How Did We Get So Obsessed with Streaks?

Anne Helen Petersen interviews Adrian Hon, co-founder of the game studio Six to Start (Zombies, Run!) and author of You’ve Been Played, about why gamification is everywhere and why most of it is bad. His central distinction is between small-scale “analog” gamification, like a parent’s marble system for summer chores, and scaled-up corporate gamification, like Apple Watch badges or Duolingo streaks. The analog version keeps a human in the loop who can adjust goals and forgive an off day. The corporate version replaces that human judgment with fixed metrics designed to maximize a company’s engagement and profit rather than the user’s actual goals, and it can’t make exceptions: nobody at Apple decides you deserve a day off your calorie goal.

Hon’s sharpest point is about what good gamification requires that bad gamification skips: it has to actually be fun, using real game design rather than just layering points and leaderboards onto an unappealing task. He traces the deeper failure to what he calls “soft lock,” a video game term for a state where you haven’t failed but can’t progress either. He argues corporate gamification manufactures a version of this in real life: streaks and progress bars that provide only the illusion of forward motion while the underlying material conditions of a person’s life stay exactly the same, and unlike an actual video game, there’s no save file to restore and no human at the other end of the interface.

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• Hon’s dividing line for gamification: whether a human being stays in the loop to adjust goals and use judgment (a parent’s marble system, a swim instructor deciding a lap counts) versus when a fixed algorithm enforces the goal with no possibility of exception.
• He argues scaled digital gamification quietly substitutes a corporation’s goals (engagement, profit) for the user’s own goals, and cites Apple Watch “close your rings” notifications and Duolingo’s late-night XP alerts as examples designed to produce FOMO rather than serve the user.
• His critique of bad gamification isn’t that it’s manipulative in the abstract, it’s that it’s usually not even fun: thin, thoughtless layering of points and leaderboards onto activities people already dislike, versus his own studio’s rule that if a game mechanic wouldn’t be fun on its own, it doesn’t belong.
• “Soft lock” (borrowed from video game design, describing a state where a player hasn’t failed but also can’t progress) is his frame for what everyday gamification produces: an illusion of progress that keeps people in place while their actual life circumstances don’t change, with no human interface to appeal to and no way to reset.
• On ClassDojo, used in roughly 95% of US schools: teachers award or deduct points for behaviors including bathroom breaks; Hon notes evidence for its effectiveness is weak, some studies show it makes students more negative about class even when behavior improves, and its “growth mindset” justification isn’t well supported by the research he cites (two 2018 meta-analyses found weak effects, a 2019 randomized trial found none on literacy or numeracy).
• His practical prescription: remove streaks from most apps, since punishing people for missing a day treats an ordinary human need for rest as a failure state; and push for regulation (he cites the SEC looking at gamified trading apps and EU countries considering lootbox bans) rather than relying only on individual willpower to resist manipulative design.
• He’s still an optimist about the form itself. He credits well-designed gamification (his examples: making science or guitar practice or exercise more engaging) as genuinely valuable when it aligns with what the person already wants, and frames the problem as an absence of that alignment in most commercial gamification, not gamification as a concept.