Overgamification is the reason we keep playing, but it's also the reason we stop

I've spent my most recent weekend split between two extremes. Firstly, I was playing a game that hammered me with rewards every single time I did anything, and secondly, I played a game that just let me get on with it and find my own dopamine hits. One of them I turned off and uninstalled immediately once I had got through that beautiful, noisy, flashy onboarding period, while the other, I intend to pick back up again later today. It's been more than a few years (twenty?) since games like World of Warcraft mastered the constant flood of notifications and feedback - or compulsion - loops that now dominate everything from social media to news channels. At the time, keeping people interested was a great way to stop them from wandering off to other mediums; from going to the movies, or reading a book. But now, in 2026, almost everything is running the same way, certainly almost anything that runs on a computer, console or mobile phone. ... [MORE]