You'Ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon

How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation—and what we can do about it 

Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet.

Points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. In  You’ve Been Played , game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations, schools, and governments use games and gamification as tools for profit and coercion. These are games that we often have no choice but to play, where losing has heavy penalties. You’ve Been Played  is a scathing indictment of a tech-driven world that wants to convince us that misery is fun, and a call to arms for anyone who hopes to preserve their dignity and autonomy.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Technology, Sociology, Games, Business, Audiobook

304 pages, Paperback

Published September 21, 2023

About the author

Adrian Hon is co-founder and CEO at Six to Start, creators of gamelike stories and story-like games including the world's bestselling smartphone fitness game, Zombies, Run!, with ten million players. Six to Start's clients have included Disney, the BBC, Channel 4, and Penguin, and the company has won multiple awards including Best of Show at SXSW.

Adrian is author of A History of the Future in 100 Objects, and has written a column about technology for the Telegraph. He originally trained as a neuroscientist at Cambridge, UCSD, and Oxford.

Follow me on Mastodon.

Reviews

[Brian Clegg · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's some interesting material in You've Been Played, waiting to be discovered - but it could have been a lot better if Adrian Hon had gone with a co-author: unfortunately, as a book it's no great shakes.

Let's do the interesting thing first. Hon is talking about gamification - the (clumsily named) idea of using game-like elements outside of games, where they are supposed to encourage us, for example, to exercise more, to work more efficiently, or to follow some government edict. The idea is to provide some game-like rewards (or punishments) for certain behaviours, and as a result to either change the way we act or to make a routine chore more fun.

Unfortunately, as Hon makes clear, this is rarely a good thing. Firstly it's based on behavioural theory that is largely outdated. But also it's manipulative, and even if it does generate a degree of fun to begin with it rapidly becomes a chore and loses its positive contribution. Hon is good at showing us the negatives, but also making clear the limits of what has been achieved so far - so, for example, he highlights the Chinese social credit system, which has been portrayed as a Big Brother system that gamifies everyday life. This is done by supposedly rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad as seen by the Communist Party, but has only been implemented piecemeal and has generated a significant amount of rebellion. (Hon is not saying it's good, just that it's not yet as dystopian as it could be and is usually portrayed.)

Without doubt, some employers' use of gamification to exploit workers as Hon describes is disturbing and needs action. Equally, a lot of gamification, while relatively benign, is irritating and infantilises the users of the system. So we get a strong and disturbing message. Oddly, apart from the basic threat of gamification being misused, the most interesting chapter in the book wasn't about gamification, but about modern conspiracy theories. Hon draws decidedly tenuous links between the two, but his discussion of how and why modern conspiracy theories succeed was genuinely interesting. But after a while, the main theme becomes very repetitive - this is close to being an article that has been stretched to fit a book format.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the book is that there is far too much about Hon and his company, which he puts forward unconvincingly as a paragon of good gamification - sometimes the text sounds more like a prospectus for investors than useful analysis. I can see the argument for using game features that are entertaining, rather than taking basic game elements like leaderboards and scores and applying them with nothing that the users will really enjoy, but it's hard not to see a vested interest at play when the best example is usually one of Hon's own products.

The other problem is that Hon is a big enthusiast for role playing games, and seems to assume that they are universally enjoyed, and hence can provide a model for how gamification should be done. He describes an online conference that was positively transformed by being gamified. To give the beneficial experiences of an in-person conference, for example, attendees could drink a 'polymorph potion' at the online bar that would 'add a random and inevitably silly emoji to their name' which apparently is a great conversation opener. Similarly 'The Haunted Foyer had a mysterious portal leading to a miniature choose your own adventure game that changed the colour of your name, a swag table that gave away items like a generic sword or official conference socks, and vending machines dispensed unique procedurally generated items'. Hmm.

This is great if you love cosplay or pretending to be a wizard, but for many people (certainly for me) it would be a huge turn off. Whenever there's role play in training, for instance, my inclination is to try to subvert it by cheating the system - or ideally to swerve it entirely. Hon is suffering from the assumption that because he loves this kind of thing it would make experiences better for the rest of the world - to be honest, I prefer generic gamification to this kind of stuff. (I ought to say it's not that I hate games - I regularly play and used to review them professionally, but I don't want to pretend to be someone/something else in a fantasy world.)

Overall, there is interesting material in here, but it's a shame it wasn't presented better.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a gamer, and I have generally thought of gamification as a good thing. Wouldn't it be great to take the qualities that I love about game playing and embed them into other parts of life to make them more fun and challenging and to make us feel better about doing mundane things that make the world better? Good games have a spectacular learning curve that can take you from fumbling noob to supreme master before you even realize how much you have learned so quickly. What if I could learn a new language that way? Or if that sort of thinking could be used to get me past some of the hard parts in physics? Mr. Hon is also a gamer and he sees some of the same upsides in gamification that have intrigued me, but he also sees the dark side, which is the main subject matter of this book. Almost any technology can be used stupidly so that the results are trivial and stultifying instead of being interesting. Mr. Hon calls this generic gamification. He's right. I don't need badges and leaderboards in my Kindle app, and I pay too much attention to them in my exercise app, so that they diminish my enjoyment instead of challenging me in a positive way. They just get in the way. But stupid boring generic gamification is the least of our problems. The bigger issues arise when gamification is applied in ways that are coercive and manipulative, when techniques from gaming are used to drive ever growing work quotas or as a mechanism for social surveillance or when they are used to spark conspiracy theories or to induce addictive behavior. Unfortunately there is far too much of this, and it is such a problem that I think that we should probably have laws and regulations to reign some of it in. As Mr. Hon points out there are too many instances when gamification is used to objectify people, to deny their humanity and treat them like non-player characters. I am going to have to start being more careful to keep an eye out for toxic gamification in the world around me, and I'm going to have to think twice before the next time I suggest to someone that they gamify their business model or their organization.

[Ryan Ard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was an interesting account of how gamification can be very negative. Nowadays, work, fitness, diets, everything is becoming gamified. Gamification can be done in a positive way but generally it’s manipulative and/or based on outdated behavioral science. I often find myself being influenced to open an app or log a workout based on wanting to get more worthless tokens on an app. If nothing else, this book has helped me recognize when something is trying to influence me through gamification tricks.

[Ell · Rating 4 out of 5]

“With today’s gamification, you’re no longer the player—you’re being played.” This is the central premise of this book and what an interesting book it is! No, there are no scare tactics or conspiracies here. The author simply and adeptly explores the reasons behind the gamification of so many things around us along with the intended and sometimes unintended consequences. And the author should know because he has been in the gamification game, so to speak, for over a decade. But that’s not all. Hon studied neuroscience at Oxford University at the doctoral level. He’s knowledgeable, well-informed, and an artful writer. If you are interested in the gamification of our lives, get a copy of this book.

[patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved it! awesome look and super personal, loved how it interwove so much of his own experience with gamification in work and personal life and other real world examples.

[Dan Nolting · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a harrowing and timely accord of how behaviorism has once again reared its ugly head. The author, who is a game designer, has much to say on all sides of the issue of creating addictive loops and habit modification. With lots of references and direct sources, we can see how even the most innocent looking platforms are only developed for one purpose: to take advantage of those who have little or no control of their money.

[Zosia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucking phenomenal. The book I'll be telling everyone to read. I liked it so much that I wrote the author a fan letter halfway through. I'd only surfacely considered how corporate, government, school, work, etc gamification seemed shady but this CONSIDERS it and then some. It makes me fucking furious. It's borderline revolutionary, too (or at least another text to file under Capitalism is Fucked). That's more fucks than I've ever written in a Goodreads review. Anyway. Read it!

[Vincent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delivered in an interesting way. This is certainly the one book about all the ups and downs of gamification, giving so many examples and author's opinions along the way. It does help us make an informed moral judgement of this tool. And like all tools, it's important on how do we use it.

[Eustacia Tan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even before I read this book, I knew that I am someone who’s the prime target for a gamified life. After all, I spent months trying and failing to get the motivation to re-start exercising regularly. But after I bought a second-hand Apple Watch and downloaded the Lumi app, I started going to the gym. Now, I am on the treadmill somewhat regularly and I’ve earned $30 thanks to the collaboration between Singapore’s government and Apple.

I guess you can put a price on my health.

Clearly, I’m not the only one. In You’ve Been Played, Adrian Hon identifies the many ways that our lives have been gamified, often using was a generic form of gamification. As Hon defines it, generic gamification is the “application of points, leaderboards, achievements, progress bars, and challenges to diverse, digitally tracked activities” and while not the only form of gamification, is the most widely used type. Why is it so popular? Well it’s easy to implement, it allows for automatic and instant judgements, and people think that it works (even though behaviourism has been discredited).

And honestly, I can attest to how easy it is to let these apps just take over your life. I spent the last week doing far more Duolingo practice than before, even though I dislike the new interface, purely because I was in the final stage of the diamond league (so far their highest leaderboard) and I didn’t want to lose. That’s it. I didn’t want to lose and therefore I made myself play. I’m not sure if all that French and Bahasa Indonesia practice will pay off eventually, but this does show how pervasive generic gamification is and how addictive it can be.

While I’m lucky that all the gamification pain in my life is self-inflicted, it isn’t always the case. After taking us through the many ways apps use gamification to “level up our lives”, Hon tackles the problem of gamification at work. Amazon, for instance, tries to integrate games into its fulfilment centres, such as a game where you “race one-on-one as flying dragons against a nearby worker.” These games may relieve the tedium of work for a while, but it soon becomes nothing more than a way to track a worker’s productivity. And perhaps even more dangerously, it could affect income. There are challenges, such as those by Uber, where quests and challenges result in monetary bonuses, which in turn have drivers working for as long as possible. When these bonuses make up a significant part of your income, they’re no longer optional.

You might think that after Hon covers the gamification of work and personal life, the book has exhausted its topic, but you would be wrong. You’ve Been Played goes beyond the obvious examples of gamification. Hon explores the gamification of games, where loot boxes build gambling habits. He looks at the gamification of our behaviour, the mixed success of China’s various social-credit schemes, and also its American counterpart. According to a 2020 podcast called According to Need, homeless people are ranked based on an assessment and prioritised accordingly for housing – does that remind you of how a game leaderboard might work?

And of course, there are conspiracy theories. Qanon gets a chapter to itself, as Hon looks at an ARG he helped to run and its similarities to Qanon. I understand where he’s coming from; the first fiction podcast I was into was based on an ARG and the thought of the universe sending clues and important truths to those who are smart enough to understand is a seductive one.

It is easy, after all this, to think that we are doomed to a life on a hamster wheel, where leaderboards track and incentivise our every move. However, the last chapter on escaping softlock is a hopeful one, talking about how game designers can create ethical gamification. It complements an earlier chapter on gamification done well, where Hon dissects his popular game Zombies, run! and how he created it to encourage running without the negative effects of gamification.

Much of what You’ve Been Played describes matches my lived experience, and it felt like I was taking a peek behind the curtain. Given how eye-opening I found this book, it feels like something I would bring up quite frequently in discussions with others. For me, the greatest merit of this book was its relentless expose of how gamification is being used in various aspects of our lives and its possible downsides. It sounds rather bleak, but because I’m not convinced that ethical gamification can become the standard in the industry, I found this book to be more instructive as a look at where we are now, rather than where we will be in the future.

This review was first posted at Eustea Reads

[Lewis Birchon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look at me, logging the completion of a book on a lightly gamified app… sigh.

Hon writes this book with skin in the game. He’s the co-creator of Zombies, Run! and many other games. Yet he treats gamification with scepticism rather the than heavy promotion you might expect from someone in his position.

There’s good reason for this. Hon takes us through many examples and domains where gamification has been used to condition users’ behaviour. This Taylorian approach can be against the user’s own interests - and sometimes against the intended purpose itself.

But there’s hope and potential. Amongst the dystopian examples, there are some applications of gamification principles that genuinely work with users’ interests.

Only one minor problem: this doesn’t necessarily go hand-in-hand with mega-profit.

An entertaining, accessible and informative read - especially for anyone who might be in a position to put any of these principles into use.

[Chris Boutté · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an awesome book. I thought this was just going to be another book saying “technology bad” and explain how social media is just trying to get us hooked in various ways. Adrian Hon killed it with this book by diving deep into a ton of different areas where gamification is being used in different ways for both good and bad. He has a background in creating games, so it was really interesting learning about the thought process that goes into them, but this book was surprisingly philosophical as well by discussing the ethics behind different organizations using gamification.

I really liked how he discussed how workplaces use gamification to get more out of employees while not giving anything back to them and better ways of doing this. I definitely recommend this book and hope it gets the attention it deserves.

[Raphael · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Very Important Read

This well written and thoroughly researched book shines a spotlight on gamification that is increasingly pervading all aspects of our society. We need to confront head on the challenges and abuses of gamification, and ensure that it can be used to improve our lives, not make it worse.

[Sally · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't find this book particularly engaging. I felt like a lot of the chapters repeated the same arguments again and again. The parts I enjoyed most were when the author described the games he'd helped design and why they made the decisions they did.

[Nisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

While it does feel like Hon is more of a game designer than an author, I did find the content really interesting and engaging as someone who is not a gamer. I would definitely recommend reading this.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a coherent and readable text on an important topic.Adrian Hon writes carefully, backing up all his statements with well cited research. Sometimes this cautiousness in the reporting means that he doesn't always fully support the statements he makes at the beginning of the book. I appreciate the fact that he does not stretch the research or cherry pick his examples to make his point, but sometimes there is a kind of "less that the sum of its parts" feeling about the book. I think that might be because this field is just so new that the vocabulary for critiquing gamification has not yet been fully developed. Still a valuable read, and really interesting things to say about education, in particular.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely made a point about a gamified dystopia. It needs to be followed up with a more in depth journalistic effort to get the personal stories of people affected.

[Mattschratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good solid account of the ways in which gamification is messing about with people's lives, with a lot of stuff pulled from different places.

[Timothy Carlson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting book. Explained a lot about the different ways in which gamification is used in our society, whether in schools, government, lifestyle, work, and even online conspiracy theories. It was fascinating seeing the ways in which gamification is used to coerce behavior and how that is not proven to be very effective. While I wasn’t quite in agreement on every thing he said, overall it was an enjoyable read.

[Tony Mush · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s bad enough that gamification has become the twenty-first century’s most advanced form of behavioural control, but there’s even worse news: it’s also deadly boring. It turns out that wrapping a veneer of missions and points and challenges around the job of a warehouse worker doesn’t change its crushing repetitiveness,


Practically anything that can be monitored and recorded has been gamified, and as technology has become cheaper, smaller, and ever more powerful, colonising our homes, our workplaces, and even our bodies, so too have the opportunities for gamification expanded to occupy every part of our lives.

Intrinsic motivation is a central component of this new psychology, the idea that sometimes we do things because they’re joyful rather than out of reward or punishment (i.e., extrinsic motivation). Self-determination theory, one of the most popular frameworks for understanding motivation, sees three factors as key to the very best forms of motivation: autonomy (ability to determine one’s own path), competence (experiencing mastery), and relatedness (interacting with, and caring for, others).

But the numbers didn’t matter—in true Silicon Valley fashion, it was the dream they bought into, not the reality.

Fairly paid, meaningful work can be its own reward.

If participants buy into the metaphor, it affects the way we act. A writer who believes in the just-world hypothesis will assume people are in prison because they deserve it and police are in positions of authority because they are fundamentally good; so a TV show by that writer might involve the police helping mostly good people and punishing mostly bad people, thereby reinforcing the just-world hypothesis.

No one should have to endure nagging and shaming by their apps just because designers are being driven to increase user engagement by any means possible. If a company believes its gamification features are good for everyone, they should make the case for them openly. And while it’s tempting to incentivise users into opting into gamification through discounts and offers, it shouldn’t be necessary if the gamification is compelling and effective on its own.

[Kevin Parkinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I absolutely love the central hypothesis of this book - that, despite the popularity of gamification, the genuine good it can create, and the many promises it makes, there can be a dark side to it as well. That honestly struck me as a pretty novel concept, though the concept rings true. Now that the author has pointed it out to me, I do see plenty of gamification that is at best cringe-worthy. For example, I recently received a notification on Reddit because I had scrolled the equivalent of ten bananas. Previously, that might have excited me as a fun little quirky addition, and perhaps it would have motivated me to scroll even more for even more badges. But, because I was aware of Hon's central argument, it creeped me out. I was able to see through the venire in ways I might not have been able to without this book, and it actually caused me to put the app down. For the general concept of this book, the author deserves five stars.

Unfortunately, the execution of the book falls short. The writing is often dry, meandering, and too long. Some of his complaints seem petty and hyperbolic. And I was shocked at the number of times his evidence seemed to be a Reddit comment. I get that this is a new concept, and we probably need more studies on the downsides of gamification. So to get the ball rolling, he had to start somewhere. But as someone who has seen untold number of fictionalized stories commented on Reddit, him sharing anecdotal evidence from that particular site caused him to lose some of his otherwise impressive credibility in my eyes.

Hopefully another book can come out on this topic. Perhaps one written by this author and a co-author. Or perhaps someone else can pick up the torch and carry it on. I sincerely thank the author for helping me think in this way, but I can't recommend anyone read any part of this book other than the summary on the back cover.

[oldb1rd · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, I definitely saw it coming straight from the pretentious "BREAKING!"-style title of the book.

And well it turned to be exactly what it is. A niche game designer waving his POV on gamification in general & thinking it's big.

Well, okay.

The book is seriously lacking on many things except for Hon's confidence in his expertise - there's plenty of it. Basically it’s just a huge subjective article pumped up with lots of confirmation bias for gamification divided in 2 groups - good examples (Hon’s games and beliefs) and bad examples (the rest).

It’s also rather amusing to observe how far when speaking of “bad examples” he goes into demonising something that’s just a tool. Like a knife. You can cut bread, you can cut people with it. The knife doesn’t become good or bad because of that. It’s all about the hand. Technique, execution and most of all - goals.

I think someone should also write a book about a terrible act of invention of the wheel which led to the capitalist dystopia we currently live in. Darn it, wheel you were made only to serve primal big corpo needs for transportation and kill the joy of traveling by feet.

Besides that it’s just non-stop repetitious preaching with a call to the utopia of ethical gamification in the grand finale.

Very moving.

(GIF of Woody Harrelson wiping out his tears with dollar bills).

[Anna Hawes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went into this book knowing I'd read about fitness and classroom and workplace management apps but it covered so much more. I wasn't too surprised about reading about GameStop stock, but was enlightened about connections I hadn't considered like credit scores, conspiracy theories, and medieval indulgences. (Nuns were the original virtual racers. Never would have guessed.) It was really interesting to consider all the ways humans try to motivate themselves and others and what makes such practices good or bad. His background in neuroscience and game design positions him well to address those questions. I appreciated the author's nuance: technology is not all good or all bad. Apps that encourage users to perform specific actions can do so in ways that are helpful or in ways that are harmful. He put forth compelling arguments for where to draw those lines and made recommendations for what we as a society should do about technology creeping further and further into our lives.

[Becca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gave me new consideration for the gamification around us. Is it a good thing to put your health in the hands of a random app? You may be taking advice from a tech bro, and one that wants you to never quit their platform.

For better or worse, Hon is very thorough. The book goes into what seems to be every aspect of gamification. On the whole, the details are engaging, even if some of the examples feel like a stretch. Is a credit score gamification, or is assigning a numerical score the only way we know how to manage complex problems for large groups of people? Maybe starting a discussion is enough to justify this addition.

Overall I had a lot to think about, and I think I'll be more aware of gamification around me.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Games are fun and we love to play them. So corporations are doing it en-mass.

1. There have always been rewards given: employee of the year, Boy Scout badges, etc. However nowadays games are used in the office as well. Amazon created games for workers to compete with each other, without easing the underlying poor work conditions such as giving adequate toilet break times. That is just pure torture.
2. Games that claim to improve mental function etc can be biased and used to sell them. They don’t compare the games to say other interventions like studying a bit more or exercise.
3: In the end, there are 2 kinds of workers: those who control the games (elite management) and those being played (the rest).

Very good points but I feel the book is too long.

[Scott DeAngelis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Starts out strong. Fizzles out by page 150.
Lots of excellent talking points about corporate greed and the double edged sword unsheathed as a result of gamifying mundane tasks at home and work.

Source material is based almost entirely on the authors personal experiences and success of his own game. Which is great, but had never heard of his game before and his arguments would have held more weight if he didn’t prop up his own brainchild incessantly and leveraged talking points from other successful games across various platforms. Not well researched and dissolved into a babbling mess as the author runs out of ways to expound on his thesis.

[ava · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the author definitely could’ve benefited from a co-author— the ideas are all there, but I found the structure of this book a little disorganized and hard to follow. This was an interesting premise, but I don’t feel like I learned anything revolutionary that I didn’t already know.

This book had maybe the opposite of its intended effect on me because I decided to start wearing my apple watch again. I have started to notice gamification everywhere— I keep seeing this Little Caesar’s pizza ad encouraging customers to earn reward points.

[Kaitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great vacation read and not because it was light and breezy but because it was full of interesting facts and discussion points to share with my friends on our weekend getaway. This account of gamification's effects across many areas of society was so compelling and has me looking at everything with a skeptical eye ever since. Very much recommend.

[Natthaphon · Rating 3 out of 5]

DECENT BOOK! As gamer, it’s fun to read. There are many parts that I’m related. More than half of book are about video games and mobile applications. However, I expected more deep sociology knowledge because of the name of book, “How Corporations, Goverments, and Schools Use Games To Control Us All”. It’s just little for me.

[Rachelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

You've Been Played... a thorough history of corporations and smartphone apps using gamification to encourage employees and consumers to participate and achieve more. Well researched, many examples provided. Video gamers should enjoy this book.