Why Everything is Becoming a Game - by Gurwinder

For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games. Not merely to amuse you, but because they realized that the easiest way to make you do what they want is to make it fun. To escape their control, you must understand the creeping phenomenon of gamification, and how it makes you act against your own interests. This is a story that encompasses a couple who replaced their real baby with a fake one, a statistician whose obsessions cost the US the Vietnam War, the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life, and the biggest FBI investigation of the 20th century. But it begins with a mild-mannered psychologist who studied pigeons at Harvard in the 1930s. B. F. Skinner believed environment determines behavior, and a person could therefore be controlled simply by controlling their environment. He began testing this theory, known as behaviorism, mainly on pigeons. For his experiments, he developed the “Skinner box”, a cage with a food dispens

For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games. Not merely to amuse you, but because they realized that the easiest way to make you do what they want is to make it fun. To escape their control, you must understand the creeping phenomenon of gamification, and how it makes you act against your own interests. This is a story that encompasses a couple who replaced their real baby with a fake one, a statistician whose obsessions cost the US the Vietnam War, the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life, and the biggest FBI investigation of t