Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto directly references it! And of course you have Facebook's old "move fast and break things" motto.
Where this overlaps with gamification is in its embrace of individual sovereign will and the compression of time (CF Virilio).
David Waddington's forthcoming book The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games is all about this overlap. I've read a proof, it's a great examination of these issues!
https://www.mqup.ca/Books/T/The-Hidden-Curriculum-of-Video-Games
As much as I like gamification analogies, I think this piece is stretching things a bit far.
IMO Silicon Valley's obsession with agency and "agentic vs mimetic" behaviour is better explained as a direct callback to early 20th century Italian Futurists who glorified war, speed, energy, and youth.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/17/elon-musk-gamify-government
"Today, to get bodies into stores, the shopping experience must be theatrical, Instagrammable, gamified."
But it was ever thus...
RE: https://peoplemaking.games/@kathrynyu/116222229936168149
*sighs, updates book manuscript*
It's beyond frustrating to see this claim peddled in the New Yorker, albeit in a podcast interview. It would never have gotten past their fact-checkers in a proper piece.
God knows Silicon Valley has created a lot of manipulative, addictive shit, but this sloppy scholarship helps no-one.
The only way the comparison makes sense is if you call all variable reinforcement ratio mechanics like slot machines.
But you cannot say any instance of VRR in the world – like opening your mail client to see if there are any new messages – is "literally" copied from slot machines.
They are *like* slot machines, in a way, but the intention to copy was not there, certainly not for the iPhone Mail app.
Jonathan Haidt just claimed that the pull-to-refresh behaviour in Mail on the iPhone was "literally" copied from slot machines. As someone who has written a book critiquing gamification, this seems totally off.
Pull-to-refresh debuted in 2009 with Tweetie, a 3rd party Twitter client, and subsequently patented. I can't find anything suggesting it was based on or inspired by slot machines.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/can-we-save-kids-from-social-media
The epic Battlestar Galactica-inspired larp Odysseus has launched its crowdfunding campaign, attracting €100,000 in the space of five minutes!
It really is one of the most sophisticated and spectacular larps out there, so if you're at all interested in what Nordic larp is like, check it out (I know I’m going!)
https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/ellarion-tales/odysseus-first-light
We've just released full details of all TEN games playable at Jubensha Con 2026 this May!
This is likely the widest range of English-language jubensha available at any event, ever, and most of them are wholly or partly-GMed so players get the full jubensha experience. Extremely hyped!
We're still assembling details for our talks, but we will have experts from China, Singapore, US, and UK, including people who've been designing games and running venues for years.
