How Twitter gamifies communication

Today’s link is a philosophy paper. Don’t let that scare you though, it doesn’t really fit into the stereotypical notion of philosophy. This is a paper about philosophy of games (what makes something a game and how do we interact with them?) as applied to communication. It is incredibly accessible to read and easy to understand. The paper by C. Thi Nguyen is called How Twitter Gamifies Communication, and is about, well, how Twitter, and really any other social media with a point system, gamifies communication “by offering immediate, vivid, and quantified evaluations of one’s conversational success”.(sidenote: If you prefer podcasts as a medium, you can check this episode of the Ezra Klein podcast.¹ ) As a side note, notice that this isn’t directly about recommendation algorithms, but of point systems like likes, retweets, followers, or views.

What does it mean to gamify an activity? One way to think about it is as a simple motivational boost, we get an additional reward for completing the tasks we know we want to do. This is done by converting whatever motivation we have for doing something (e.g. wanting to learn a new language) into a quantifiable measure (the number of days of completed tasks in the app). The abstract and hard to understand notion of how good you are at a language has been converted into an easily understandable number that is steadily increasing.

What is important to understand is that gamification isn’t just a simple motivational boost. It is a trade, and what you’re trading is additional motivation for a narrowed and simplified goal, which, crucially, changes the nature of the activity. In the case of an app for language learning, this might mean that you aren’t studying as much outside the app, which might or might not be an issue depending on the quality of the app.

This narrowing and simplification can drastically change activities that have subtle and diverse set of goals. On such activity is communication. People might communicate to entertain, to convey complex but important ideas, to evoke a sense of beauty that takes a while to hit, to educate, etc., etc.

Games offer a simple world. In daily life, our goals are often unclear. What do I want to work on in the future? Why am I doing what I’m doing? Why do I work to earn money? Is it me who has decided that or someone else? Why haven’t we overthrown capi-

I’m getting distracted. In our lives we often don’t have clear goals, but in games we do. Clear the levels. Defeat the enemies. Move as far to the right as possible. Get to the first place. All of which can be summarised as different forms of point systems. When an activity is gamified, it is moved to the simple world of a game.

In the case of Twitter, it “can grant us the emotional security and existential relief of value clarity, but we must adopt Twitter’s narrowed targets in exchange”.

Nguyen lists three ways the design of Twitter narrows or simplifies the values of communication that one might have. First, likes and retweets favour short term gratification. People are more likely to press the buttons if they agree or like it immediately. A person that reads a tweet that challenges them but ultimately, makes them think about it for a few weeks, might not bother looking up the tweet again.

Second, the degrees to which someone likes or dislikes a tweet is flattened down to a simple binary. This favours tweets that are appealing and unoffensive to many people rather than having a profound impact on a few. Quantity over quality in other words.

Third, twitter offers one homogeneous goal of communication. Without a centralising platform, there might be people that are motivated by popularity or instant gratification, but Twitter encourages everyone on the platform to adopt values listed above.

One important thing to understand about this process is that institutions perform this kind of simplification because it can’t see see nuanced and ineffable information. Information that is subtle and context dependent doesn’t travel well. Sending such information from one part of an institution to another will not work well because the recipient doesn’t have the context the information was produced from. The context can be conveyed, but that would require even more work. Another problem is that such information doesn’t aggregate well, because information from different sources will have different contexts.

As an example, instead of grades, a teacher could give a report for each student that gives a more nuanced picture of the student’s strengths and weaknesses. That would entail more work for the teacher, but it also makes things more difficult for the bureaucratic machine surrounding education. How do you compare reports? Higher education would need to do much more work to evaluate students. Statistics about how well education functions wouldn’t be possible. But, if the evaluation of the student gets simplified down into a few numbers all of this becomes feasible. This is why this kind of simplification is everywhere, dare I even say any time some form of statistics is used.

If this sounds interesting to you, the book Seeing Like a State by James Scott talks more about this. Supposedly. I haven’t read it yet. What Nguyen then writes about is how this is applied to our souls (Klein and Nguyen 2022), when our goals become gamified, how it changes our values. Continuing with education as an example, with tests scores and grades as the focus, education becomes more susceptible to gamification. Instead of the hard to articulate values of education — such as learning to interact with other human beings, grow as a person, critical thinking, diversity of people and interests, — instead of those values, grades encourage you to think about only that number. When the only thing you care about is the grade you start to think about taking the shortest path to raise the number, which hampers the learning that we presumably care about. (sidenote: If you care about this kind of stuff you might enjoy this article: “More than calculators: Why large language models threaten learning, teaching, and education”. It is about what the author thinks happens when LLMs (i.e. generative “AI”, e.g. ChatGPT) get inserted into an gamified education environment.² )

Lastly, I want to introduce a phrase that Nguyen coined because it is useful: value capture. It occurs when:

1. Our natural values are rich, subtle, and hard-to-express.
2. We are placed in a social or institutional setting which presents simplified, typically quantified, versions of our values back to ourselves.
3. The simplified versions take over in our motivation and deliberation.

I think this can happen in many different contexts so it’s useful to have a word for it when you notice it. Anyways, what I’ve done here is outlined the outline, so do read the paper if you thought this was interesting: How Twitter Gamifies Communication