 My name is Paolo Rufino and I'm from the University of York. My research so far has been mostly about gamification, as I will discuss today. Gamification is seen by many to be one of the latest developments of the quantified self-movement, because it combines self-tracking with elements of game design, as I will discuss. So what I would like to talk about today in particular is a very personal story, and it's a story of how I ended up my two years long relationship with Nike Fuel. The reason why I talk about it as a relationship is because I've been wearing this wristband on my wrist for more than two years every day, so I don't think any relationship could get more intimate than this. And breaking up with it has been of course also a very emotional issue. So I would like to talk about how I came up to the decision to break up with Nike Fuel. This story will of course be used to me to talk about some of the keywords of gamification. But first of all, what is Nike Fuel? So Nike Fuel is a technology developed by Nike, the sports company. It's a technology for the measurement of the movement of the body. It has an accelerometer in the wristband. This is supposed to be put on the wrist and to be worn at all times by the user. So the accelerometer records the movement and converts it into a Nike Fuel score, which is visible from the wristband, if you press the button, or by connecting the wristband to the laptop or via Bluetooth to the smartphone app. At midnight the score resets and the counting starts again from zero. It is designed for sport practitioners as well as beginners. It is advertised as a tool for self-improvement by self-tracking. And it is very often used as a reference on techs about gamification and on the quantified self-movement. Gary Wolf actually from Wired Magazine uses Nike Fuel as an example quite often. The reason why I would like to reconstruct this romantic relationship that they had with Nike Fuel is to, in order to, I will use this story to rethink some of the keywords that are very often used to discuss about gamification and also about the quantified self-movement. And these keywords are engagement, first of all, but also movement, time, space, and also maybe life. If there will be time, we will talk a bit about the meaning of life in this presentation. And I would also like to discuss about my own personal experience with Nike Fuel as a strategy to counter some of the dominant narratives on gamification and the quantified self-movement. They try to analyze and quantify the metrics of these tools on their users. So they essentially try to focus on the statistics about users' acquisition and retention seen as methods for telling the truth about the effects of gamification and quantified self-technologies. So instead what I would like to argue is that we can develop multiple counter narratives by looking at how individuals engage with gamification and quantified self-technologies. But first, what is gamification? So in a few words, as defined by Dieter Dingetal quite effectively, is the use of game design elements in non-game context. So gamification is a current trend in the design of apps and services for self-improvement oriented to education, learning, health, and so on. And it is used very often to attract new customers in online and digital businesses. Extensive use of the term is reported since 2010-2011, although the term gamification has been used also at the beginning of 2000. These courses about gamification are quite dominated by the marketing consultancy sector. And when Dieter Dingetal defined in 2011 gamification as the use of game design elements in non-game context, what they meant was that with game design elements is what they broadly defined as elements that are characteristic to games. And more specifically, these are usually interface and game design patterns such as badges, levels, scores, rankings, leaderboards, rewards, and so on. So for example with Nike Fuel, what you get once you upload your data on your personal service, your personal profile is a series of statistics about your own activity and you can compare them with your own performance from previous days and you can compare it in the future with how you will move in the following days and you get a series of badges and scores to kind of reward yourself if you have been moving throughout the day. So it reminds a game-like experience. In the last few years we have seen the emergence of many events and publications and conferences about gamification. We have the website gamification.co owned and managed by a game zigerman who is one of the gurus of gamification. It's a website that updates on daily news in case stories about gamification if you want to spend time on the website you will see that every day has very different stories. So gamification is seen as a very broad phenomenon that can include stories about health, education, and also for the improvement of the conditions of labor and work, for example. But also mostly brand loyalty and consumer retention. Most of the stories reported on gamification.co are about how businesses have been improving their consumer retention by using gamification. There is also an annual conference called Gamification Summit organized by Gabe Zigerman again every year in San Francisco since 2011. There are also, of course, many publications. The book Gamification by Design, Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps, the one at your left, is authored by Gabe Zigerman and Christopher Cunningham is probably the most popular book. And in textbooks on gamification such as Gamification by Design, gamification is mostly presented as a technique. It's a technique based on the collection and analysis of previous experiences in user engagement. So gamification is there presented as a series of very practical and operational suggestions on how to involve the users, be they customers, citizens, employees, or gamers, and how to maximize their performance through the creation of this game-like scenario. So in order to achieve this goal, gamified technologies need to collect and archive data about the user. And data needs to be first archived and processed to later become part of the game. And it is collected according to a principle of transparency as you can see if you read these textbooks. Gamification proposes itself as a technique to play with the truths, with the facts about the user, and attempts to assist the user in improving those true facts, those real data about the self. So here you can see how the connection can easily be made with the quantified self-movement, which very similarly proposes to quantify the self in order to improve it. And the quantified self-movement has in fact originated in a context which is very similar to gamification. It is mostly the TED Talk series. Both terms and expressions have been made popular around 2010-2011 when mostly through the pages of Wired Magazine both gamification and the quantified self-movement receive extensive exposure. So collection and data processing is oriented towards the improvement of life. Life is intended as the sum of the data about a person body as it is generated during daily activities. The quantified self is also promoted as a solution to medical problems and for the improvement of certain characteristics of the body. So gamification can actually be seen as a further step in the process of quantifying the self, in which the improvement of life happens through a game-like environment and towards the establishment of practices of participation between users. Now one of the key words of the discourses about gamification is engagement. So engagement is seen by many authors who work on gamification as the sort of the holy grail of gamification. It's the most important concept. Once you are capable of designing an effective and engaging experience you are a master of gamification. So engagement is used as a term to discuss and represent the extent to which players are using the game and being influenced by the game. Zickerman and Cunningham in gamification by design actually started their text with the definition of engagement. And this is how they define it. Determine engagement in a business sense, they say, indicates the connection between a consumer and a product or service. Unsurprisingly, the term is also used to name the period in a romantic couples relationship during which they are preparing and planning to spend the rest of their lives together. Engagement is the period of time at which we have a great deal of connection with a person, place, thing or idea. Somehow this definition is seen as being too broad and too problematic by the two authors so they quite quickly narrow it down in something much more prosaic and they say that engagement maybe is better if you quantify it through an e-score or engagement score which includes recency, frequency, duration, virality, rate, etc. I will not go into the details of this mostly because actually I quite like the broad definition that they first define and that they so quickly dismiss. So engagement, if we take it in its more kind of romantic interpretation so what is it? It's a special kind of relationship and it's a relationship that precedes a passage towards a more binding relationship. So engagement is by definition expected to end at one point and transform into something else. Engagement is a term which actually does not simply define a relationship but a relationship between two things that are about to change the relationship. So it implies change. It implies movement towards a point of modification of the relationship itself. It implies progress towards an event that will alter the terms of the engagement itself. Engagement implies change and movement. Now what's interesting is that Nike Fuel, this gadget is in fact sold and advertised as a technology for the quantification of movement and movement is the keyword used by Nike to advertise its own product and I think it's not just a coincidence. So what I would like to show you now is the ad used by Nike to present its product. I would like you to focus on the words that are actually used by the voice-over to describe Nike Fuel. Well, it is a presentation about technological failures anyway, so it's perfectly, it fits perfectly with what I'm about to say. Experience all tell us that movement is life and that the more we move, the more we live. It's something athletes have understood from the beginning. The kind of movement it takes to improve your game is the kind of movement it takes to improve your life. But unlike sport, life doesn't come with convenient ways of measuring movement. So we developed one, Nike Fuel, a single universal unit uniquely designed to measure the movement of the entire human body for the entire human race. Whatever your weight, whatever your gender, whatever your activity. It's that simple and that revolutionary. So get out there, find what fuels you and get moving. Okay, sorry for the interruption. So movement is life is the slogan by Nike and this is the text of the voice-over, right? So what I would like to focus on is the first part of it where the voice-over says our minds, our bodies and our experience all tell us the movement is life and that the more we move, the more we live. Now, the video shows people of different ages, different races, practicing sports at more or less professional levels. They all move and therefore they all live according to the syllogies implicated by the presentation given in the spot. So the slogan movement is life. It's quite key to understand Nike Fuel. But how is Nike really understanding movement and life? So what I would like to argue in this presentation is that Nike's understanding of movement is actually read the homogeneous, static and spatialized. So what Nike is ultimately promoting is a kind of movement that remains static. Now, in order to argue about this, I would like to confront Nike's slogan movement is life with the very same slogan pronounced by someone else by Henry Berkson who similarly concluded that movement is life much earlier with very different conclusions coming from very different premises. So Henry Berkson in Time and Free Will actually explains his idea of movement and life. Now, I will not go into the details of his explanation but I will only stop on one argument. Unfortunately, I will need to show another video now. So hopefully it's going to be much smoother. So what I would like to show you is a video by the Open University where they explain the paradox of Zeno, in particular the story of Achilles and the tortoise. Now, this paradox formulated by the Greek philosopher has been received by a computation or an explanation by Henry Berkson much later on. And through the explanation of this paradox, I would like to introduce Berkson's understanding of movement. First, the tortoise is given a slight head start. Anyone fancying a flutter would still rush to put their money on Achilles but Zeno pointed out that to overtake him, Achilles would first have to cover the distance to the point where the tortoise began. In that time, the tortoise would have moved so Achilles would have to cover that distance giving the tortoise time to amble forwards a bit more. Logically, this would carry on forever. However small the gap between them, the tortoise would still be able to move forwards while Achilles was catching up. Meaning that Achilles could never overtake. Taken to an extreme, this bizarre paradox suggests that all movement is impossible. But it did lead to the realization that something finite can be divided an infinite number of times. This concept of an infinite series is used in finance to work out mortgage payments which is why they take an infinite amount of time to pay off. So, what was Bergson's response to the paradox of Zeno? Well, it was that, of course, Achilles actually will reach and pass the tortoise because it is much faster. But the paradox of Zeno remains unsolvable as long as movement is seen as homogeneous and specialized as Bergson puts it. So in this quote Bergson explains the problem quite well. So why does Achilles outstrip the tortoise? Because each of Achilles' steps and each of the tortoise's steps are indivisible acts insofar as they are movements and there are different magnitudes insofar as they are space. This is what Zeno leaves out of the account when he reconstructs the movement of Achilles. Forgetting that space alone can be divided and put together again in any way we like and thus confusing space with motion. So according to Bergson, the movements of Achilles and the tortoise are different in kind while space can differ by degree, by magnitude it can be more or less. So according to Bergson, movement has its own duration and duration cannot be reduced to space. The space surrounding Achilles and the tortoise is, in fact, homogeneous and can be divided an infinitely number of time in infinitely smaller fragments but the movements of Achilles and the tortoise are not similarly homogeneous and happen in time as much as in space. So Bergson solves the paradox of Zeno by introducing what he names intuition and this is what Deleuze later on will define as stating a problem and solving it in terms of time rather than of space. The sports company Nike, instead, actually reinforces the paradox by Zeno by specialising movement and life with it. Bergson will say that Nike actually uses an intellectual approach rather than an intuitive approach. So when intellect is analytical in that it divides and recomposes things in order to give us the knowledge that we need to satisfy our needs, intuition gives us instead the knowledge of how things are in constant movement and always in the process of becoming other. So this is why ultimately I believe that Nike's conception of movement and of life actually remains static. And Nike actually says this explicitly in its advertisement, if you remember. They say, Nike, if you will, it's supposed to measure the movement of the entire human body for the entire human race, whatever your weight, whatever your gender, whatever your activity. So they're essentially saying that there are no movements that can be different in kind or quality. They cannot be homogeneously quantified by the wristband. But then how can anyone really be engaged and happily engaged with something that doesn't move, something that is so static. So how can engagement make anyone happy if there are no differences in kind between the various movements that the couple goes through together? Now, during my relationship with Nike, if you will, there's been a time actually where that I should have triggered my attention. It did only much later on. After about nine months of our relationship, an event happened that actually could have changed my relationship with it. It didn't raise any particular concern at the time, but it gave me later a good reason to rethink the value of our engagement. So after about nine months for the date of purchase, I had the wristband at the technical fault and it was not working properly. Essentially, it was altering the data whenever I was traveling to a different time zone. So I wrote to Nike's account on Twitter, as you can see, that's from December 2014, trying to report the problem. This went on for a few weeks and ultimately was offered to replace my wristband. I was given a new one. Now, the problem was that the Nike Fuel wristband that I got as a replacement was working exactly like the previous one, but of course without the technical fault. So everything was fine, it seemed. But actually, much later on, I started questioning what really happened there. So what was I really engaging with if the wristband had been replaced? Was I engaging with Nike Fuel as a concept, an abstract concept? Or was I actually engaging with something else? Did the terms of our engagement change somehow? Or should they have changed? And will Nike Fuel as a wristband work exactly in the same way if it moved to someone else? And of course, of course it did. It doesn't quantify my own movement, but anyone's movement. Which, of course, might sound like an obvious statement, but in fact, actually, it triggered a consideration in me. Because relationships sometimes come to an end when there is an unexpected event that changes the terms of the relationship. For example, someone cheats, or someone needs to move to a different town, changing job, whatever. And these events are seen as a rapture in an established order, which makes the previous condition of the relationship impossible to recover. Events of this kind cannot be undone. So in those circumstances, it is usually said that nothing can be the same ever again. Between us, nothing can be the same ever again. In my case, actually, I slowly started to realize that by swapping the wristband with a new one, everything will have always stayed the same forever, which is much worse. So after these considerations, I came to the conclusion that Nike Fuel and I could actually replace each other with no significant consequences. So in other words, the daily scores that I accumulated for over two years, while being different from each other by their degree or intensity, by being different in magnitude, being higher or lower scores, were unlikely to ever become of a different kind, of a different quality. A quality that would be incomparable and indivisible by the same criteria applied to all the other previous measurements that are also going to be applied to all my future movements. So the game of gamification, as we know, never really ends. We know that tomorrow the game will be repeated according to the same criteria, according to the same mechanics. Our engagement will always be measured and evaluated through the same criteria of the present. So if this was really a romantic relationship, a romantic engagement, it could be said that Nike Fuel is a wristband that never becomes a ring. It never becomes something different. Okay, so what are my conclusions after this experience with Nike Fuel? So by telling this personal story, I've been trying to reflect on some of the most common use keywords of gamification and quantified self. First of all, engagement but also movement, time and life to a certain extent. We have also seen how these are discussed by Nike and it's in the presentation of its Nike Fuel product and also as they appear in the literature on gamification and the quantified self movement. I have approached this through a personal story, one that looks at my own engagement with Nike Fuel and also the failure of the promise of movement as it was advertised by Nike. And particularly at the static conception of time and life that the technology ultimately offers. So within these conditions, our relationship could only come to an end. Our relationship that was supposed to be since the beginning all about movement was not really going anywhere. So in conclusion, I think we can maybe start thinking about other keywords, not necessarily to replace engagement, but to maybe further kind of define what we are really doing when we engage with our quantified selves. I don't think that engagement really works ultimately because it promises change, a change that never really happens, a mutual change that is supposed to happen at one point in time. So this implied promise of movement and mutual change is necessarily going to fail and disappoint. Engagement implies its own end, its own transformation in a relationship of a different kind. But as it is currently understood in texts about on-gamification, engagement can only change by magnitude, by quantity. As you might remember when I first introduced the definition of engagement by Zygerman and Cunningham, they evaluated to a metric to a score. So it can get higher or lower, but it's never going to change in kind. So rather than engagement, maybe we can start thinking about gamification and quantified selves as things that we to live with more broadly, as temporary companions. We can think of our relationship with our quantified selves, maybe in terms of kinship, which is I think a much slightly more preferable as it is open to uncertainty, it is open to change, it is open to the possibility that relations might also come to an end. It is open to the possibility of unpredictable events actually happening in the relationship with the other. It also looks at the events of the relationship, rather than looking at engagement as homogeneous, as an homogeneous condition to be analyzed through metrics and statistics. It opens therefore to an intuitive understanding of gamification in quantified self, one that considers the problems in terms of time rather than space in a constant process of becoming a movement rather than as something static. Accidentally, this might also be a suggestion for developers and designers. What would be a gamification or a quantified self experience which actually opens to and welcomes uncertain events, which is expected to change in time, which might change in time, and that changes the terms of the engagement radically in a way that cannot be undone. What could be this other kind of gamification in quantified self? It will definitely require, from the side of the user, a different kind of engagement, a different kind of interaction, interactions that are personal, intuitive, timely, and unique, that cannot be repeated. So I'm not sure how this engagement with these quantified selves would be like exactly, but I'm sure it would be different, it would be much more interesting and certainly much more fun to play with. Thank you.