Opinion post by

Roger Fingas

While some of its early hype has died down, the concept of gamification — rewarding mundane tasks by turning them into games — has not only survived, but thoroughly wedged itself into society. It’s especially commonplace when it comes to digital learning and fitness tracking, so much so that you probably don’t even think about it when you fire up an app like Google Fit or Duolingo.

There are certainly benefits to gamification, but it may be no surprise that the push for it is actually backfiring in some cases, making people want to ignore these systems or quit the very things they’re encouraging us to do. I’m going to focus on fitness, since that’s my specialty, but it should be easy to recognize the problems I’m talking about in many other apps and platforms.