Big Picture Mode

Industry issues given the widescreen treatment

Nathan Brown measures out his life with gamified coffee spoons

Afriend of mine has a wonderful theory about what happens when you die. Rocking up at the pearly gates, or the river Styx, or the precipice to the endless abyss of nothingness or whatever, he reckons you’ll be presented with your life statistics; a reams-long list of all the things you did, big and small, during your short time on Earth. Your average hours slept each night; the number of trains you caught; how many drinks you bought for people you’d only just met, or times you passed wind in public. This is a fine pub-table subject, since you can really get into the weeds with it – and we have, over the years. My personal favourite is a record of the number of times you unwittingly passed true love on your commute. Ideally with times, places and faces attached, though I realise by that point the details will be more than a little moot.

The purpose of this isn’t to remind us all that life is short – it feels enough like that at this time of year as it is. Rather, it shows our basic, in-built love of statistics, especially when they relate to our own personal growth. This has, of course, been a foundational element in RPGs for years, and is increasingly vital in games of all stripes. Yet it’s bleeding over into real life, too. When I started on Edge a little over seven years ago, the term ‘ gamification’ was the hot new thing, on the lips of every keynote speaker at industry conferences across the globe. Videogames were going to make real life better, we were assured, with levelling and achievement systems predicted to raise consumer engagement in all kinds of fields.

So it proved, to a point, despite the understandable cynicism. One of the many reasons I’ve all but stopped using Facebook is the rate at which my news feed came to be dominated by, in particular, people’s Strava exercise records. I mean, it’s great that you’ve beaten your personal-best time round Clissold Park. I am happy for you, but it’s a naked boast that gives me nothing beyond a pang of guilt at my own sedentary lifestyle. Strava’s only real purpose, to people that don’t use it anyway, is to somewhat dilute the rate at which Facebook outs their former schoolmates and colleagues as racists, or really mean Brexiters, or both. Another one for the post-death stats, please: bigots inadvertently associated with, broken down by year. I can only hope 2017 was the peak.

But look, when half your Facebook friends are posting lap times and your nan’s asking for a bloody Fitbit for Christmas, clearly gamification has had an effect. And perhaps, if I’m being kind, it was the constant passive-aggressive pestering of Strava and its ilk that finally saw me ringing in the new year with a promise to lose some weight. Shortly after I joined Edge I remember being outside a conference on a smoke break, telling a colleague of my disappointment at how clean-living people in this profession were. I’d expected heavy drinkers on two packs a day with sustainable middle-class drug habits; instead I got people with gym memberships who called it a night after two beers and a salad. People are just fitter these days, I suppose – and from what I’ve heard I should really have got into the whole writing-about-games thing in the late ’90s, hoo boy – but I get it now. This is a job that involves a lot of sitting down doing nothing but pressing buttons. If you don’t do anything to offset it, you’re only ever growing outwards. So it has proved.

Now, I’ve tried to do this before, but I’ve always run out of steam – and that, I realise, is precisely where gamification comes in. Or, perhaps, statification. I’m using a weight-tracking phone app that gives out badges for certain milestones, but they don’t draw me in particularly; nor do the community-set challenges that task you with losing a set amount within a certain time period. But the stats – oh, dear lord, the stats. I can tell you with pinpoint accuracy how many calories I’ve taken in, how many I’ve burned, and the effect it’s had on my weight every day for the last month-and-a-bit.

I cannot explain how much I love that. It may not quite be a list of my lifetime stats, but it’s converting a significant part of my real life into a videogame-like series of numbers, and that naturally sets something off in me. It’s working, too. Hopefully, it’ll help ensure I wait a little longer before I find out what really waits when we shuffle off this mortal coil. That would mean more time sitting on my arse pressing buttons – which, really, is the only kind of gamification-of-life that truly matters.

Nathan Brown is Edge’s editor, and hopes to be presented with this page’s lifetime overdue days when he dies

When your nan’s asking for a bloody Fitbit for Christmas, clearly gamification has had an effect