Reflections on the Gamification of Fitness

According to any number of game designers, psychologists, and journalists, our lives are becoming increasingly gamified. Gamification, or “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts,” seems to be everywhere—hotel brands and coffee chains have loyalty programs that give out points for choosing to visit them over their competitors, the language-learning app Duolingo records multi-day streaks and awards users with badges for completing lessons, and wellness apps like MyFitnessPal encourage you to track your meals by setting daily calorie targets based on long-term goals. Gamification is being used to make learning more fun, encourage patients to take their medications, and promote mindfulness. But is gamification good, bad, or, like so often in our complex world, some combination of the two? Should we invite gamification into our lives as a way to promote fun and productivity, or guard against it?

With all the different ways gamification is now being used, analyzing gamification as a whole would be a monumental task. I will therefore focus on what I take to be a common way that gamification enters many people’s everyday lives—through the use of fitness trackers and their corresponding apps. As someone who’s used a fitness tracker on a daily basis for years to help me reach my health and fitness goals, but who rarely thinks of the potential philosophical implications of doing so, I was curious to analyze the positive and negative aspects of gamifying fitness in this way.

Proponents often rely on consequentialist arguments to support increased gamification in a variety of real-life contexts. Gamification, they hold, increases people’s motivation to perform otherwise dull or unpleasant tasks by making them more fun. Things like completing chores, exercising, and filling out forms can feel boring, arduous, or pointless. Using game components whereby people can track their progress, compete (or cooperate) with others, and be rewarded for their efforts can break up the monotony of everyday tasks and make striving for long-term goals more satisfying and enjoyable. In theory, not only does gamification have the potential to increase the immediate pleasure we get from performing these tasks, it also improves our well-being in the long run by helping us stay on track and reach our goals—a win-win!

These potential benefits certainly seem to apply to fitness trackers and apps. For many of us, exercise feels like a chore. We know we ought to do it, and that getting healthier brings a number of benefits, but those facts aren’t always enough to get us to jump on the treadmill or pick up a set of weights. Moreover, progress toward health goals is typically slow and difficult to track. Sure, after months of effort I may be able to cut a minute off of my mile or go down a pants size, but there’s rarely a significant change from one day to the next. On the other hand, apps like Fitbit and MyFitnessPal give you easy-to-understand metrics like step counts and active minutes, provide short-term, achievable goals, and reward you (even if it is only with digital fireworks) when you hit your targets. J. S. Mill would approve—gamified fitness apps can both give us pleasure in the moment and motivate us to become healthier, thus increasing well-being overall.

On the other hand, critics of gamification highlight its potential risks. For instance, the data gathered via gamified apps can be incredibly private in nature (such as one’s gender, or even one’s menstrual cycle), and has the potential to open users up to surveillance and manipulation. Users playing a “game” may not realize that their data is being collected and thus not think twice about voluntarily reporting sensitive information. Once collected, their data runs the risk of being mishandled, intercepted by hackers, or sold to third parties.

In addition to data privacy concerns, the strategies used by social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to keep users engaged have been critiqued as akin to those employed by the gambling industry. As articles like “The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media” point out, posting on social media is itself a gamble, whereby we “roll the dice” to see if our words go viral or attract followers. Much like people are motivated to “stay in the zone” when playing slot machines, egged on by small, relatively frequent wins (that are typically smaller than the cost to play) until the purpose of playing shifts from winning to simply continuing to play, occasional “likes” on Facebook and Twitter can motivate us to stay glued to the app, scrolling aimlessly through pictures.

Do these critiques apply to fitness apps like Strava and Noom? Certainly, many of these apps ask users to provide personal information such as weight, age, and gender when they sign up, and voluntarily tracking one’s actions is required to reap the app’s benefits. This data can be used for targeted advertising, or, as Jennifer Whitson has argued, to manipulate our desires and habits. Moreover, apps that use GPS, such as MapMyRun, have access to users’ locations. This information could potentially be cross-referenced with other databases to, for instance, pinpoint an individual’s address, or determine whether they were in the vicinity of a crime when it was committed. Indeed, Olympic athlete Molly Seidel announced last summer that she would no longer be posting most of her runs on Strava, in part because allowing people to see her regular running route led to safety concerns.

To what extent fitness apps mirror gambling seems to depend both on the app and how it is being used. Unlike social media sites, where creating posts for others to view is the main activity, the primary purpose of many gamified fitness systems is (at least purportedly) to track one’s own actions and progress. Certainly, most provide a way to share these metrics, compare oneself with friends, and react to others’ achievements, but this isn’t always a required set of activities (although it is more encouraged on some apps than others). That said, apps that do have those features may function similarly to social media sites. Moreover, systems like Fitbit do provide small, fairly regular rewards for hitting your goals and so have the potential to pull people into “the zone,” logging in over and over to check their calories burned, view their friends’ progress, or scroll through the newsfeed.

Perhaps one of the most interesting critiques of gamification has been raised by philosopher Thi C. Nguyen. Focusing primarily on the gamification of Twitter, Nguyen argues that gamification replaces our frequently complex motivations, goals, and values with the simple aim of increasing points or likes. Regarding Twitter in particular, he maintains that the various, often subtle purposes of communication, such as pursuing truth, reaching agreement, or making meaningful social connections are reduced by the social media platform to the goal of collecting likes, retweets, and follower counts for the (fleeting) pleasure they bring. Moreover, if people internalize these gamified goals to the exclusion of others, the depth and breadth of communication are likely to suffer—people will be driven to create posts that will be widely approved of, as opposed to more subtle, well-thought-out views.

Games and gamified systems, Nguyen maintains, appeal to people because their goals are typically simple and achievable—they give us a break from our messy, complex normative world. Instead of having to balance frequently conflicting (and potentially incommensurate) commitments and values, many games/gamified systems provide players/users with straightforward goals. This is fine for true games, in which players temporarily remove themselves from the tasks of everyday life and take on specified goals for the purpose of playing the game. However, Nguyen’s worry is that gamified systems, which are meant to help you with real-life activities and goals, problematically narrow our normative perspective.

It might seem like Nguyen’s critique doesn’t apply to fitness trackers—after all, how can being aware of my step count change my values? But the purported goal of these devices and apps is to improve health and well-being, which are nebulous and multi-faceted goals. Fitbit, Strava, and others encourage us to focus on things like step counts, calories, and macros, but are these always good measures of one’s health? And do they distract from a more holistic method for pursuing well-being? I must admit, when faced with the choice between taking a walk or doing yoga I often choose the former because it gives me more steps and a higher calorie burn. Is that choice always better for me? Certainly not—stretching is important too, as are activities (like yoga) that promote mindfulness. But it’s much more difficult to work toward the goal of “good health,” with all of its different components, than to shoot for 10,000 steps or 1,500 calories. Thus, we might have good reasons to be cautious about using gamified fitness apps.

On the other hand, once we acknowledge all of the different commitments, goals, and values that we juggle in our daily lives, things like fitness apps do offer some benefits. More and more people are reporting that they feel overwhelmed by the modern world. Information is easier to access than ever before, and the problems humanity faces (climate change, the COVID pandemic, etc.) seem to increase every day. When we recognize that the world is full of conflicting values, it can be paralyzing. This is not to say that plurality can or should be reduced, but tools to help us cope with this reality can be helpful psychologically and emotionally. (Indeed, Nguyen acknowledges this, while also pointing out that our desire for value clarity can be exploited.) And it is nice, when other things are going poorly in one’s life, to be able to point at an achievable win. With burnout on the rise, is the simplification of our goals and values always a bad thing?

Regarding fitness trackers, determining how to increase one’s health and wellness can be challenging—I’ll admit, I’ve spent hours trying to figure out just how to pursue better health. Should I focus on meditation, macros, cardio, strength training, sleep? To what extent? Just trying to set goals can take considerable time and energy, and in some cases a level of expertise that one doesn’t possess. Would it sometimes be better for me to use that energy on, say, exercise? Granted, increasing my steps isn’t the same as being healthy, but even if I acknowledge this, is there still a role for my Fitbit?

I wonder if we need to take a page from Aristotelian virtue ethics here and start thinking about the virtue of temperance or moderation when engaging with gamified systems. There seem to be significant benefits to using such systems some of the time, like increased motivation and a reprieve from what can sometimes be an overwhelming level of complexity. But I think Nguyen is right that letting ourselves be seduced by simple goals at the expense of more nuanced values can be dangerous. Failing to keep our actual, complicated values in mind has the potential to derail our efforts, taking us in an entirely different direction than we intended. But perhaps the solution is to find a balance. For example, I might rely on my Fitbit for daily motivation, but check in with my long-term goals periodically.

Designers could, and likely have a responsibility to, help with this—for instance by programming fitness trackers to remind you to take a break from the app, or to focus on why you’re exercising in the first place, or how a particular activity makes you feel. Although I don’t always choose to run instead of do yoga (thus hopefully indicating that I haven’t completely forgotten the complex components of well-being), I could certainly use the occasional reminder that one’s health isn’t the same as one’s step count. These reminders would need to be designed mindfully, however, to prevent people from merely clicking through these reminders (as many gamers do when their video games are interrupted by warnings about the risks of excessive game playing), thus opening the door for companies to shift responsibility for negative outcomes away from their design and onto users. Indeed, programming in reminders about users’ larger goals may be in the company’s best interest—there’s some evidence that people fail to stick with healthy habits if they only receive extrinsic rewards and don’t focus on the intrinsic benefits.

Cultivating virtues isn’t easy. Just as it’s difficult to find the mean of courage between rashness and cowardice, or humility between boastfulness and self-deprecation, it may be difficult to cultivate a balanced approach to gamification. But to reap the benefits of gamification without sacrificing one’s real values, I think it’s worth a try.

Laura Engel

Laura Engel is a co-editor for the Everyday Lifestyle Series of the Public Philosophy beat. She received her PhD from Binghamton University and is currently based in Minnesota. Laura specializes in ethics, social and political philosophy, and moral psychology.