Our Gamified Lives
January 30, 2026
Duolingo. The best way to learn Spanish, right? Gamified so thoroughly that even I—who loathe competition in any form—got hooked. The characters were fun, and the constant invisible pressure had me coming home tired and rushing to do my Duolingo, worried that I would finish past midnight and lose my streak. Which does not even sound like me.
It took months for me to realize that the app was making me nervous. Muscles tense, I was rushing, trying for speed, letting the literal bells and whistles ramp up my reaction time. This is not the way I want to learn a language, I blurted, alone in the kitchen.
I bought the Babbel app and ignored the rest of my Duolingo subscription. Feeling almost hostile toward it, I deleted the icon from my phone. With Babbel, I relaxed. I could take my time, go back when I needed to review, pause until new words soaked into my brain. Babbel kept me calm.
But even Babbel whispers the length of my streak at the start of every session.
Streaking used to be delightful. Guys got naked and ran through the quad. Everybody’s distance vision became acute, and yeah, our reflexes sped up: “There he goes! Over by the library!” But today’s streaks are coercion disguised as encouragement.
I never wanted a streak. I wanted to be able to skip my Spanish on friggin’ Christmas Eve so I could go to our friend’s house for dinner and enjoy the cheerful chaos of kids and dogs and grownups of all ages. But when we came home well past the witching hour, the app informed me that it had Saved my Streak.
Babbel, et tu? Maybe it just feels like it has to play a little bit like the other kids do, to be cool. Maybe they all do this for our sake, because they know languages are hard and they think they are motivating us. Or maybe gamification is just capitalism’s appeal to the inner child, now that we, as a society, have tired of stuff and sex. But I would rather have a thin-lipped schoolteacher scolding me for missing class than an app dangling a streak. The scolding was at least straightforward. Back then, the game was in our control—how often we could cut class, how creative our excuses could be.
I no longer need a game of any sort. I am sixty-almost-five years old. I did not buy a language app with any promise of faithful attendance or performance. I just want to learn Spanish. Whenever I have time. Yet I cannot remove the streak monitor, any more than I can remove tech’s other bells, whistles, pre-installed apps, surveillance, and Microsoft Edge browser that keeps popping up like a gopher on a golf course.
What bothers me most is that the gamification worked. God help me, I was relieved, for the first unthinking second, when Duolingo saved my streak. I grin in recognition when a Guardian reviewer admits, after using Duolingo to learn Japanese, “Things came to a head when I passed an entire holiday glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second Kanji lesson over and over like a pigeon pecking a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.”
The reviewer is about to describe C. Thi Nguyen’s new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game.
We spend half our life gamifying, Nguyen says, and the other half running from those games by distracting ourselves with other games. Suddenly what we really care about has fallen to the wayside, and our attention is trained on points, levels, and rewards. Distracted by the gamified overlay, we only want to win. “Value capture,” Nguyen calls this. A meta-game in which somebody steals what matters and substitutes a hollow, fake-gold trophy.
As this new structure imposes itself across society—clickbait replacing substance, office visit time limits and financial incentives changing how doctors practice, statewide tests changing how teachers teach, watches praising us for walking 10,000 steps—we wind up with metrics that measure the wrong things. Not a wise doctor having a long chat to discern what is really wrong, or a teacher knowing how her students think and what will intrigue them, or a long Sunday walk in the country instead of a daily rat’s race around a deserted mall.
“The result,” Nguyen warns, “is that our civic life has become superficially efficient but fundamentally amoral.” We act in ways that will raise our scores or salary or ranking, and soon the joy has drained away from our work. We choose Starbucks again and again because every latte earns us a star. We count “likes” on social media to bolster a self suddenly moody, shaky, and uncertain. And at performance-review time, we dutifully assign numbers to abstract skills impossible to quantify, hoping the silliness will add up to a raise.
Duolingo’s outright gamification sounds like fun, with its bright colors and happy beeps and flashing lights, its cartoon owl flying around and the wry bear making you laugh. But strip all that away, and you are talking only about quantification, a practice far less sexy. How many days have you done this? How fast did you answer? How many questions did you get right?
Whatever happened to learning Spanish for the beauty of the language and the exhilaration of being able to communicate across borders? Value capture took it away. And in situations more important to society, gamification’s hyperquantitative approach lets bureaucrats and politicians pretend they are acting in our best interests by focusing, “objectively” and “responsibly,” on “the numbers.” Quantifying anything lets you deduce progress—like those time bars software developers had to give us, so we would not get antsy while we waited for a download.
Reading about gamification, I find it described as a form of soft control. We internalize the goals it sets for us, and we behave accordingly. Feedback is instant, and the little rushes of dopamine leave us craving more and more. Addiction, disguised as motivation and self-discipline. And all the while, the puppetmasters hide under the blankets, safe from any ethical or psychological scrutiny.
Kids are hooked as surely as adults. Educational games are presented as a way to rescue shortened attention spans, when instead they are “destroying the very capacity for deep learning. Gamification trains kids to chase dopamine over depth and participation over understanding.”
A dismayed teacher sums up the consequences: “Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off. When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in…. They’re not there.”
Their parents, meanwhile, are on a meditation-app streak. Or checking their 85 percent sleep the night before, their blood sugar numbers and calorie intake. Yet the biggest killer is stress, and none of this is relaxing.
Nor is it team-oriented. Sure, it is adorable when family members across the country share Wordle. More people use The New York Times for games than for news, I suspect—myself being one of them, addicted to the crossword. But at least nothing is beeping at me, monitoring me, plunking me down on a leaderboard. When learning, work, and health are gamified, everybody is in it for themselves, and all that seems to count is repetition. Show up, amass points. Take no time to noodle about the differences in two languages or read a poem in Spanish or close your eyes and listen to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain.
Let the gamifiers change you.
