Gamification is a great starting point — but a terrible long-term support system.
My blog began five and a half years ago with a narrow topic: how products use knowledge about our neurotransmitters. One of the clearest examples is gamification — it’s everywhere: banking apps, food delivery, lifestyle products, health trackers, education platforms.
Let’s recap the basics. We love game-like elements such as progress bars and badges because achieving them triggers dopamine. The brain doesn’t distinguish between completing a progress bar and approaching a real palm tree with actual coconuts; it doesn’t distinguish a bright pixel reward on the screen from an actual delicious fruit — and so it rewards you along the way. People love the feeling of completion, and good gamification always launches several loops that can never be completed simultaneously.
I genuinely believe that gamification in Duolingo or Apple Health is far more harmful than in Tinkoff (Russian bank) or Wolt. In the second case, the relationship is pretty straightforward: okay, if I spend 3000 rubles on “South American snakes,” I’ll get an increased cashback; if I order Subway twice more, I’ll get a 600-forint discount. You understand that free cheese only exists in mousetraps, and you can rationally evaluate whether the spending makes sense to you — and whether it’s worth doing just to get another bonus.
But when it comes to health, learning, or lifestyle, gamification demands your time, not your money. And humans are terrible at measuring time. Try to roughly estimate how many free ten-minute intervals you’ll have left this month. Hard, right? Yet you’ll still give 31 of those ten-minute slots to a green owl if it has successfully embedded itself into your motivational system.
“Come on, Misha, I’m learning German — that’s not the same as ordering pastries! It will definitely help me when I move to Berlin!”
Then why do you need the owl to remind you?
What exactly are you worried about when you close your three Apple Watch rings: your health, or the rings themselves?
Gamification in these products replaces your true motivation. It’s useful when you’re building a habit: your brain doesn’t yet understand the real value of the activity, and you can use the small tricks the designers have generously given you. It’s like riding a bike with training wheels — they keep you from falling. But if you’re still using those wheels months or years later, they only slow you down and prevent you from learning how to ride for real.
Today I want to give you a small exercise: pick one app that’s embedded in your daily routine — the one you feel you need to “satisfy.” Ask yourself: why did you start doing the thing that keeps this crutch alive in the first place? Do you have true motivation to do it? If tomorrow the gamification suddenly failed (you forgot your watch, the owl bugged out, or you tracked your habit on paper instead of in the app), what would you feel the next day? Would you maybe feel relief? And if you took one day off — breaking your streak — would you come back to it tomorrow?
If you don’t have true motivation — break the streak and let it go. It will free you from a debt that constantly hangs over you.
If you do have true motivation — break the streak anyway, you’ll still return tomorrow. But this time you’ll return as a free person: because you need to speak German to the butcher, because you don’t want to feel winded climbing four floors, or because you enjoy looking in the mirror at your abs.