Several years ago, after sustaining a serious head injury, the video game designer Jane McGonigal nursed herself back to health using the psychology of games. She devised a game, she explained in a TED talk, wherein her “secret identity” was “Jane the Concussion Slayer”; with her sister and husband as allies, she “battled the bad guys” and “activated power-ups” to nurse herself back to health. Next week marks the publication of her new book, SuperBetter, and with it, no doubt, a fresh boost for “gamification”, for which McGonigal has become an evangelist – the idea that life in general might go a lot better if we structured more of it like a game.

The premise of gamification (McGonigal rejects the term, preferring the phrase “living gamefully”) makes a certain intuitive sense: millions of players find video games compelling, perhaps even to the point of addiction, and they’re highly motivated to complete the sequential challenges around which most games are built. What if we designed our work projects, our time at the gym or even our romantic lives so that they exploit the same psychological principles, featuring mini-challenges, systems for winning points, completing quests and moving upwards through levels, culminating in an “epic win”?

Gamification is already deeply embedded in consumer technology – think Facebook likes, Tinder matches or Fitbit badges – and it reliably divides people into those energized by it and those utterly appalled. Nathan Heller falls into the latter camp. In the latest edition of the New Yorker, he articulates the opposite perspective – that there’s something both infantilizing and troublingly reality-denying about turning life into a game:



What we’re doing, when we imagine real tasks as quests, is tuning out. Rather than moving through the world, attentive to its logic and form, we’re following a story created by someone else.

If nothing else, this debate epitomizes the strange place at which we’ve arrived, as a culture, when it comes to the topic known on the self-help shelves as “personal productivity”. Traditionally, that phrase referred only to explicitly work-related tasks. But gamification is part of a broader trend toward seeing the whole of life as consisting, fundamentally, of a whole lot of tasks that need to get done – so that the key to living well lies in finding the best techniques for doing so. This is a view so widely held (I’m certainly no exception, most of the time) that one risks sounding like a stoner by pointing out that there’s a hypothetical alternative to all this relentless productivity, at least when it comes to those parts of life not directly devoted to earning a living. What about, you know, just… being?

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being productive, and making some kind of appreciable difference to the world is probably essential for a meaningful life. The constant hazard with the contemporary cult of productivity, though, is that productivity itself quickly starts to feel inherently virtuous – as if merely getting things done were a good thing, regardless of what those things are. An exhausting weekend spent crossing tasks off your household to-do list is nothing to be proud of, if they’re not the right tasks. People often misremember the title of the late Stephen Covey’s famous self-help book as The Seven Habits of Highly Efficient People, but for all its faults, he chose the right title: the word is “effective”, not “efficient”. Efficiency in the service of a stupid goal is worthless.

Worse, we chronically confuse the effort we invest in completing a task with the usefulness of its being completed – so an exhausting day spent on busywork feels more virtuous than a couple of really effective hours followed by an afternoon slacking off.

Gamification risks making all this worse precisely because it works so well: when you’re psychologically enmeshed in scoring points by acing challenges, it’s even easier to forget to keep asking whether they’re the right challenges. (Have you ever fallen into one of those slightly hysterical work-trances, where you’re sprinting to cross as many items off your list as possible, regardless of whether they’re worth it? Congratulations: you’ve gamified your life.)

Writes Heller, in response to several tricks McGonigal suggests for improving your bonds with your social circle:

This is the crest point of a culture that holds “productivity” to be a value in itself. It doesn’t really matter what you are producing, as long as you’re doing it constantly; it’s fine to sit in rocking chairs with a friend or buy your wife flowers, provided that you’re getting something measurable from the transaction… [SuperBetter] channels human strength so beautifully that most things human in it gradually fall away.

You could go even further in this critique of productivity and suggest – as does the theologian Jonathan Malesic, writing in the New Republic this week – that procrastination is actually a virtue. Now that work has colonized more and more of life, this argument goes, refusing to work isn’t really a failing. Instead, it’s a sane resistance to work’s insane domination:

What if the disutility of work – its boredom, constraint, and physical discomfort – weighs heavier in the balance than productivity? If you know you’re going to be paid the same whether or not you work diligently, then you may as well minimize the time you spend on tedium.

There are limits to this way of thinking, to be sure: if your job doesn’t allow you to get up and leave when you like, then the alternative to sitting at your desk being productive is sitting at your desk distractedly clicking on soul-corroding Facebook posts, and I’m not sure that’s really much of an improvement over soul-corroding work. Still, Malesic’s argument is another useful reminder of the question to ask next time, and every time, someone tries to convince you to adopt some scheme to improve your personal productivity: productivity in the service of what, exactly?