Just for the sake of argument, what would you think of using notifications and gamification to get people to, say, work their way through trigonometry problems or foreign-language practice?
I turned off all the notifications I had to practice language. They happened at whatever time they happen, which is always when I'm in the middle of something else. What I do instead is, I have a certain time of day that I do my intensive study, because that takes a chunk of concentration time and was never going to happen unless I actually made time for it. And I get through my flashcards in little spurts; I just do 5 or ten of the whenever I have to wait a minute on a recompile or integration tests or wait on the microwave oven or whatever.
A good, effective habit is one that is internalized like that. I really don't think you can effectively replace it with an external interruption.
I especially see gamification as problematic for learning things. It seems to me to be a 21st century version of teaching to the test. You end up learning what's easy to gamify instead of what you should be learning. If that's literally the only way you can motivate yourself, I suppose you've got to do what you've got to do. But, if you will take for the sake of argument that learning a language is a means to an end, and not an end in and of itself, my experience with Duolingo is that I got really good at using the language to earn achievements on Duolingo. My real goal, though, is using the language to read books and have conversations. So I've had much better results with (non-gamified) language learning methods where the reward for my work is getting to do the thing I actually want to do: reading books and having conversations.
Good answers. Conceivably notifications could be useful for someone who's unwilling/unable to schedule intensive study time; but in that case, that raises the question of why they're studying something they're not motivated to study, or why they lack organizational/planning capability; but there might be common cases where the adults say "fuck it, I'm not going to try to solve those underlying problems, I just want to make them learn this stuff in the short term"; but one might rightly say, this is short-sighted child-rearing for short-sighted people, and keep it the hell away from me and my kids.
There might remain a question of whether it's better than what's currently being done by the short-sighted. But if more humane approaches stand a chance of winning out, then it might be best to not give any support to the competition, and even discourage others from doing so. That type of conclusion one should hesitate to draw, but it might be right.
As for gamification, perhaps if you could gamify "reading books and having conversations"—but as you say, by default what you'll get is just what's easy to gamify.
Even if it's not harmful, I have absolutely no need for points and achievement badges for reading books and having conversations. The whole point of those sorts of activities is that they're not games. They have their own, different value they provide to my life. When I want a game, I'll play a game.
Wow, this is such a wonderful distinction. I am sorry I do not have anything to add on to your point, but I hope to bring your conclusion up in future conversations.
