[HN Gopher] The gamification of reading is changing how we appro...
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The gamification of reading is changing how we approach books
Author : oidar
Score : 57 points
Date : 2023-08-04 16:02 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.shondaland.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.shondaland.com)
| jmount wrote:
| Even gamers hate gamification. External rewards often decrease
| activity, as the convert anything into a chore.
| sfc32 wrote:
| Just read paper books, without involving devices, apps or social
| networks.
|
| Analog books are a much-needed antidote to our hyper-accelerated
| digital world. They cheap (or free), portable and can be life-
| changing.
| TillE wrote:
| I buy paper books when I have to, but e-readers are fantastic.
| No reason to avoid them for the vast majority of novels which
| don't have weird formatting or tons of footnotes.
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| If you rent and/or move often, paper books can be a
| considerable issue due to weight and space.
|
| Though I love the smell and feel of them. Also, an e-reader
| backlight is such a great advancement for bedtime reading with
| a partner.
| [deleted]
| yakubin wrote:
| Not just when you rent/move. It's nice to be able to
| routinely read 1k+ pages long books, holding them in a single
| hand without straining your wrist, being able to comfortably
| do it on public transport, without a table etc.
| musha68k wrote:
| > I don't want to lose the experience of reading a book I'd never
| heard of but found on a stoop, or rereading a book even if it
| doesn't count toward an annual goal. I don't want every book I
| read to be a mappable point in the fated conception of me and
| what other things I might like (to buy).
|
| Somewhat OT but this is maybe my biggest gripe with digital game
| stores as well. It's anathema to what I look for when reading as
| well as playing. Alas on Nintendo Switch at least there are still
| physical games to be found and not everything is a damn metric by
| now.. ("82.2% of players have this achievement").
|
| > Prettier than Goodreads, it repeats the strange effects of
| reading for pleasure in an age of digital surveillance, while
| claiming that it isn't.
|
| The cat has been out of the bag for a while now. We have
| amplified the baked in (and notoriously unchecked) in/voluntary
| surveillance aspects of our modern information systems by
| continually trying to map them to well proven social concepts.
| The result being the sheer pervasiveness of this post privacy
| world, now also clearly affecting the people who were and are
| still claiming to not having "anything to hide".
|
| Amplified and scaled up functions of this ("surveillance /
| software at scale eating the world") partially at play now
| everywhere with much increased and lamented acts of the
| performative, loss of substance and depth, loss of connection,
| etc.
|
| I'm of course trying not to think of a pink elephant nor any
| potential upvotes at all right now...
|
| Maybe going increasingly / pragmatically "organic" is a good way
| forward (backward)? Ironically that's one of the very few things
| Elon Musk has helped me with so far as I have only really started
| to question / lose interest in "social media" in general since
| his strange quest for the destruction of Twitter.
|
| Hyperbolic edit: maybe that was Elon's plan all along (!?)
| jrm4 wrote:
| Yet another reason why I have a great deal of respect for the
| deeply practical approach of efforts like Library Genesis.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| LibGen and SciHub are absolutely utopian projects, and are more
| reminiscent of the "old internet" than anything offered by any
| major platform today: Practical, no frills, no pandering, no
| "gamification." It's nice that there are still places on the
| internet where you can be treated as an adult.
| didntcheck wrote:
| "People forcing themselves to excessively partake in an activity
| in order to impress strangers find they're having a miserable
| time". A very shocking discovery
|
| Meanwhile those of us doing things because we enjoy them haven't
| even heard of these "influencers" or their games. "We" is a lot
| smaller than those in a bubble think
|
| Though perhaps I'm being a bit disingenuous, since people who are
| more interested in being visibly "A Book Person" than actually
| _reading_ have been a phenomenon since way before the internet,
| and is obviously part of a much broader category of posturing
| that 's presumably existed as long as language has. As with most
| things, the internet has just amplified basic human flaws in a
| feedback loop
| pests wrote:
| I struggle with understanding other people on this topic.
|
| I read books I enjoy. I put down books I find dull or bad. I
| don't feel bad for not finishing a book. I don't track which
| books I've read or pages I've completed.
|
| I don't even consider myself a book person.
|
| Some people get consumed in the act around a hobby. Where
| collecting tools and supplies and materials is the actual focus
| opposed to the actual act. Painters with their paint and
| brushes, guitarists with pedals and amps, programmers with
| their environment and ide, book people collecting books they
| will never read.
|
| I understand it to an extent and its perfectly okay. I'm sure
| this preparation has helped in a lot of hobbies. I'm also sure
| other people get just as much fulfillment and accomplishment
| and results without all the prep.
|
| Just some musings.
| jrmg wrote:
| I find it hard to deliberately leave a book unfinished even
| if I'm not enjoying it.
|
| I think it's because there are definitely books I've slogged
| through the first half of, but ended up loving by the end.
| Perhaps this new book I'm not really enjoying is one of
| those?
| carabiner wrote:
| Same with strava, even Mountainproject ticks. We're being
| programmed to be achievement machines.
| caconym_ wrote:
| I largely stopped caring about anything on Goodreads as a signal
| when I learned how much harassment of authors it enables, in
| particular fake-review-bombing of books that haven't even been
| released yet. Amazon doesn't seem to care much, if at all.
| bcbrown wrote:
| I was curious how one gamifies the printed page, and it turns out
| this article isn't so much about books as it is social media.
| Turns out, if you interview people who are obsessive about social
| media, you end up interviewing some pretty strange people:
|
| > Internet culture reporter Kelsey Weekman was inspired by
| bloggers like Emma to "become a book person." She'd read a few
| dozen buzzy books between 2017 and 2021. But in 2022, she tore
| through 390. By mid-May, she'd already made it to 200. She
| achieves such numbers by reading some six hours daily -- before
| work, on her lunch break, as soon as she clocks out. "I'm a binge
| reader. Very obsessive, very intense. The same mindset that I
| used to have towards scrolling on the internet, I've replaced
| with books," Weekman says.
|
| > I don't want to lose the experience of reading a book I'd never
| heard of but found on a stoop, or rereading a book even if it
| doesn't count toward an annual goal. I don't want every book I
| read to be a mappable point in the fated conception of me and
| what other things I might like (to buy).
|
| > Perhaps I should try something: read a good, random book and
| tell no one.
|
| Writing an essay about how you are disenchanted with your habit
| of using social media for performative reading, and ending by
| declaring you're going to read a book non-performatively, well,
| seems seems a little superfluous to the stated goal. You can just
| skip writing the essay and just read a book.
|
| I don't doubt this person's experience, and perhaps this essay
| will give other people with similar feelings a useful nudge
| towards introspection towards the conflict between stated and
| unstated reasons for reading books, but reading this made me feel
| sympathethically icky.
|
| And if someone wants a non-gamified source of inspiration for
| books to read, I cannot recommend highly enough a subscription to
| a literary review, like the London Review of Books or the New
| York Review of Books.
| Arrath wrote:
| > I was curious how one gamifies the printed page, and it turns
| out this article isn't so much about books as it is social
| media.
|
| I've a little exposure to gamified reading: Last year my
| girlfriend got sucked in to some reading app (from an ad on fb
| or ig), the gist being that it serves up chapters of
| (apparently) never ending romance novels, specifically crafted
| to drag the reader in and end each chapter on cliffhangers of
| one form or another to entice them to get the next chapter and
| continue. Naturally, it functions on in-app currency and gives
| you a certain number of tokens up front before you have to
| start paying in. And yes, she shoveled a good amount of money
| into it to gobble down chapter after chapter.
| esafak wrote:
| A good reminder that reading is not good _per se_ ; you could
| be reading junk.
| bcbrown wrote:
| You can read for enjoyment and you can read for self-
| improvement; either is fine by me as long as you aren't
| deceiving yourself. Imbuing a recreational activity with
| moral heft can devalue both recreation and morality, and I
| think that's one component of the tension the author of the
| article is wrestling with.
| esafak wrote:
| You can learn to enjoy more challenging material. Self-
| improvement and enjoyment are not in opposition.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| I find it weird how we live in such a centralized world now. All
| the forums and blogs and fan sites I grew up with are gone,
| buried under seo spam, so we turn to a few mega-centralized
| sites/apps now to connect with other humans. Everything else
| seems to be content marketing, or soon-to-be ai spam (coming
| soon)
|
| What if you don't like Goodreads? I mean, almost every book on
| there has between a 3.5 and a 4.1 rating anyway, whether it's
| some fanfic or a 200 year old classic, the ratings don't really
| help you pick a book. Where else would you even go to get
| aggregated ratings and rankings, amazon? Not an actual
| alternative, they're the same company. Indigo/book seller sites?
| Most books have zero ratings. Blogs? Bloggers can only read so
| many books.
|
| I like discord and substack lately, it's where I'm discovering
| new things, eg, reading clubs. They won't stay good forever.
| Substack Notes is a bit of a bummer for me, and what does the
| future hold for discord? Which tech giant will acquire it and
| shape it into something else? How long until everything you type
| into discord gets sold to train ai for example?
|
| Pretty soon I'm going to have to, like, leave the house and
| arrange in-person events to connect with anybody without a weirdo
| tech company getting in the way. What would that world even look
| like?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > What if you don't like Goodreads?
|
| Do things the way people did before the Internet, perhaps?
|
| Happy user of Librarythings, BTW. I don't use it for
| recommendations, though
| zehaeva wrote:
| I know it's weird, but go to your local library. Walk the
| stacks of a subjects/section that appeals to you and then just
| pick books up and check them out a little, maybe even take one
| home!
|
| Slight snark aside, I think you have the the idea right, to go
| for the person, human, connection.
| burkaman wrote:
| If you want every book to have a rating, then the site needs to
| have a ton of users, and if there are a ton of users then most
| books will converge to 3.5-4.1 "most people like it but some
| people don't", as you've observed.
|
| Other than talking to people in real life, you can also look
| for curated lists. https://shepherd.com/ is a good site for
| this.
|
| I think lists like these are better than numeric ratings and
| stack rankings, which don't really make sense for books and
| other art. The only useful ratings are "don't recommend",
| "recommend", and "essential, you have to read this".
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, in looking at ratings I think you have to keep in mind
| that people don't randomly select books. People pick things
| that they think they will like, and they are generally pretty
| good at it.
|
| This is especially true for authors of series. The great bulk
| of people reading volume 7 are going to have read books 1-6,
| so the rating will tell you almost nothing about the
| objective quality of the book, and a lot about how it comes
| across to people who liked the first 6 enough to get through
| them.
| [deleted]
| MKais wrote:
| Personal anecdote: In order to find interesting books for my
| children, I tried everything online but to no avail. In the
| end, the solution that worked best was to get recommendations
| from the local bookstore owner. It goes without saying that she
| is an excellent bookseller. But all it took was telling her, my
| son likes such and such book series for her to say: in that
| case, I think he will like this series. As a result, he read
| three books in three weeks. Ten more to go.
| sacrosancty wrote:
| [dead]
| causality0 wrote:
| Who is "we"? People addicted to this lunatic method of social
| book consumption like the author? I don't use Goodreads. Nobody I
| know has ever mentioned Goodreads in conversation. I learn about
| new books and authors from the websites of authors and publishers
| I already like and word of mouth. I have zero interest in knowing
| what strangers are reading or in having them know what I'm
| reading. If I have an extraordinarily strong opinion about a book
| I _might_ post in a subreddit to see if anybody else thinks the
| same. I don 't have the slightest damn idea how many books I read
| last year and I'll keep it that way, thanks.
| throwaway106382 wrote:
| i hate "gamification" with a burning passion, the CEO of my
| company can't STFU "gamification" of our _healthcare staff
| scheduling software_ and it drives me up the gd wall
| evandale wrote:
| It seems like the entire point of online communities are to
| gameify whatever the community is about. I noticed it around 2008
| and its only been getting worse.
|
| Creating Internet points (likes, shares, retweets, karma, w/e the
| system) was a huge mistake for humanity. I'm starting to
| appreciate forums and chatrooms again where everything doesn't
| have to be a competition and people aren't trying to min/max
| everything they come across.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| I've been doing the "goodreads challenge" since 2018 -- really I
| just use goodreads to keep track of books I've read, so the site
| is an adjunct to an activity I'd probably do anyway. I read 20-30
| books a year and it's a sobering thought that the number of books
| I'll get to with the rest of my life is probably less than a
| thousand.
|
| The toxic gamification is probably where booktok or goodreads
| become the primary activity and book reading is what you do to
| achieve goals on those sites. I guess I never had to deal with
| that since I'm middle aged and these sites weren't around when I
| was a teenager.
| joemi wrote:
| I don't find it hard to ignore all the social and gamified
| aspects of Goodreads. I use it solely for keeping track of what
| I've read and want to read, and for finding similar books to ones
| I've liked. And nothing else.
|
| I'm older than the article's author, though. They mention they've
| been using Goodreads since their teens, whereas it didn't even
| exist until my mid-late twenties. I wonder if that has something
| to do with it? Perhaps if you start using it when younger, you
| get taken in by the social and gamified aspects?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's not about age. I'm in a good few reader and author groups
| on FB, and the median age is closer to 40 than 20.
|
| The most popular books are series of undemanding mass-market
| fiction, usually with some repeating branding in the titles
| and/or cover art that makes it clear they're related.
|
| People don't just read them, they collect them. And then post
| photos of their collections. And also post how well how they're
| doing on their hundreds-of-books-a-year reading challenge.
|
| It's a world I never knew existed, with a very unfamiliar
| culture.
|
| I think it's really more about conspicuous consumption than
| reading for pleasure or enjoyment.
|
| Gamification has made it compulsive.
| marcod wrote:
| Same. I was already reading for 20 years before I saw
| Goodreads.
|
| I love that I can compare my favorite books list with other
| people on GR. I like to see what books my friends on there are
| reading or use the site for info about what book to read next.
| It's really very easy to ignore the rest... the entire article
| reads more like a personal problem, though obviously GR has
| tons of issues.
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| I feel the same. Mainly use it for a platform to track what
| I've read. I do enjoy giving short reviews for books that call
| for them, but I don't make it a priority after completing a
| book. I'm a huge fan of the discovery (sci-fi/fantasy) for the
| next books for me to read, but there's been a number of times
| I've been interested in the summary only to be turned off by
| the reviews to the point where I'm reading review less and
| less. I feel like I've found joy in books others have not and
| to be influenced prematurely is a loss.
|
| Will say I like the yearly reading challenge, if only for
| myself. Says the average challenge is 61/year, which, even for
| myself as a fast reader, seems high. Believe I'm ~30 books. I
| initially put my goal at 22 books.
| adas4044 wrote:
| I used to do reading challenges based on books read, but I
| found a better alternative: pages. If you focus on pages
| read, you don't have sunken cost while reading a book and you
| can stop reading if the book stops being interesting. Pages
| read is less satisfying, but I've found it gives me a better
| reading experience.
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| That's a great point. I did get into the Murderbot Diary
| novellas this year and it's unfair (by page count) that
| they count as full books in the challenge.
|
| I will say, when I'm using my e-reader, I use a percentage
| as guidance for progress versus page count, so I almost no
| longer ever know how long my books are.
| lanstin wrote:
| Those are awesome book, but short. From the time I
| started the first page of the first to the time after I
| finished them all and pre-ordered the next was maybe 9
| days.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >I do enjoy giving short reviews for books that call for them
|
| When I was in school, we called these book reports, and I'm
| pretty sure a number closer to 0 actually enjoyed them the
| least of which was me.
| praxulus wrote:
| I've been aiming for 12 books a year for the last 5 years or
| so. Sometimes I'll go months without picking up a book, and
| the challenge is helpful for getting me back into it.
| 23B1 wrote:
| I think it's awesome we live in an age where people are, for the
| most part, able to free their minds from the banal realities of
| survival, and fret about reading too much or 'for the wrong
| reasons'.
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