Versatile software engineer with a background in .NET consulting and CMS development. Working on regaining my embedded development skills to get more involved with IoT opportunities.
The general concept is gamification, offering incentives and rewards for good behavior, which is appealing in the same way that grinding away at World of Warcraft was in high school. There's an app called Habitica that helps you build habits based on a scoring system, and you see it in a lot of educational sites where you level up, collect badges, etc.
It can be a great motivator, but it also has some ethical questions to be solved. At what point are we taking advantage of people's addictive tendencies instead of merely promoting good behavior? Somewhere out in the user population, there's going to be a few dopamine-seeking individuals who take the game way to far because their brain is giving them a reward. It might seem harmless and you wonder how someone could get addicted to an educational game, but you look at how terrible heroin is and all the overdoses and addicts don't pause for a second to reflect upon that.
The general concept is gamification, offering incentives and rewards for good behavior, which is appealing in the same way that grinding away at World of Warcraft was in high school. There's an app called Habitica that helps you build habits based on a scoring system, and you see it in a lot of educational sites where you level up, collect badges, etc.
It can be a great motivator, but it also has some ethical questions to be solved. At what point are we taking advantage of people's addictive tendencies instead of merely promoting good behavior? Somewhere out in the user population, there's going to be a few dopamine-seeking individuals who take the game way to far because their brain is giving them a reward. It might seem harmless and you wonder how someone could get addicted to an educational game, but you look at how terrible heroin is and all the overdoses and addicts don't pause for a second to reflect upon that.
Hi Scott, I'll investigate a little more. Thanks for the info!