to become the only winner. He believed such games not only drove industrialization but also replaced the sense of purpose and meaning that industrialization destroyed. They were thus inextricable from technological advancement, and, in a society like ours, impossible to stop.

Put simply, we try to measure what we value, but end up valuing what we measure.And what we measure is rarely what we mean to value. As Skinner showed, the goals of games — points, badges, trophies — are secondary reinforcers that only derive their worth due to their association with something we actually desire. But these associations are often illusory. A click is not the same thing as a food pellet. And points are not the same as progress.

Kaczynski’s theories eerily prophesize the capture of society by gamification. While he overlooked the benefits of technology, he diligently noted its dangers, recognizing its role in depriving us of purpose and meaning. Today the evidence is everywhere: religion is dying out, Western nations are culturally confused, people are getting married less and having fewer children, and many jobs are threatened by automation, so the traditional pillars of life — God, nation, family, and work — are weakening, and people are losing their value systems. Amid such uncertainty, games, with their well-defined rules and goals, provide a semblance of order and purpose that may otherwise be lacking in people’s lives. Gamification is thus no accident, but an attempt to plug a widening hole in society.

These features turned social media into the world’s most addictive status game.

Respect is so important to humans that it’s a key reason we evolved to play games. Will Storr, in his book The Status Game, charted the rise of game-playing in different cultures, and found that games have historically functioned to organize societies into hierarchies of competence, with score acting as a conditioned reinforcer of status. In other words, all games descend from status games. The association between score and status has grown so strong in our minds that, like pigeons pecking the button long after the food dispenser has stopped dispensing, we’ll chase scores long after everyone else has stopped watching.

Most of the feedback loops in employment — from salary payments to annual performance appraisals — were torturously long. So Coonradt proposed shortening them by introducing daily targets, points systems, and leaderboards. These conditioned reinforcers would transform work from a series of monthly slogs into daily status games, in which employees competed to fulfil the company’s goals.

This led him to propose two kinds of reward: primary and conditioned reinforcers. A primary reinforcer is something we’re born to desire. A conditioned reinforcer is something we learn to desire, due to its association with a primary reinforcer. Skinner found that conditioned reinforcers were generally more effective in shaping behavior, because while our biological need for the primary reinforcer is easily satiable, our abstract desire for the conditioned reinforcer isn’t. The pigeons would stop seeking food once their bellies were full, but they’d take far longer to get tired of hearing the food dispenser click.

Skinner’s goal was to make his pigeons peck the button as many times as possible. From his experiments, he made three discoveries. First, the pigeons pecked most when doing so yielded immediate, rather than delayed, rewards. Second, the pigeons pecked most when it rewarded them randomly, rather than every time. Skinner’s third discovery occurred when he noticed the pigeons continued to peck the button long after the food dispenser was empty, provided they could hear it click. He realized the pigeons had become conditioned to associate the click with the food, and now valued the click as a reward in itself.

the transmission of information from teacher to learner is essentially the transmission of the response appropriate to a certain stimulus.

Radical behaviorists such as Skinner also made the ontological claim that facts about mental states are reducible to facts about behavioral dispositions.

they focused on objectively observable, quantifiable events and behavior. They argued that since it is not possible to observe objectively or to quantify what occurs in the mind, scientific theories should take into account only observable indicators such as stimulus-response sequences.

Their methodology was primarily introspective, relying heavily on first-person reports of sensations and the constituents of immediate experiences.

the app works with the light-up keyboard to teach you to play

But, innovative, technologically advanced learning environments still benefit from a solid foundation in adult learning theory, instrumental theories like John B. Watson's Behaviorism, Lev Vygotsky's Social Development Theory, Jack Mezirow's Critical Reflection and John M. Dirkx's Nurturing Soul in Adult Learning. These theories should serve as the foundation for an enriched online learning experience.

Adapting adult learning theory to support innovative, advanced, online learning - WVMD Model

Adult learning theories: Implications for learning and teaching

. Thorndike and others approachedadult learning from a behavioral psychological perspective. That is, people weretested under timed conditions on various learning and memory tasks.

Section 1.3 Theories of Education and the Online Environment

the younger educators are more inclined to use technology to enhance learning. It can be very time consuming and because of this many enthusiastic educators fall by the way and refuse to preserve with the task of using technology in the classroom.

Behaviorism

Overview of Learning Theories

Dr. Freed and 200 other psychologists petitioned the American Psychological Association in August to formally condemn the work psychologists are doing with persuasive design for tech platforms that are designed for children.

God is not a behavioral psychologist.