Gamified Personal Finance

What is gamification? You could describe it as the extension of principles of game design, with or without the language of games themselves, into new territories. Gamification in this sense tries to transform tedious tasks into fun ones, or at least into less intimidating tasks.

Jane McGonigal, in her polemic Reality is Broken, outlines a kind of phenomenology of gameplay, complete with gameplay-specific emotions (Fiero, Epic Win, etc.). For McGonigal, gamification is about introducing these feelings into socially necessary or useful practices. And perhaps you could think of gamification as finding ways to introduce all kinds of positive feelings – not just those associated with gameplay – into socially necessary or useful practices. In this approach, gamification is about turning the means to an end into ends in and of themselves.

A slightly different way of understanding gamification, however, is simply as a specific set of conventions for communicating an incentive structure. The incentive structure may be backed up by storytelling and rhetoric, by quantifiable status within a community, by money or some other kind of claims on goods and services, or perhaps by nothing at all. The conventions – effectively an ensemble of data visualisation/conceptualisation techniques, such as a character class system, an array of interrelated stats, the chance to level up, the accumulation and completion of quests and side quests, bosses to defeat, achievements to unlock, and a leaderboard to scale – originate with computer games, but don’t have any necessary link with them.

Here’s an illustration of how gamification, understood in this second sense, might be used to create a new kind of current account product. Most banks are inherently unstable insofar as they loan long and borrow short. They face a maturity mismatch problem. Most deposits tend to be short term. Most loans tend to be long term – mortgages, for instance. The bank can’t turn up at somebody's house, type in its PIN, and withdraw the £100,000 equity it owns in that person's house.

Did you know you can now bank online?

In a gamified current account, a depositor would be asked on a regular basis to log in and set withdrawal requirements for the next time period. For the depositor, the aim of the game is to choose withdrawal requirements which are as low as possible, and then stick to them. There will be financial rewards for doing this successfully, and financial penalties for doing it poorly.

To take a very simple example, say a current account holder has $100 on deposit. The account holder decides that they will never require more than $40 net throughout the next quarter. They set the slider to $50 (giving themselves a $10 buffer) and click “commit.” So for the next three months, $50 is on loan to the bank at a very low rate of interest as a sight deposit – the account holder can withdraw it whenever they want – and the other $50 is a kind of short-term bond, earning a higher rate of interest. If the account holder withdraws more than $50 over the next quarter, they are effectively selling part of their bond before it reaches maturity – i.e. at a lower value.

When the account holder does not actively set the slider, the account eventually reverts to an ordinary current account, until whenever the account holder next chooses to play. There could be one or two other mechanisms: unlocking achievements to give the account holder one-off liquidity boosts, etc.

As a side note, there could even perhaps be a social / community aspect to this system. For instance, account holders could ratchet up a score when they transfer their excess liquidity to account holders who need it (who have underestimated their liquidity needs for the period). I am intrigued by the possibility that different ways of communicatively integrating a group of borrowers and lenders, and different ways of allowing them to visualise and conceptualise their individual and collective interests, might achieve different levels of robustness, and different levels of resistance to panic.

The current account, in other words, would be transformed into a flexible, intuitive portfolio of different kinds of debt, whose mechanisms would be mostly traceable to the bank’s need to make maturity matches.

Clearly there are a large number of issues – to do with game design, implementation, legal underpinnings, nudge economics, and wider social impact and ethics – and were such an idea to be developed by commercial retail bank I would treat it with outright terror. In principle, however, it seems like a promising way of mitigating the sharp maturity discrepancy at the heart of the fractional reserve banking system.

And as a final note, one possible area of application would be in the construction of an alternative community currency – both in terms of attracting users by the novelty of the system, and perhaps also in making a lower reserve ratio possible, allowing a relatively larger money supply to exist on the basis of a given injection of conventional currency.

Earlier: science fiction of gamification. See especially Tim Maughan’s entries on that list for a bit of perspective on shiny new ideas for gamification.

Elsewhere: SMBC on gamification.

Keep Calm & Put It On

These cool T-shirts are cool. 

A little background, for those who don't just care about looking cool, but also about the background to their looking cool.

This season's must-have scandalcore permutationwear recalls the phrase "Keep Calm & Carry On," which originated with some WWII propaganda posters, posters which, from the sounds of it, somebody really meant to get round to putting up. The phrase returned during the naughties as a mildly disappointing piece of post-Cool Britannia retro-smug knick-knack in framed prints, on the sides of mugs, etc., and eventually mutated into a phrasal template-type meme.

It's been all over the news the last few days because someone spotted on Amazon that a T-shirt company called Solid Gold Bomb listed items emblazoned with some totally mindbogglingly violent misogynist permutations. The company pretty quickly issued a forlorn and shambolic apology, explaining (as Pete Ashton and others had already guessed) that the listings were the result of an automatic script which generated thousands of possible designs.

It looks like the script drew on a long list of verbs and permutated them with a short list of words with a decent chance of grammatical agreement - intensifiers, prepositions, and pronouns. Including the verb "rape" and the pronoun "her."

Behind the product was a script; behind the script a company; behind the company a human. But the trail needn't have been so simple. What if behind the algorithm, there was an algorithm-writing algorithm, something which didn't require supervision, which might go on long after its maker was dead? What if our tangible world of commodities were to start to behave a little bit more like online viral ecologies, like worms, spam and malware?

§

Compare Bruce Sterling's "Kiosk," text or podcast.

Algorithmic print-on-demand books with deceptive listings have been around a while (NYT). See also Lara Buckerton on recombinant literature (and copyright and other things).

Do such books not exist till you order them? Or do they exist, but with a print run of zero?

Compare also the clothes of Engrish.com. Many of these are probably machine translations of typical shirt discourse, but the more interesting ones seem to be bits of text selected at random, or for purely visual aesthetic qualities.

A sort of inverse is Hanzi Smatter, who takes understandable pleasure telling people what their Chinese character tattoos actually mean. (A lot of folks seem to get inked with "free" in the sense of "gratis.")

§

Has Solid Gold Bomb broken the law?

In the UK, quite possibly. Negligence isn't enough for Part 4A of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994; there has to be an intention to cause distress or harm. I wonder if listing an item on Amazon counts as "sending a message"? The extraordinarily spongy, zanily designed and haphazardly applied offences of the Malicious Communications Act 1998 and the Communications Act 2003 could potentially suck up Solid Gold Bomb's mistake. Should it be a crime? I'm not sure. I have a kneejerk reaction against any criminalisation! One thing is clear: the laws which cover these matters have their origin in things like sending poison pen letters or waving placards in the street, and are still oriented to such activities - activities with deep structural differences to the kinds of things that happen online.

More generally. The things we buy and sell tell us, indirectly, about what is and isn't okay to do. The law in modern complex societies is vast, complex and opaque, known by most people mostly through inferences, heuristics and non-propositional savoir faire. Lots of little hints overlap to reinforce a norm. There are all kinds of institutions and practices which nudge us down lawful paths (and in fact, often without teaching us why they're nudging us). Markets are an important part of this. Markets don't just transmit information about demand and supply: they disseminate all kinds of information about all kinds of things.

How would pervasive 3D-print-on-demand production chains, fronted by script-generated vendors, alter the ways in which such signals are disseminated?

§

I like Calum Rodger's suggestion - in the context of computer-generated poetry - that The Function of Criticism at the Present Time is perhaps to investigate the algorithmic objects that give rise to texts encountered by readers, rather than the texts, readers or encounters. (This was in a paper for the Forms of Innovation conference in Durham last year. He may well touch on the topic again in two weeks in Edinburgh).

Pete Ashton usefully adopts the rubric of digital literacy. "Nobody made, or approved, the design," he points out, and, "there’s no cost involved. The shirts don’t exist. All that exists is a graphics file on a computer ready to be printed onto a shirt if an order comes through." I guess his implication is: the appropriate response isn't to go ballistic on Twitter versus strawfolk, it's to Keep Calm And Email Amazon And Solid Gold Bomb That There's A Glitch With The Algorithm. Don't waste your energy and don't try to score political points off it. Those are points which are prone to vaporise, taking some of your more valid manna with them. Compare some of the folks on this thread, who just don't believe there could be any such accidentally sexist algorithm. Ashton also shouts out Rushkoff's Program or be Programmed.

But I'm not entirely convinced. It feels to me like it lets Solid Gold Bomb get off too lightly. There is culpability here. I have to say I didn't notice any "him" statements, but a lot of "her" statements. Did Solid Gold Bomb perhaps intend to unleash some jocular, low-key, "Battle of the Sexes," market-acceptable sexism? And did Solid Gold Bomb carefully excise cuss-words from the source list, but not think of words like "smack" and "rape"? Does Solid Gold Bomb now appreciate that stochastic language, far from being free, is the most easily colonised by existing power structures and the brutal means by which they are enforced? Or to put that another way, is Solid Gold Bomb now aware of just how much nasty is stuff is out there, waiting to be said? Would a feminist have made Solid Gold Bomb's mistake? Is Solid Gold Bomb a feminist?

Anyway, my hunch is that we unlettered digi-bungaloids are slow to change, and instead the new production chains will to adapt to digital illiteracy. New Quality Assurance processes are going to be developed which are oriented to precisely this kind of permutated commodity. Or perhaps operations like Solid Gold Bomb will have some detectable signature and get all their listings slapped with warning signs. "This Item May Not Exist (Unless You Want It To). Click Here If This Listing Is Inappropriate."

UPDATE: It looks like Amazon have now yanked all Solid Gold Bomb products, is that right? Though they're still paying for their GoogleAd click-throughs.

§

Individual and institutional agency may be mixed into what appears on your screen in pretty complicated and counter-intuitive ways. Traditional ways of reading traces of responsibility may be becoming unreliable.

Except, of course, that they were never reliable in the first place! Nor can you sanely suppose that (see above) the things we are taught by what we buy and sell are things we ought to be learning.

As seems to be the case pretty often with net culture, the theory we devise for it turns out to be applicable to things that pre-dated it. Buried deep in the obscure recesses of the eleventh volume of Marx's Kapital. "A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. [...] it was the analysis of the prices of commodities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as values. It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers." Compare the excellent discussion in Keston Sutherland's "Marx in Jargon" (PDF) of how human labour is gathered in commodities. "Marx’s German readers will not only have bought Gallerte, they will have eaten it; and in using the name of this particular commodity to describe not 'homogeneous' but, on the contrary, 'unterschiedslose,' that is, 'undifferentiated' human labor, Marx’s intention is not simply to educate his readers but also to disgust them."

Maybe one good translation would be Spam.