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I think gamification is the exactly opposite of what you need. I cycled through a bunch of frankly masturbatory hobbies before I settled on woodworking. I tried to learn guitar, I tried mountain biking, I did martial arts for a long time, I've tried to make video games off and on for my entire adult life, did a smattering of electronics repair. All of them, to various degrees, felt like pissing in the ocean. I think I enjoyed the martial arts and mountain biking the most, but at a certain point going through the motions felt pointless. Especially with martial arts, once I no longer had anything to prove to myself that I could do it, I just wasn't feeling it anymore. I sunk costed through many more years of just showing up, but my drive to put in the extra work evaporated. A lot of what compelled me to put time into hobbies I really wasn't getting anything out of was the addictiveness of the gamification in the learning method.
But woodworking, at least for now, is fantastic. I make beautiful things that go into my home that are exactly what I want, and I don't care one teeny tiny bit how they stack up to what anyone else has done. It's not gamified, it's not competitive, but it's marginally creative and meets specific needs. Plus it's nice having hardwood furniture in my house instead of flat packed sawdust and glue. Mastering a smattering of baking recipes has been similar. I wanted great scones, I didn't like any of the bakeries around me, I figured out a recipe that produces the scones I want and now my family gets to enjoy them.
Human motivation is funny, and in several ways, I suspect gamification has spoiled our brains to expect more rewards for fake task than they deserve. I've found making real things you actually want and need has been a great detox, and doesn't necessarily carry with it the sort of "I'm too tapped out from work to do this" vibe that other more masturbatory and pointless hobbies might. But that might just be me.
As an avid mountain biker, I'm curious as to what you think was gamified about the whole experience. Most people who get into the sport start riding relatively easy trails and progress to harder ones as they get better, but the whole concept of difficulty is vague and not necessarily related to how fun a trail is to ride. What most people don't do is start off by taking lessons and sticking with it to "unlock" various achievements by passing certain thresholds. Easy trails can still be a blast for experienced riders, and a beginner can always walk anything he's uncomfortable with (most difficult trails are only truly difficult for relatively brief stretches). Most people, though, will be good enough in a year that they'll be able to ride whatever they want to, within reason, and the only thing that differentiates riders is speed, which isn't important if you aren't racing and which no one cares about on casual rides. Skills improvement usually just means getting faster by being able to navigate tricky sections better, like having the technique to navigate tight turns without slowing down too much or being able to find lines in rock gardens. The end result of developing these skills is that you end up finding certain kinds of trails more enjoyable, but it's a completely personal gain.
Have you heard of the types of fun? If not, See: https://essentialwilderness.com/type-1-2-and-3-fun/
As a descriptive generalization, all complex activities are composed of all three types of fun. The exact ratio of each type of fun changes activity by activity and person by person. Typically speaking, everyone wants to maximize type 1 fun and minimize type 3 fun. In the meantime, they will tolerate type 2 fun in proportion to they ability to delay gratification as an investment to produce more type 1 fun in the future.
Now, gamification, in this context, is best understood as a means to transmute type 3 fun into type 2 fun. The mechanism by which this happens is through providing consistent feedback and rewards so that the gamer later associated a particular misery with a positive outcome. In games, for example, killing the first 3 orcs in a questline might be type one fun, but killing the next 197 would be type 3 fun if it weren't for the xp and gold you get at the end. Similarly, in martial arts you might enjoy the first minute of getting punched in the stomach while being in horse stance, but you're not going to enjoy the next five unless you come to associate it with improving your capabilities and social status.
Gamification isn't always-- or even usually-- helpful. If an activity has a super high proportion of type 1 fun, you just do it to do it. And generally people don't have many issues doing activities they feel are predominantly type 2 fun, though they might have to get motivated first. I'll procrastinate doing my laundry, but I don't need to gamify it before I do it-- I know exactly how much I like clean clothes. Meanwhile, people should and do avoid activities that are mostly type 3 fun. I think I'd briefly enjoy falling out of a building, but I would definitely hate hitting the ground.
Where gamification helps most is at the margins, when an activity is favorably disposed toward types 1 and 2 intellectually, but at any given moment can feel emotionally tilted toward type 3. Think of this as the cold lake effect (you know you'll have fun if you just take the plunge, but you can't help but tiptoe in miserably). So if you're looking for it in mountan biking, don't expect to find it everywhere. As a hobby, mountain biking is probably dominated by the kind of people who find it type 1 fun. But if you find someone that's always a little reluctant to get on the trails. And seems mostly motivated by buying new gear, obsessively tracking their health statistics, and posting images of themselves completing on difficult trails... That's what gamification looks like for mountain biking.
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It might have been the friend I was doing it with, and how the trails were rated in our area. It was 15+ years ago, so I'll probably get all the details wrong. But there was some sort of rating system that didn't seem dissimilar from rock climbing ratings, and he was really into getting to the next difficulty, and mastering X, Y and Z skills necessary for doing so, and upgrading his bike with fancy brakes and tires and shocks. Where as I just had some dinky street/trail hybrid bike with none of those things and found myself completely incapable of keeping up. I just enjoyed doing the same trail or two when I could.
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Yea I agree with this sentiment. There are all these studies (mainly to do with reading) that gamification actually backfires. If you give a kid money or some other external reward for reading that actually is a pretty surefire way to avoid that kid developing a real love for reading. And so too with any other hobby you might be able to think of.
Really? Based on the recent ACX alpha school review, I was under the impression that cash for books does work.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school
Which studies do you mean?
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I agree with this. I cycled through a lot until I found piano, and singing. I do them because they are beautiful and they open my heart. I don't even necessarily have to have energy or anything I just find myself gravitating towards piano more and more because I genuinely want it.
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Similar for me, but I swapped over to teaching it to others, which is quite rewarding on its own.
And you could always try some amateur fights if you want to challenge yourself (at the risk of injury).
3D printing is giving me a portion of this satisfaction of making something 'from scratch' and having a finished product at the end you can take pride in.
But so far that's mostly for trinkets and trivialities.
I dream of having a sizeable enclosed workspace on my property to tinker with cars and wood and produce fairly complex devices and objects. I am become Boomer, acquirer of hobbies.
I think my only point there is that you're going to encounter the gamified stimuli anyway (unless you are VERY actively avoiding it), and it thus behooves you to let the 'good' stuff grab your attention (and money) or else something wasteful and trivial might, instead.
For instance: I do have Duolingo on my phone and I consider it a better use of my time than, say, Candy Crush or the bazillion basebuilding game clones out there, so its like, I dunno, substituting nicotine gum for actual cigarettes. I rage every time my phone updates and it auto-installs a bunch of the little ADHD time-suck apps on there that I have to remove manually.
And I can also say that there is zero chance I'll ever get 'bored' or feel 'satiated' with having sex with women, but that has run into the endless frustration that is modern dating that I bemoan elsewhere. I'm tempted to start setting aside a 'prostitute budget' for myself if I go another year or two without getting into a relationship, but I damn well know what its like to be intimate with someone you truly know and care about, and cares about you in return, so I don't think I can be truly happy just paying for it.
All these basic activities turn out to be the most fulfilling on a primal level, whoda thunk? (lots of people, it turns out, the modern world just wants to keep you distracted with candy and trinkets).
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