Gamified Socialization
The Low Risk, Low Reward Way to Communicate
I don’t have my boyfriend’s phone number memorized. I don’t have the phone numbers of my sisters, or best friends, or neighbors memorized either. I’ve tried to memorize them several times, in case I accidentally lock myself out of my apartment or get lost in public with a dead phone. I repeat the string of digits aloud four times, then check myself for correctness, which always worked when trying to memorize things for school. But now the sequences float out of my head like dust - there’s no incentive to memorize them - how often do I really find myself locked out or lost? I have important phone numbers saved on my mobile phone - when I need to make a call, I simply click the phone icon and press the contact’s name. The only phone numbers I have memorized are my mom and dad’s cell numbers, which I was taught to memorize as a young child - along with my childhood home address and our now-null landline number - in case I got truly lost.
It wasn’t always this way though. In elementary school, I had the numbers to my best friends’ landlines memorized by heart - I could recite them forwards, backwards, in my sleep, and any other which way. I would take the cordless home phone off its charger and to my room, punch in the digits, and ask the adult parent on the other end if I could speak to my friend. We would blab about a number of things that I now can’t recall in the slightest while I lay on my bed, on the floor, or paced around my room like a person in a movie.
My parents always told me how lucky I was to take the home phone to my room. When they were in school, they were subject to the mounted landline, with its curly Q cord that could only stretch so far. They had to speak to their friends and crushes in the presence of their families - if you wanted to communicate privately while at a distance, you might as well send a letter.
Technological innovation across personal devices has allowed long-distance personal communication to become increasingly private, intimate, and accessible. We can now call our loved ones virtually anywhere in the world, so long as the location has cell reception. What’s more, we aren’t solely subject to the grainy transmission of our interlocutor’s voice any longer - we can speak to them face to face if we choose to video chat.
Still, alongside this development, personal devices have also afforded more indirect, asynchronous communication, specifically via instant messaging apps. In middle and high school, my instant messaging app of choice was Kik - older generations might feel more nostalgic over AOL Instant Messenger. Today, I talk to many of my friends via iMessage and Instagram and Twitter DM, more often than I call them. What instant messenger apps lack in intimacy, they make up for with helpful convenience and a feeling of constant connection. With people that I text often, there is rarely a lapse in our feeling of bonding, so long as we continue keeping contact at a regular cadence. Texting allows people to perform maintenance on their relationships - making bouts of brief contact between more large-scale and intimate rendezvouses in person.
Incidentally, it’s hard not to grow reliant on instant messaging apps - and social media apps - as they can offer feelings of closeness without the risks associated with more traditional and legitimate displays of up-close vulnerability. This is especially the case when you’re young and already likely fearful of vulnerability of many kinds. The greatest example of this is an app that dominated my teen years, and that’s still dominating the teenage years of many: Snapchat. Snapchat is a mobile app that allows users to send photos and messages to friends that only exist for a user-specified amount of time (approximately one to ten seconds). Or at least, this is how the app was initially created - you can now send photos and videos to a user to view for an indefinite amount of seconds before they click away. Users can also replay content a finite number of times. Snapchat was also the first app to introduce the “Story” feature, in which users can post a chronological string of photos and videos that dwell on their profile for 24 hours. In 2016, Instagram copied the Story feature to great effect.
Following its initial release in 2011, Snapchat dominated the screen time of young people worldwide. It was like a hybrid of Facebook, Instagram, and iMessage, and what sealed its status as a dominant communication platform was its ephemeral nature. Young people didn’t have to worry about sending risky messages (whether it was confessions of crushes, innocent selfies, or actual nude photos) because the messages were not permanent - they would vanish from the recipient’s device in several seconds. In this way, Snapchat allowed users to skirt around the hazards tied to having traditional intimate conversations - allowing a quick picture of your forehead or lunch to suffice as communication.
The most genius part of Snapchat, however, is its game-like features: the emojis that appear next to contacts’ names, the hierarchical best friends list, and the “snap score.” These features have transformed the app from a messaging platform to a means for young people to game social interaction. The emojis that appear next to contact names represent a specific code - a code that isn’t explicitly spelled out in the app itself. A user must piece together that a yellow heart means the contact and them are each other’s #1 “best friends,” the sunglass emoji means they have mutual “best friends,” the “100” emoji means they’ve snapped each other for 100 consecutive days, and so on. Or they can search for the meaning behind these codes on the internet, similar to how one looks up cheat codes for the final level of Super Mario Bros. Users can also purchase additional perks and status markers via Snapchat+, similar to how one can buy extra lives or tokens on a mobile app game. All of these game-like features help a user figure out how often they are communicating with another user, and how they stack up against the other users that person is snapping.
“Gamification” refers to “the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts.” In research contexts, the process is often discussed as a means to enhance learning in the classroom, motivating students by weaving features like leaderboards, badges, and rewards into a lesson plan. According to Games UX Expert Celia Hodent, successful gamification strategies involve understanding and adapting gamification elements to user needs, seamlessly integrating elements into a system without overwhelming it, and incorporating interactivity and social elements.
Games inherently fulfill the human desire for social connection - a desire that can be traced back thousands of years. Some historians believe that mancala is the oldest game in the world based on archeological evidence found in Jordan that dates back to around 6000 BCE. Others have dubbed The Royal Game of Ur the oldest playable board game, which originated 4,600 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. Games have long acted as vessels for community - reasons for people to gather in a central place and take a break from their stressful day-to-day tasks. Even modern video games played by participants in disparate locations offer a unique means of connection, tying people around the globe together in a “third place” of sorts.
Social media apps becoming gamified is an interesting development, as social interaction is already a game of sorts on its own - whether it’s played online or offline. When you’re courting a person to be a friend or romantic partner - flirting, more or less - you are often entering the interaction with some kind of strategy in mind. Your responses to the other person are often calculated - intentionally and unconsciously. You attempt to present yourself - through your word choice, vocal tone, and body positioning - in a matter that’s desirable, but not desperate. There is typically an objective in mind - whether it’s getting the other person to like you, or simply having a pleasing conversation - and that objective is achieved through thoughtful and causal actions.
Despite these tactics, socializing is separate from a game because it’s more firmly rooted in reality. In humanity. The interactions you have with another person have real human consequences, big and small. Hodent shares that gamification is psychologically appealing to people because of the escapism associated with it - games take you out of your reality, providing needed stress relief. Social interactions often act this way on their own - after an enjoyable day out with friends, I often feel a sense of coming back to reality when I return home in the evening, the nerves and anxiety from before the interaction creeping back in. Further gamifying a process that is already game-like strips another layer of reality from it, blurring the humanity attached to it.
According to Webex data, 70% of Gen Z and millennials prefer communicating over digital channels, and it shows. Similar to how my parents were mystified by my instant messaging friends online instead of hanging out with them in person, I feel bewildered watching my little sisters maintain friendships via Snapchat streaks. For a like on an Instagram story to signify romantic interest. I’ve witnessed young people build whole worlds around individuals they haven’t spoken more than two words to, and observed them try to game their way to social approval - climbing up their interlocutor’s “best friends” list and strategizing their story views and follows like they’re playing three-dimensional chess. Viewing the processes of friendship and dating as games make them feel less vulnerable, and thus, less consequential. And thankfully many apps, which are eager to keep users glued to them, offer this kind of validation via their game-like features, often without genuine social payoff.
Some apps are beginning to go against the grain though. Recently, the dating app Hinge announced a new feature called “Your Turn Limits,” which prevents users from matching with new people when they have eight or more unanswered messages in their queue. The feature is predicated on research that shows that “fewer chats at a time lead to more dates and less burnout” on dating apps. It’s a feature that is attempting to de-gamify dating online, or at least force users to rethink their game strategy. Rather than playing the numbers game and casting as wide a net as possible, the feature should hopefully encourage users to sharpen their focus on what’s right in front of them, cracking the hard shells protecting their soft centers, before moving on to the next.
The way we interact with one another will shift and bend around the affordances of the communication devices of our time. It’s not a good or bad reality necessarily - I see it as a more ambivalent one. I have hope that some digital platforms will leverage game features to enhance connection rather than offer quick dopamine that’s disconnected from personhood and that stales quite quickly. Alongside that, individuals can choose how much they weigh the bells and whistles and tokens on their devices. As accessible as they are, some games are best played more simply and more tangibly.
this piece verbalized thoughts I've had swirling around in my brain for a long time. formative teenage years spent on apps like Kik and Snapchat primed many of us for a world founded on digital connection. I'm finally reaching an age where I'm tired of living that way. I, too, crave a tangible existence, to not have relationships only validated by threads and threads of messages on apps, but rather to exist in real life with people. I constantly juggle the pros and cons of a digital existence, but perhaps the true game is in trying to strike a balance. amazing work!
This hit. I've been so into Strava and Letterboxd recently.