The Gamification of the Entire Economy: How the New World Is Being Designed
Enabled by crypto, digitally native economies are quickly emerging.
Have you ever watched the movie Ready Player One by Steven Spielberg?
Prepare yourself because this article will talk about strange concepts, virtual themes, digital ideas, and basically, how the future is being designed.
I’m 45 years old and I spend half of my life playing a strategy soccer game called Football Manager. Yet the digital world belongs to GenZ and there are currently 68 million citizens between 6 and 24 years old in the United States alone.
This generation of young kids is the first one born into a full digital era. We can add here also GenY, that are currently between 25 and 29 years old. GenY and GenZ are the builders of new digital infrastructures like Ethereum, Cardano, or Polkadots.
These two generations live in The Metaverse universe.
The Metaverse: a persistent, live digital universe that affords individuals a sense of agency, social presence, and shared spatial awareness, along with the ability to participate in an extensive virtual economy with profound societal impact.- Piers Kicks
This idea emerged in the late 80s and early 90s with Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, two American authors that created the term speculative fiction in a kind of cyberpunk style that produced the idea of evolving into a shared and persistently virtual world.
This is where the Ready Player One world emerges. Like the Steven Spielberg movie, millions or even billions of people will interact with each other in a new exceptional virtual environment.
Every single industry is being disrupted by the digital world, with Artificial Intelligence having a considerable influence in the robust implementation of algorithms and the cryptographic empowerment of the Web 3.0. The blockchain community and the gamification of the entire economy are things that will most certainly happen soon.
But, how does gamification work? What will be the implications in our daily routines? Will the gamification of the entire economy create individual sovereignty, justice, and egalitarian opportunities?
Gamification can lead to high levels of learner engagement and motivation.
I recently wrote an article about Synthesis. A unique school created in Elon Musk’s SpaceX facilities was built out of the concept of the gamification of education.
Synthesis wants their students to be the best collaborative problem-solvers out there. Synthesis recipe for learning is composed of:
- Simulation mechanisms
- Simulation concepts
- Mental models
- Team reflection
- Simulation analysis
- Personal reflection
Synthesis mixed the right ingredients to create the best circumstances for teaching and learning. Facilitators (teachers) only interfere in teamwork activities to prompt moments (they call them CLICKS) that set the suitable events for specific problems.
You can see here how Synthesis is gamifying the learning processes into a disruptive new school system.
A venture capital company called Duolingo is also disrupting the EdTech market. They created a free app that is simple to use and gamified adaptive language teaching for smartphones and web browsers.
Duolingo is an online language-learning app. It’s pervasively and thoughtfully gamified: points, levels, achievements, bonuses for “streaks,” visual progression indicators, even a virtual currency with various ways to spend it. The well-integrated gamification is a major differentiator for Duolingo, which happens to be the most successful tool of its kind. With over 60 million registered users, it teaches languages to more people than the entire US public school system.- Kevin Werbach, Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics, Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania
The story of gamification isn’t fun and games by any means. It’s serious.
When used carefully and thoughtfully, gamification produces great outcomes for users, in ways that are hard to replicate through other methods.- Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter
Piers Kicks defined Metaverse as the complete digitization of everything. The gamification of everything will also be a strong possibility because the gaming incentives involve understanding psychology, design principles, and leveraging data. It actually taps into what makes us human.
Werbach and Hunter explain how games can be a valuable tool to address severe pursuits like marketing, productivity enhancement, education, innovation, customer engagement, human resources, and sustainability.- Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter
As we spend more time in the digital world, we end up creating value, exchanging value, and earning some sort of crypto assets that we can transfer at the speed of light in the web 3.0 lightning network- Ethereum and other blockchains are constantly being created.
And in a Ready Player Go style, the gamification of the entire digital world will incentivize more and more people to drop from the physical world into the digital one.
Dalby will be the organization’s CFO, NYDIG said in a statement Friday. It offers customers Bitcoin custody, execution, and financing and is a subsidiary of $10 billion alternative asset manager Stone Ridge. NYDIG recently raised more than $300 million from strategic partners, including Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. and Liberty Mutual.- bloomberg.com
In a recent announcement, NYDIG made public that Bitcoin is coming to hundreds of US banks this year. So it’s not just human resources coming from the physical to the digital world- it’s much more than that.
NYDIG plans on other services, including debit card rewards paid in bitcoin and a new type of bank account called Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insured but pays interest in bitcoin.- Hugh Son from cnbc.com
Let your intuition lead the way.
Gamification has long been applied to learning and marketing. Just think of how the military has embedded gaming techniques into its flight simulators. Today, businesses and marketers — especially in the consumer space — regularly employ gaming techniques.
Gaming techniques, such as leader boards, simulations, challenges, “top scorers,” and the like, are natural extensions of performance-based work. Additionally, Reward & Recognition professionals are probably best positioned to both use and move this vital concept forward.- theirf.org
The power of a gamified financial world, with all due concerns in terms of regulation, proof-of-work, and proof-of-stack, is that millions or even billions of people could gain access to your inventory or your avatar in a specific token or community you create.
The powerful networking effect this tokenization will bring to the financial world, combined with the good incentives of a gamified environment, can create a massively colossal boom of new businesses and new digital economies, where every citizen in the world with a phone or digital device can participate.
Final Thoughts
The Exponential Era is coming.
Yet western societies have a fundamental structural problem: the robots are coming to take our jobs. Governments will have a hard time fighting unemployment because of the disruptive innovation that is replacing human work opportunities.
For example, look at your phone and ask yourself how many apps you have. Most of them are free to use. Now ask yourself how many jobs disappeared due to those apps. You probably have your bank on your phone, right? You probably take one thousand photos and put them in the cloud, right?
For that to happen, many jobs had to disappear.
Any function that is predictable and routine will be a target for improving efficiency through automation. This automation will aggressively replace the work of highly rewarded professionals.
However, it will not be all bad. Remember, technology is made by humans, and innovation has never harmed the development of humanity- quite the contrary.
The truth is that many jobs will disappear, but new jobs will be created in an economy that will change substantially in the coming decades.
A smaller range of people will probably be needed to work in specialized productive roles, as robots will do the rest. But new opportunities will be created, well paid, and valued by the community.
In an economy that is gamified but highly robotized and digitized, modern societies will be more sensitive to the protection of nature and natural resources and the care of an increasingly aging society.
We will more often be looking at the stars and sending rockets to other planets. We will demand the extinction of hunger and injustice, creating communities and tokens that will have the power to reach all corners of the globe in a philanthropic torrent never seen before.
Like with any other technological disruption, the economy is being redesigned by those who are willing to change. The Baby Boomers are getting old; GenZ and GenY are those who are in charge now.
Combining GenZ and GenY youth and irreverence with the experience of Millennials and Baby Boomers, a new gamified economy is emerging.
We all need to be open-minded and embrace the new economic design that will bring individual sovereignty and abundance globally.
This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.
If you like to experience Medium yourself, consider supporting me and thousands of other writers by signing up for a membership. It only costs $5 per month, it supports us, writers, and you have the chance to make money with your writing as well. You can cancel the membership anytime. By signing up with this link, you’ll support me directly with a portion of your fee, it won’t cost you more.
Get access to my free books here!