Read on Twitter
I've got a new paper forthcoming: "How Twitter Gamifies Communication".
Games are appealing because they offer us clear, simple goals. Twitter is so thrilling because its goals have been artificially narrowed. Gamification changes the activity.
Thread: https://philpapers.org/rec/NGUHTG
Games are appealing because they offer us clear, simple goals. Twitter is so thrilling because its goals have been artificially narrowed. Gamification changes the activity.
Thread: https://philpapers.org/rec/NGUHTG
Twitter makes conversation into something like a game. It scores our communication, giving us vivid and quantified feedback, via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. But this gamification doesn’t just increase our motivation to communicate; it changes the nature of the activity.
Games are more satisfying than ordinary life because game-goals are simpler, cleaner, and easier to apply. Twitter is thrilling precisely because its goals have been artificially clarified and narrowed.
When we buy into Twitter’s gamification, then our values shift from the complex and pluralistic values of communication, to the narrower quest for popularity and virality.
Twitter’s gamification resembles with the phenomena of echo chambers and moral outrage porn. In all these, we have shifted our aims in an activity, not because the new aims are more valuable, but in exchange for extra pleasure.
I also wrote this paper with the aim of undergraduate teachability, accessibility to non-philosophers, etc.
Here's the pre-print, free and online:
https://philpapers.org/archive/NGUHTG.pdf
Here's the pre-print, free and online:
https://philpapers.org/archive/NGUHTG.pdf
This has a complicated relationship to some of my other work, so let me now do some Q&A about it with the imaginary voice in my head. (This is what happens when I have too much solitary COVID-office-basement time).
Q: Do I need to have read your games book to understand this?
A: The opposite! I wrote this partly because some people were interested in my criticisms of gamification, but didn't want to read a whole book on the philosophy of games. So this is a quick, stand-alone package.
A: The opposite! I wrote this partly because some people were interested in my criticisms of gamification, but didn't want to read a whole book on the philosophy of games. So this is a quick, stand-alone package.
Q: I read your games book. Is there anything new in this for me?
A: You can skip the intro section on games and agency. But about 2/3 of it is new material about Twitter in particular. My fave stuff is about what info "Likes" don't capture - how the metrics compress the values.
A: You can skip the intro section on games and agency. But about 2/3 of it is new material about Twitter in particular. My fave stuff is about what info "Likes" don't capture - how the metrics compress the values.
Q: This doesn't just seem like a worry about Twitter. Shouldn't you also be worried about citation rates, university rankings, and any simple real-world scoring system?
A: Yes. Yes I am.
A: Yes. Yes I am.
