Chapter 28 Exercises: Gaming Mechanics in Social Media

Reflection Exercises

Exercise 1 (Reflection) Take stock of the gamification mechanics you engage with across your current social media platforms. List at least five specific examples of points, levels, badges, leaderboards, quests, or narrative elements you encounter regularly. For each, reflect on how it affects your behavior. Does it increase or decrease your platform engagement? How does it make you feel?

Exercise 2 (Reflection) The chapter describes the "undermining effect" — the finding that introducing external rewards for previously intrinsically motivated activities can reduce intrinsic motivation. Can you identify a creative or social activity in your own life where the introduction of metrics, ratings, or external rewards changed your relationship to the activity? What happened to your enjoyment and engagement?

Exercise 3 (Reflection) LinkedIn's profile completion bar prompted millions of users to add detailed professional information to their profiles. When you think about your own LinkedIn profile (or a similar professional profile), how much of what you've added was motivated by the completion bar rather than a genuine desire to communicate that information? What does this reveal about the relationship between gamification and data collection?

Exercise 4 (Reflection) YouTube's Play Button system materializes digital achievements into physical objects. Think about your own relationship to physical vs. digital markers of achievement (trophies, certificates, diplomas vs. digital badges, follower counts, verification marks). Which feel more meaningful? Why? What does this reveal about the psychology of achievement recognition?

Exercise 5 (Reflection) The chapter quotes a YouTube creator who said the creative process "got more anxious" and "has never been the same" after they started working toward the Silver Play Button milestone. Have you experienced anything similar — a pursuit of a goal that changed your relationship to the underlying activity in negative ways? What was the experience like?

Exercise 6 (Reflection) Consider the "zone" as described by Natasha Dow Schüll in casino gambling contexts — a dissociative state of focused, continuous engagement. Have you ever experienced something resembling "the zone" while using social media? What were the circumstances? How did you eventually disengage? What does this tell you about the design of the experience?

Exercise 7 (Reflection) The chapter notes that gamification is more effective when users don't recognize it as gamification. Before reading this chapter, were you aware of the game elements embedded in the social media platforms you use? Has reading the chapter changed your perception of your own platform engagement? If so, how?

Research Exercises

Exercise 8 (Research) Find and summarize Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled, and Lennart Nacke's 2011 paper "From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness." What is the full taxonomy of game elements they identify? Which elements do they consider most distinctively "game-like"? How does their taxonomy compare to the simplified version presented in this chapter?

Exercise 9 (Research) Research Ian Bogost's critique of gamification, including his 2011 essay "Gamification is Bullshit" (Atlantic) and subsequent writings. Summarize his argument. How does his concept of "exploitationware" apply to specific social media features discussed in this chapter? Where do you agree or disagree with Bogost?

Exercise 10 (Research) Research Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Find at least two empirical studies that apply SDT to digital technology or social media use. What do these studies find about how social media satisfies or undermines the three basic psychological needs (competence, autonomy, relatedness)?

Exercise 11 (Research) Look up the history of Foursquare's mayorship and badge system. What were the mechanics? How did the gamification work? Why did Foursquare eventually remove the mayorship system? What happened to Foursquare's user engagement after the removal? What lessons did the Foursquare experience offer for subsequent gamification designers?

Exercise 12 (Research) Research variable ratio reinforcement schedules in B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning research. Find at least one peer-reviewed study that applies variable ratio reinforcement theory to social media engagement specifically. What does the research find? What are the methodological challenges of applying laboratory operant conditioning research to complex real-world social media behavior?

Exercise 13 (Research) Look up Natasha Dow Schüll's work "Addiction by Design" (2012). Summarize the key design elements she identifies in casino slot machines that produce the "zone." For each element she identifies, find a specific social media platform feature that appears to use a structurally similar design approach.

Exercise 14 (Research) Research the history and design of Reddit's karma system. When was it introduced? How has it evolved? What are the documented effects of karma gaming on Reddit community quality? How has Reddit attempted to address karma farming? What does the Reddit karma system reveal about the limits of gamification for community quality management?

Analysis Exercises

Exercise 15 (Analysis) Choose one specific social media platform and conduct a comprehensive gamification audit. Identify every game element embedded in the platform — points, levels, badges, leaderboards, quests, narrative elements, and any elements not captured by these categories. For each element, analyze: (a) what psychological mechanism it engages, (b) what behavior it incentivizes, and (c) whose interests are served by the incentivized behavior.

Exercise 16 (Analysis) Apply the Self-Determination Theory framework to assess the gamification design of two social media platforms — one that you believe implements gamification relatively well (supporting competence, autonomy, and relatedness) and one that you believe implements it poorly. What specific design choices account for the difference?

Exercise 17 (Analysis) Analyze the TikTok challenge mechanic using game design terminology. What makes a successful TikTok challenge? How does it implement quest design principles (clear goal, appropriate difficulty, community, feedback)? What distinguishes an organically viral challenge from a brand-sponsored challenge? Does the distinction matter ethically?

Exercise 18 (Analysis) Compare the gamification design of LinkedIn's professional platform with the gamification design of Instagram's social platform. Both use progress metrics, milestone achievements, and social validation mechanics. Do the different social contexts (professional vs. social) produce meaningfully different ethical concerns? Which platform's gamification do you find more or less ethically defensible?

Exercise 19 (Analysis) Apply Bogost's "exploitationware" critique to a specific social media feature. Identify a feature you believe qualifies as exploitationware — extracting engagement without providing genuine value. Make the argument in Bogost's terms. Then write a counterargument defending the feature as legitimate gamification that provides genuine value. Which argument is stronger?

Exercise 20 (Analysis) The chapter describes Reddit's karma gaming and Goodhart's Law: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Identify two additional examples of Goodhart's Law operating in social media platforms. For each, explain what the original measure was intended to capture, how optimization pressure corrupted the measure, and what the consequences were for platform quality.

Exercise 21 (Analysis) Analyze YouTube's Play Button tier system specifically from a business strategy perspective. What are YouTube's incentives for creating this system? What are the costs and benefits for YouTube? For creators? For viewers? Does the system produce aligned incentives (everyone benefits from the same outcomes) or misaligned incentives (different parties benefit from different outcomes)?

Creative Exercises

Exercise 22 (Creative) Design a gamification system for a non-social-media context — perhaps a civic engagement platform, a neighborhood communication tool, or an educational environment. What game elements would you include? What psychological needs would they satisfy? How would you avoid the exploitationware failure mode? Present your design with specific feature descriptions and a rationale for each choice.

Exercise 23 (Creative) Write a short story (750-1,000 words) from the perspective of a social media creator who realizes for the first time that their platform has been "game-ing" them — that their behavior has been shaped by gamification mechanics they did not previously recognize. How does this realization affect their relationship to the platform and to their creative work?

Exercise 24 (Creative) Design a "gamification transparency" feature that social media platforms could implement to make their gamification design visible to users. What would it look like? What information would it display? How would you present it in a way that is informative without being so disruptive that users simply dismiss it?

Exercise 25 (Creative) Write Marcus Webb's proposal memo for the Velocity Media gamification system, and Dr. Aisha Johnson's response memo, as they are described in the chapter. Make each memo specific, evidence-based, and internally persuasive. Then write CEO Sarah Chen's response, arriving at a decision and explaining her reasoning.

Exercise 26 (Creative) Create a visual taxonomy of gamification elements in a single social media platform of your choice. Present it as an annotated diagram or infographic that would help a non-expert understand what game mechanics they are engaging with when they use the platform. Label each element with its psychological mechanism and its likely effect on user behavior.

Group Discussion Exercises

Exercise 27 (Group Discussion) The chapter argues that social media gamification and casino gambling share structural design similarities. Divide the group into two sides: one arguing that the comparison is apt and the ethical concerns are equivalent, the other arguing that the comparison is misleading and the ethical concerns are categorically different. After the debate, discuss what the most persuasive arguments on each side were.

Exercise 28 (Group Discussion) Consider the claim that gamification is "more effective when users don't recognize it." Is it ethical to design systems that work by remaining invisible to users? Compare this to other examples of design that influences behavior without explicit user awareness — product placement, choice architecture in supermarkets, font choices in persuasive documents. Is there a consistent ethical standard that applies across all these cases?

Exercise 29 (Group Discussion) Discuss the distinction between "competence gamification" and "engagement gamification" as framed in the Velocity Media debate. Can you identify real-world examples of each? Is the distinction always clear? Under what conditions might engagement gamification also serve genuine competence development? Under what conditions is it impossible for the same design to serve both goals?

Exercise 30 (Group Discussion) Reddit's karma system is intended to surface high-quality contributions. In practice, it is routinely gamed in ways that reduce community quality. Is the karma system's failure a design problem, a human nature problem, or a scale problem? Could any point-based quality metric system successfully resist gaming at Reddit's scale?

Exercise 31 (Group Discussion) The chapter describes how mobile games (Clash of Clans) and social media platforms have converged in their design, both optimizing for maximum time-on-platform using similar psychological mechanics. If we consider this convergence, is there still a meaningful distinction between "game" and "social media"? Should they be regulated differently? By whom?

Exercise 32 (Group Discussion) Consider the distributional concerns raised in the chapter: gamification has stronger effects on users who are more vulnerable (teenagers, users with compulsive tendencies, users with low self-esteem). Does this differential vulnerability create ethical obligations for designers? Should platforms design differently for users they know are more vulnerable? How would they know? What are the privacy and autonomy implications of such differentiated design?

Exercise 33 (Group Discussion) YouTube's Play Button system creates a physical object that materializes a digital achievement. Discuss whether this materialization is a positive design choice (making digital achievements feel more meaningful) or a negative one (exploiting the psychological weight of physical objects to intensify the status game). What does the creation of physical achievement objects reveal about the design intentions behind the status system?

Exercise 34 (Group Discussion) The chapter identifies the "optimization target problem" as the fundamental ethical issue in gamification: what are you optimizing for? Design a gamification system for a social media platform with a specific, well-defined optimization target that is different from engagement metrics — for example, optimizing for user wellbeing, for quality of social connection, or for creative development. What would change? What tradeoffs would result?

Exercise 35 (Group Discussion) The chapter ends with the observation that "the failure to make these distinctions [between engagement and wellbeing] is not inevitable. It reflects a choice — typically a commercially motivated choice." Who bears responsibility for this choice? The designers? The executives? The shareholders? The regulators? The users? Discuss the distribution of responsibility and what each responsible party could do differently.