What Happens When We Gamify Reading

Value Capture and Reading Challenges

To gamify something is to turn an activity into a game-like system usually involving points and some way to win. Gamification has become popular as a way to encourage “healthier” habits. One of the main ways reading gets gamified is through reading challenges. All of these challenges involve tracking your reading in some way and they often include points, prizes, or badges. There are formal and informal reading challenges on every book-related social media space, website, or app. These include Goodreads, BookTok, Reddit, Storygraph, and Kindle. The most popular of these book challenges is the simple read X number of books per year.

Streaks are a common gamification tactic.

Many people, including myself, enjoy reading challenges. It can be a fun thing to do solo or with friends. These gamified systems can help get people reading more in an era where fewer people read books for fun and even the biggest bookworms read less. The problem is that gamifying reading doesn’t always work; even when it does work, it can change the way people read and often for the worse. These are concerns for all ages but even more so for children who encounter gamified reading in schools. It can lead to people reading in weird ways that are good for the game but not for understanding or even for pleasure. After years of innocently participating in reading challenges, I recently realized how much I had changed the way I read in order to better fit these competitive systems. Learning about gamification finally helped me understand what had happened.

My History with Reading Challenges

My first brush with reading challenges was in middle school. You would read a book, complete a short quiz and then earn points based on the difficulty level of the book. I was an avid reader but did not find out about the challenge until late in the year. I half-heartedly participated but stopped because the quizzes were annoying and I began too late to have any shot at the coveted pizza party prize. It was disappointing but I did feel a twinge of relief after seeing other kids stress reading in order to get into the party.

My reading challenge days didn’t truly begin until I joined Goodreads. Their annual reading challenge asks you to publicly commit to reading X number of books a year. Each year, if you complete the goal, Goodreads suggests making a goal that’s even higher.¹ I did this and kept increasing my goal year after year, but soon ran into a problem. My book goal was higher but the constraints of adult life meant I had less time to read. This led to a scramble at the end of each year to read as many short books as I could to meet the goal. About two years ago, my partner became exasperated at how stressed I was about something that did not matter. She was right so I quit doing any type of challenge the following year. What surprised me the most was how much these reading challenges had changed what I read. I had gotten into the habit of avoiding books that were too long or dense. It wasn’t that I always avoided these books, but if given the option between a short, quick read or a long, dense one then I’d always choose the former.

The whole thing was ridiculous but it’s far from the only time I’ve found myself acting in dumb ways to win games that don’t matter. From the lengths I’ve gone to meet step goals or the time I completed NaNoWriMo² even though it became clear it wasn’t working with my writing style, I often find myself doing challenges where the goal of the challenge supplants the reason I signed up in the first place. When I can take a step back, it’s clear that what I’m doing is silly, but, in the moment, it all made sense. What helped me understand this pattern was learning about game philosophy.

Value Capture

Last year, I read Thi Nguyen’s book Games: Agency as Art. His book is about why people play games, what makes games a type of art, and when games can be a problem. Unlike most academic literature on games, Nguyen is not too concerned about violence in videogames. While he does spend some time talking about gaming addiction, that’s also not his chief concern because his worries are less about actual games and more about how people are increasingly applying game-like values to the real world. People like games because they give you a simple system where you know what to do and then do it. As he states in the book:

“One of the greatest pleasures games offer is a certain existential balm—a momentary shelter from the existential complexities of ordinary life. In a game, for once in my life, I know exactly what it is that I’m supposed to be doing.”³

In real life, the goals are not clear. Even when you do have a goal, there is not a set path to achieve it nor a guarantee that any path you take will be a success. Life is complicated. The problem is not playing a game when you need a mental break. The problem is thinking that you can live life as if it’s a game. That is happening more and more frequently because of gamification. In some cases, gamification is explicit such as with the school based reading challenge at my middle school with its points and prizes. Other times, it happens unintentionally due to quantification (turning something into a number). In our data-driven world, anything worth doing needs to be measurable and comparable so if there’s a way to turn something into a number then people will do it, but when your goal is to increase a number then it works the same as a point-based game. That’s why just tracking the number of books you read can change how you read and this happens through the process of value capture where the goals of the game take over your goals for playing. As Nguyen describes, value capture is when:

1. Our values are, at first, rich and subtle.

2. We encounter simplified (often quantified) versions of those values.

3. Those simplified versions take the place of our richer values in our reasoning and motivation.

4. Our lives get worse.⁴

I will apply these to my own experience with reading challenges.

1. Our values are, at first, rich and subtle.

It is impossible to describe all the reasons that I read books or why I’d want to read more in place of doing other activities. When it comes to fiction, I like that books allow for a type of storytelling that cannot be replicated by other mediums like film. There’s a reason people tend to prefer the book to just about any tv or movie adaptation. Books are longer, they let you imagine what’s happening, and let you control the pace of the story to some extent. You can read slower during a difficult passage or you can reread a surprising twist. I like reading non-fiction books for similar reasons. Unlike short-form media, like this post, books allow for longer arguments built up over chapters. Plus writing is an old medium so you can read things from hundreds or even thousands of years ago, which is just cool.

The reason I’ve felt the need to gamify reading books is because it’s harder to do than watching tv, scrolling on social media, or playing games. I enjoy doing all of those things, but there’s an incentive on video platforms, streaming services, social media, and cable TV to keep us on them as long as possible. They are part of the attention economy in a way that books aren’t.⁵ I like spending time reading books because it’s time that less influenced by manipulative algorithms and advertising. In short, I value reading because it provides certain qualities that other activities can’t do or don’t do as well. I participated in reading challenges as a way to fulfill these values, but…

2. We encounter simplified (often quantified) versions of those values.

The Goodreads Reading Challenge

The values of a reading challenge are simple. It is to “read more.” There are reading challenges that are more complicated than this but none of them can ever approach the complexity of the millions of reasons people read. If all the reading challenges did was get people to read more then it could help people meet those values but…

3. Those simplified versions take the place of our richer values in our reasoning and motivation.

I’m sure there are some people for whom engaging in a reading challenge or other form of quantitifed reading has no bearing on how they read. But, many people find themselves having an experience like mine. I read for many reasons but soon my focus is taken over by a desire to read more in order to make the numbers go up. You know this has happened when you’ve started reading quicker and changing the types of books you read.

4. Our lives get worse.

Nguyen argues that any system that replaces complex values with simple ones will make life worse and I’m inclined to agree. With reading challenges, I found that reading became less pleasurable and more stressful, especially at the end of the year. Reading started to feel more like an unpaid job than an enriching hobby, and I did avoid reading some great books that would’ve made it too difficult to meet my goal.

So What’s the Solution?

Despite everything, I decided to sign up for another reading challenge. Even if these systems change the way I read, it still feels worth it to incentivize reading. The attention economy means that we’re surrounded by systems designed to suck up our focus to make profit for others. Part of the reason gamification has become so popular is to help people do the things they want to do rather than only do the things corporations want them to do. Now many of these gamified systems still incentivize corporate profits. Goodreads/Amazon makes more money by getting people to read short books rather than long books since book length has little effect on book price. It can all feel a bit dystopian, but I think there’s ways to lessen the effects of value capture while taking advantage of the benefits of gamification.

What’s working for me is to be intentional about what types of challenges I do and to be reflective about whether value capture is occurring. Instead of doing an annual books goal, I chose an annual page goal. With pages, there is no longer an incentive to read shorter books. There are ways to trick the system still, such as by reading large print, but I made the goal low enough that it won’t incentivize such ridiculous behavior. I also switched from Goodreads to Storygraph. The latter allows for a page goal rather than a number of books goal, isn’t as focused on the social media aspect, and isn’t owned by Amazon. Plus I’m not adding friends on Storygraph. It’s easier to get trapped in a gamified system when your participation is also a performance for others.⁶

It’s not perfect though and I have noticed ways I behave irrationally in order to fit into a quantified system. An example is that I struggle with how to “count” books that I only read certain sections of. Storygraph doesn’t allow you to specify that you read pages out of order. It also only allows you to say that you “finished” or “did not finish” a book. It doesn’t work for books that aren’t meant to be read front to back (such as reference books or collections of short stories). I even felt bad about saying I “read” Games: Agency as Art because the truth is I read most of it, lost my copy of the book, and only recently bought it again. But all this is silly. Whether a book counts as being read only matters if you are keeping score in a gamified system, but my true values allow me to only read parts of a book. Being reflective about value capture is what allowed me to notice this behavior and remember that these systems aren’t perfect.

So one solution to encountering gamification is to participate in the game intentionally, after recognizing what your values are. Stop or change the game if you are changing your behavior in ways that don’t align with your true values. That’s the best we can do as individuals trying to navigate gamified systems. People who design these systems need to put even more effort into recognizing what these systems are incentivizing. This is especially true for gamified learning in schools. I’m glad that I didn’t know about my middle school reading challenge until it was too late. I know of a least one person who quit reading for fun after participating in one of those school-based challenges because it made reading a chore. Gamification can be a useful tool in encouraging people to read more, but we have to be careful that it doesn’t bastardize why and how we read.

1. They used to do this. I am unsure if this is still the case.

2. National Novel Writing Month which is the challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. I spent a month writing something that was so rushed and barely thought-out that I’ve never touched it again.

3. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, page 66.

4. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, page 201.

5. I’m not saying people can’t read books in excessive and unhealthy ways. The point I’m making here is that in the attention economy consumers are the product. The goal is to keep you consuming long enough that you will buy things thanks to ads (whether personalized or not). The book industry still generally works by an older model where they make money off the product, not ads.

6. I’ve been thinking about this ever since seeing all the coverage about Luigi Mangione’s Goodreads account. So much discourse went into what the books he read and reviews he gave says about who he is.