Last month, I attended a conference in Vegas for a few days. The Strip, with all its lights and grandeur, does quite a poor job of concealing its depressing realities.

Consider this example: on a Tuesday morning, I’m walking through the casino/hotel to go to the conference center and see an elderly couple with a young boy walking in the opposite direction. I can’t think of any non-depressing contexts that explain why a school-age boy would be walking around a Vegas casino at 9 am on a Tuesday in October.

The worst are the slot machines. There’s a 100% correlation between people playing slots on a Tuesday morning and people who look utterly lifeless. In one of my seminars in college, we read a paper detailing the various gamification techniques that slot machine designers had perfected. Positive reinforcement with lights and sounds, specific schedules for such reinforcement, and disguising losses as near-wins are all textbook strategies. For such a boring game, I’m not sure if I should be more impressed at how thoughtful slot machine designers are or depressed by how many people are addicted to slot machines.

The purpose of that paper was to describe slot machine design principles that casual game designers could use to increase their game’s stickiness and “player enjoyment.” The authors use Tetris as an example of a game that could be improved.¹

Silicon Valley in particular has become much more knowledgeable about gamification in recent years. Zynga’s business is pretty much entirely based on that paper, taking otherwise mediocre games and transforming them into cash cows by layering on social networks, microtransactions, and enhanced game mechanics optimized for addiction.² It’s not just casual games; these kinds of strategies are now being used to get people to do all sorts of things, ranging from profile completion (e.g. Facebook gives me a progress bar) to exercise (e.g. Fitocracy) to discovering protein structures (e.g. Foldit).

More broadly, the tech industry understands the value of influencing an individual’s psychology. For example, it’s standard industry practice to have a growth team, which exclusively focuses on bringing in new users (e.g. optimizing signup flows) and retaining them (e.g. optimizing the time-of-day an email gets sent to users). Some tactics are more morally dubious than others, but usually the worst you can get is being too spammy.

However, consumer web products are so deeply tethered to real life that product decisions can have significant consequences. This recent article on cycling and Strava highlights one such example. The leaderboard feature almost certainly drove engagement metrics across the board, and I bet the company received positive feedback from users. All-in-all, a good product decision that leveraged elements of gamification. Except for the fact that an article like this could be written.

It’s hard to precisely disentangle Strava’s liability from the cyclists' liability, but no matter: the point remains that a consumer web product helped shape an individual’s psychology in a manner that resulted in tragedy. Even though this is a particularly extreme case, to what degree is this industry at fault for other negative repercussions? I’ve written before about the loss of privacy and authenticity, but I’m afraid it’s much more than that. Technology has the capacity to amplify and enhance every human vice and weakness, and a market environment that helps validate such meaningless forms of innovation is depressing.³

It might be reasonable to assume that gamification and other growth tactics are justified because of their positive impact on metrics, but this presupposes (1) the lack of unintended consequences (like cycling accidents or little kids hanging around slot machines on a Tuesday morning) and (2) that the underlying product is fundamentally valuable (such that getting more people to use it is a good thing). Though it might run counter to business sense, I think the Valley would do well not to build the equivalent of slot machines.

When presented with the option of self-administering drugs that stimulate the reward pathway, rats will choose to continually self-administer to the point of death. Slot machines are a nice analog: one can continually pull the lever until (financial) death. Vegas taught me that there are enough slot machines in this world.