Gamification

Last night after browsing Twitter for a number of hours I decided to move on to something more educational, reading the news.  News.google.com is my most frequented news source; it has a nice array of articles from various papers and websites, and delivers a pleasant variety of opinions.  I expected it to go as most normal nights looking at the news goes: browse articles for about ten minutes then move on to more interesting and less depressing blogs.  This time however, something caught my eye. 

In the middle of the page, hovering over my favorite section, I saw a block of text with what appeared to be a badge.  “No” I thought, “this is the news” I thought, “Google would never do this”.  Oh, was I wrong.  What I saw blocking the technology section was an ad for Google badges or whatever they are calling it.  Before I closed my browser with pure disgust I read the brief description.  It read something like, “You can earn private badges for reading news stories”.  I’m sure there was more to it but I don’t really care.

Social gaming can be fun; I’m fine with Foursquare making checking into places a game, going to physical places and leaving your mark lends itself to social gaming.  There are other apps out there that let you essentially “check in” to television shows that you are watching, I don’t use them but I can understand how it could be fun.  How can checking into a news article have any utility?  I can’t begin to imagine a conversation with my friends where I would say something like “haha, I stole your mayorship of reading the New York Times”.  Does that even make sense?

Google, why would you take something as pure as the news and try to make it into a game?  If I am reading the news I am already doing so for my pleasure; adding bells, badges and whistles won’t change anything.   I’m fine with the constant gamification of everything, but it has to stop somewhere and that somewhere should have been before it got to the news.