The Dark Side of Gamification: Ethics, Privacy, Surveillance, and Monitoring in the Use of Gamified Elements

Gamification found acceptance as an intriguing business tool, especially in the marketing domain wherein game-like processes encourage human engagement with products or services. Several studies have highlighted various uses of gamified approaches not only in marketing but also in other domains. However, what is unexplored is the “dark side” of gamification for various users across various businesses. Though gamification incentivizes customers to repeatedly play for more chances to win, it is covert in nature, which can lead to stress or strain on individuals and may have a huge impact in terms of ethics, privacy, and health monitoring on the users. As gamification engages users on psychological levels, it can be associated with privacy invasion, social overload, and negative health conditions, thereby revealing shocking exhaustion scenarios. These have huge ethical, privacy, surveillance, and monitoring impacts as gamification is in a way manipulating human minds and continuously keeping people addicted to an opaque and nonexistent world for materialistic benefits and pleasure. This chapter explores the impact of the false transparency creation, unethical interactions, and worst-case scenarios that gamification can cause. This can have huge ramifications on human beings as gamified systems are really complex processes. This chapter further highlights that businesses need to understand their limitations before gamification becomes a more powerful psychological tool with serious consequences, including life-threatening ones, for its users.