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Why relaxation has become the ultimate game

Ithrew myself into Letterboxd and Goodreads. I first got the apps, which allow you to track and save your film watching and reading respectively, because I wanted a better memory of everything I’d been consuming, as well as a place to find and save recommendations.

I found more than just that: both offered a community of people engaged in the same interests as myself, with whom I could discuss great cinema and literature.

They also became a great source of inspiration as I discovered new films and books I may never have previously discovered. I was obsessed: I believed I had found the only two good social media apps.

But after a while, both started to impact my hobbies in unexpected and not altogether pleasant ways. Every new year, Goodreads asked me to set a reading challenge, which I would set ambitiously high. Come November, I would find myself in distress as the end of the year approached, rushing through short books in pursuit of that arbitrary target while neglecting others on my bedside table that I actually wanted to read.

Over on Letterboxd, I would find myself disappointed if a thoughtful review I wrote garnered few likes. I began to notice that while watching films, I wasn’t entirely paying attention: instead, I was thinking about my future star rating for the film and trying to draft a witty caption in my head, just to prove to my followers later that I had the right things to say about the right films.

After watching countless films that bored me to tears, I also realised I had stopped watching films I actually liked; I was just watching films I thought my followers would respect me for watching. Both apps had made relaxing activities stressful; my pastimes had become jobs.

What I was encountering is known as gamification: the process by which game elements are added to non-game environments. Dr Michael Daubs, programme director of media studies at Victoria University of Wellington, says the gamification of hobbies through lifestyle apps such as Letterboxd, Goodreads, Strava, Nike Run Club, which both track exercise, Untappd (all about logging new beers you’ve tried), the language learning platform Duolingo and more has a complex impact on our psychology in ways both good and bad.

‘‘If you’re looking to get fit, there is a benefit to gamifying fitness to a certain extent,’’ he says. ‘‘It gives you a definitive

goal that you can try to reach every day or every week, you can track your history, you can see your fitness levels improve over time, or find out areas where you might be lacking. And especially apps such as Strava, there’s a benefit of getting kudos from your friends or family saying, ‘good job, you shed that extra kilo.’ Those kinds of positive feedback are rewarding for us chemically.’’

But when these apps invite us to set personal goals, we run the risk of becoming obsessive, or setting unattainable targets. ‘‘At some point, you might get a goal set by an app that says, ‘now run 5km in 25 minutes instead of 30 minutes,’ and you’re just not physically able to do it. And that can lead to you not reaching your goal, which leads to disappointment, depression, all the things that we feel when we don’t achieve what we set out to achieve,’’ Daubs says.

Aucklander Toi Rankin, who works in film and television, says he found community and affirmation on Nike Run Club, particularly with the app’s in-built reward system. ‘‘Every time you’d finish a run, some audio would play saying, ‘nice job, you killed it,’ and I’d be stoked,’’ he says. ‘‘It made you feel like you were in a group or a community. Exercise is always more fun and encouraging when there’s people in it with you, and running is generally a solo thing for me, so when I’d get that audio message, I knew thousands of people were also getting it. It was nice to be congratulated and feel supported.’’

But, because these things can be a doubleedged sword, Rankin also found himself obsessing over the app’s tracking system. ‘‘If I started a run and realised part way through I hadn’t been tracking, I’d think about how many kilometres I’d missed and how that would negatively affect my monthly or weekly total,’’ he says. ‘‘It’d ruin my headspace and I’d lose motivation to keep running and either give up altogether or not push myself because it didn’t count. It’d sometimes feel like you were cheated out of your goals, and even worse, by yourself.’’

Rankin may have been encountering what’s known as the ‘‘observer effect’’, which Daubs describes as the state when we’re aware that something we are doing will be observed by others, ‘‘and that knowledge affects the way that we go about a task,’’ he says. ‘‘In the case of Letterboxd, it can affect the way that you watch a film, because you’re not really watching the film for the enjoyment of watching the film anymore. The movie itself becomes a vehicle for the real entertainment, which is later on when you write your review, and you’re thinking about what you’re going to write and how other people are going to respond.’’

Daubs says users of gamified lifestyle apps can also encounter a phenomenon termed an ‘‘arrival fallacy’’, which is ‘‘when we actually do achieve our goals, and then we realise there’s just another goal that we need to achieve now,’’ he says. ‘‘That can actually lead to depression and disappointment as well, because we don’t get that good feeling when we achieve the goal. There’s just something else to do. That’s where gamification can turn a hobby into a job, rather than enjoyment of the hobby.’’

‘‘It can affect the way that you watch a film, because you’re not really watching the film for the enjoyment of watching the film anymore. The movie itself becomes a vehicle for the real entertainment, which is later on when you write your review.’’

On Goodreads, Wellingtonian Kayla Polamalu, who works in policy, says she is motivated to read more regularly and widely, but the performative aspect of it frustrates her. ‘‘Literature is already used as such a gauge for how ‘cultured’ or ‘intellectual’ someone is, and then because people can see your Goodreads lists, it can become really easy to judge people based on them,’’ she says. ‘‘And if not judging others, then you at least expect that you’re being judged. People will often not list their science fiction or chick-lit ‘guilty pleasures’ as having been read because they’re worried people will consider them less chic for it.’’

It’s a pattern reflected across all social media, says Daubs. ‘‘When you look at what people do online, you’re often comparing yourself as an individual to the best of other people, and what they’re willing to share. We’re comparing the totality of our existence to the top 10 per cent of everyone else’s existence, and that’s really difficult to live up to,’’ he says.

While Daubs says users should be cautious of the impact of gamification, there are many ways in which these apps can help us – such as the way they connect us and foster communities. Wellingtonian communications professional Sophie Howard is an avid Letterboxd user, and she loves the way it has made film and television criticism more accessible.

‘‘When I was first getting into film criticism and starting to widen my tastes, often the only criticism that was available seemed to be through the lens of a mid-40s straight white dude, which meant that there would be films or shows I loved that would get slated as silly, light or explicitly for women,’’ she says. ‘‘Letterboxd has created a platform where diverse voices and opinions can thrive, and can be expressed in so many different formats.’’

She cites a review of the New Zealand web series Ru¯ rangi, which follows a trans man returning to his hometown, in which a trans viewer wrote about what it meant to feel represented by the show. ‘‘Ru¯ rangi was made by trans people for trans people, and so to read that an audience member felt seen by it, could feel recognised and reflected by it, and can write about it, is remarkable to me,’’ she says.

‘‘That’s one of the really positive and often overlooked elements that gets lost in moral panics about social media making us dumber or more polarised,’’ says Daubs. ‘‘In the best case scenarios, they do help teenagers and adults find communities, and also learn about themselves in certain ways as well. Yes, we are performative on social media, but we can also use social media to self-write to a certain extent and figure out exactly who we are.’’

More broadly, that speaks to an aspect of lifestyle apps that attracts us to them so strongly. ‘‘These apps make us visible in a way that we aren’t to ourselves if we don’t use them,’’ says Daubs.

‘‘It’s not always about achievement or meeting goals, or improving health, or film or book knowledge. It’s an awareness of self that can be comforting, and healthy in ways that aren’t narcissistic at all, but just kind of what we need to have in a world that is incredibly complex, and often messy and unappealing.’’

Sport

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2021-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282939568442967

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