The gamification of exercise has gone too far
I love it and I hate it; it's the junky's paradox
I’m the fittest I’ve ever been — and a lot of that is down to my Apple Watch.
One reason is, every day, it encourages me to close a selection of rings, which represent movement, standing hours, and exercise.
Effectively, it’s made exercising a game. I’m in constant competition against myself. And this is great — but also kinda fucking awful at the same time.
This approach is a type of gamification, a word that’s been around long enough that I no longer cringe when I see it.
Basically, the term is the use of game mechanics to get people to do stuff they may not want to.
And it’s incredibly effective.
Video games perfected the art of making menial tasks fun (I’m looking at you, World of Warcraft) and this made UX experts, product designers, and the like, pay serious attention.
These days, forms of gamification have crept into almost every aspect of our online lives. Just think of how CAPTCHA checks ensure we’re human by making us select specific images. There are thousands of different ways this test could be achieved, but this one has found success because it’s like a neat little game.
And the exercise industry has taken note.
I can’t describe how helpful gamification was for me when I starting working out seriously. Whether it was logging calories, managing my heart rate, or just tracking my performance over time, these things became so much more achievable when there was this addictive, game-like element attached.
All good things must come to an end, though, and my hot streak was doused when I got injured. Again and again.
Picking up niggles are a natural part of hard exercise, but when I stepped away from my obsessive quest to constantly up my numbers I had the space to do some research, and it became abundantly how damaging unbridled gamification can be.
Let’s return to the Apple Watch as an example.
One way it keeps you motivated is through something called ‘Activity Badges’. These are just what they sound like: cute little virtual buttons you’re awarded after completing various exercise-based tasks.
Unsurprisingly, there are a gamut of badges — and, at first glance, they’re generally benign. For example, one award is called the 7-Workout Week.
On the surface, great! It motivates you to work out! A lot! Wonderful!
But, on the other hand, it also subtly encourages you to not have a rest day — a vital aspect of being healthy and getting stronger. Instead, the emphasis is on working out every day, and pushing yourself as much as possible. That’s fine if you’re going for a gentle stroll, less so if you’re flinging around hunks of metal.
The further you delve into the science of exercise, the more you realise quite how damaging the one-upmanship of gamification is.
Take running. Many apps and tools will deliver you an average pace, analysing whether your speed is rising or falling over a period of time. What this does is force you into a constant fight with yourself to run faster and harder.
And — WOULD YOU BELIEVE? — you’re not meant to run like this. A fact I can attest to by repeatedly pointing at my injured knee and going, “You see? You see?”
Instead, many professionals follow the the 80/20 rule, a system where 80% of runs are at any easy pace, with more intense sessions taking place the remaining 20%.
In other words, your wearable effectively yelling at you to “HURRY THE FUCK UP” isn’t really helping anyone.
I’d love to have a supremely elegant moonshot to solve the issue of rampant gamification in fitness, instead my Hot Take is that… the software should be better?
Radical, I know.
Smart devices shouldn’t serve you binaries when it comes to exercise. They should take into account changes in your resting heart rate, the vigorousness of movement during workouts, sleep patterns, and an array of other data to get a clearer picture of where you’re at physically. This should then inform your targets for the day.
And yes, this is tricky data to capture and use effectively, so why not get the user involved too?
Ask them some questions about how fatigued they are, if they have any injuries, whether there was a body part that felt weak during the work out, and so on. Combining all this could give a far clearer picture of someone’s overall health than a arbitrary number we’re all blindly racing after.
Ultimately, the gamification of fitness is all good — until it’s not.
The technique is a terrific motivator, but its addictiveness needs to be tempered to recognise there’s more to exercise that closing rings. The tech world loves inventing the bus, but, often, it just needs to work on making existing things better, rather than ripping everything up.