Can one of them speak Dutch or Japanese?
Please I’m crying !
Yes, I really started to notice that my goal on chess.com is not to enjoy chess as a game, but to improve my rating in rapid, blitz, bullet, etc. I don’t like playing bullet at all, but the site seems to force me to do it, because it’s so beautiful when your rating in rapid and bullet is about the same level.
Q (as posted in the blog): So how do you avoid walking into the trap of getting caught up in gamification games?
A: Set the option to "do not show rating points" (or whatever it is called).
That is what I did after realizing that I tend to play on and on, not because of having fun but because of regaining lost rating points.
I recently redownloaded Wordle. I used to play this game for dozens of minutes daily, sometimes even a full hour at a time. (One reason I stopped is knowing that my opponents could be using power-ups, and I wouldn't know. However, it has a one-player feature.)
The game (like so many others before it) has been dastardly twisted into some massive reward-caching bullshit. It's infuriating. So many menus to click through. Am I more addicted? No, I'm pissed off. I click on the game once every few days, I solve the daily word, then maybe one or two classicals, and i *leave.*
It's not an improvement. I'm sick of everyone who makes these corporate things acting like it is. I don't *want* to be addicted to everything. I would just like to live; to breathe; to be whatever I want on any given day.
As an online chess player, i can confirm that i'm a pigeon, and i'm trapped
I love how i missed like half the sounds after probably 15k games on chess.com
The trend noted in your blog parallels another disturbing trend:
https://youtu.be/aByWLQ7h2n0
"Stop making a game out of chess, you're ruining all the work!" :-D
Good article, but I can't help associating the Skinner "[pigeon religion](https://www.all-about-psychology.com/superstition-in-the-pigeon.html)" experiments with a recent blog post here on Lichess about how professional chess players are very superstitious. I mean, sure, I hate chesscom as much as the next guy, but they are only exacerbating a problem that already exists.
I believe that it's important to understand one's own motivations for playing chess, or doing anything really, and in that case gamification loses a lot of its power. And yes, exposing the tricks they use to lure you in is important for that process.
As a shooter game addict myself, the only solution I found was going cold turkey for years at a time. This is serious stuff.