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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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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.

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.