In the general darkness – an almost total absence of data and therefore of users – of the map of Afghanistan on the Strava cycling and running tracking application, a tiny tangle of isolated lines in the south of the country easily caught the eye. And it could only indicate one thing: not the morning run of a Pashtun shepherd, a highly improbable even if not impossible event, but the daily training of some soldiers of a US military base. It was 2018, and the war in Afghanistan was still in full swing: fortunately the Taliban did not notice the opportunity in time, which was then “hidden” and fixed by the app’s technicians before an attack on the not so secret base, making that was the first attack carried out thanks to a morning jog recorder. Strava, four-five years later, has become one of the most popular tracking apps on the planet, covering over 30 sports, and the gamification of our lives has turned into something so pervasive that it has spread far beyond sports .
Anyone who goes for a run occasionally uses a mobile app to track their progress. But if not many years ago it was enough to record our average speed, the travel time and perhaps a map of the route taken (some even enjoyed, running, composing drawings and writings, like the Instagram user @dick_run_claire who, while jogging -peni has dedicated an entire account), today a good race tracking application does much more. Set goals, first and foremost, to give you a lure to chase, a goal that can spark the will to beat laziness. But, also, wear the shoes of a coach or a psychologist. This is for example the case of Nike Running Club, which speaks to you through the figure of Coach Bennett. Bennett, the Global Head Coach of Nike Run Club, encourages you, spurs you, whispers to you, reassures you. You can even think, sometimes, that he listens to you, that he reads your thoughts. «You started. The hardest part is over », he says, reassuring you. And he doesn’t just teach you how to run to reach one more goal, the application: he also tells you to stop in time, not to run too much. That is, to stop before getting tired, before ruining your breath, your mood, and perceiving that run (which you’ll have to want to do again) as too tiring. «We are learning with every step we take», whispers Coach Bennett.
Naturally, gamified fitness apps exploded during and after the lockdown: four billion people locked up at home are a pool of potential users that is otherwise impossible to replicate. Not everyone had the intention of (or the strength to) keep fit, but the downloads, in those absurd months, have skyrocketed, and many have since become loyal. Strava in particular increased profits by 70% in 2021, also riding a global boom in the use of bicycles in amateur but still performing contexts. The Strava model is of the “freemium” type: that is, the app can be used without paying a single euro, but to access certain contents and certain functions, a monthly subscription must be paid (very low, it must be said). The tracking and archiving of so-called “segments”, their comparison with those of friends, acquaintances or followers, is one such case. What are segments, though? In short: the function that revolutionized Strava, making it an application with over one hundred million users. Segments are bits of a very popular road or trail, such as a certain climb, or a particularly adventurous stretch of off-road, or a spectacular straight. There is a start and finish automatically detected by the app when you hover over it, and it allows you to race anyone even without being “at the same time”. A constant challenge, in practice.
I ask Carlo M for an opinion on Strava and the segments, whom I often see on Instagram while he documents his training sessions or his cycling weekends around Bergamo, he tells me: «The real races are different, but the segments are one of the things that makes every workout or outing more fun». Today there are more than 20 million segments in the world, and each user can create one, in order to compete/play with friends from a particular area. «They serve both to be able to challenge each other with friends (and enemies) and to test themselves on their past results». So I ask him if it isn’t risky to compete in unprotected contexts, probably because I have this natural tendency towards pessimism. He says no, more or less: «On the bike the segments are uphill, those worthy of pushing. And uphill you go slowly. There are also flat segments that are dangerous, and just don’t challenge yourself on those. In the end, there have always been unauthorized races, even the so-called “sprint to the cartel” is a sort of race in training, and you certainly don’t need apps to do it”.
The function of communities, in the context of gamification, is fundamental. After Covid it has become one of the magic words of marketing (always hand in hand with the ever-present sustainability) and fitness/gaming apps are no exception: the desire to compete (running, cycling, or in other ways) is often based on the achievements of friends and family, as well as your own. Ettore C. is a writer, he has always been a self-taught sportsman, and he tells me: «In my opinion, sport is one of the few sectors in which gamification is an asset. Maybe it’s because I’m eternally demotivated, but if I didn’t have a tracker I wouldn’t try to improve my times, while now I do it, let’s say, without really thinking about it. Not that I care, but it comes naturally to me. Which is kind of the point of gamification – isn’t it? – encourage you to certain behaviors without you having to think about it». I ask him: aren’t there risks in all this tracking of habits? Strava, for example, shares all the data with the various government divisions for transport, and it does it – all right – for the safety of cyclists, but it is still private data in the hands of governments. “It’s a real but uncontrollable risk,” he says. «I think that unless we engage in what is a capillary and long battle like that for workers’ rights, we must assume that all our data is in everyone’s hands. So in the abstract yes, the running app spies on us: but everything spies on us».
When I started doing yoga several years ago, my teacher suggested that I read Indian texts to better “understand” the physical activity I was doing. Today, when I open the “fitness-yoga” application that I decided to download after months of stalking/targeting in Instagram ads, I instead find a series of challenges to have a “beach body”. And it’s not just sports or yoga that have gamified: if I want to concentrate on just one “task” while working on the computer, rather than jumping from one tab to another, I can count on Forest, this app I had heard so much about and which measures concentration with a sapling that gradually grows to form a small forest. Ironic, I think not without a certain sadness: the same tools that destroyed our attention now try to recreate it as if it were an obstacle course. So do we need to make everything a game, to be able to do everything right? We have become too dumb to start and finish a task without making it look like Crash Bandicoot (reference from Millennial, alas)? I would say yes, and that even the remedies for this nonsense seem made to be read and used by a fool: you’ve spent too much time on Instagram, my phone tells me every week, urging me to spend less time, but still doing it through that same screen, that same device. But it means something else: that everything is also performance, and at the end of every performance there is a victory or a defeat.
Andrea Daniele Signorelli writes about technology and digital innovation on Tomorrow, The print and other newspapers, and in 2021 he published Technosapiens. How the human being turns into a machine. The risks, he says, are not so much for the data, but more for how our behavior is transformed: «In general, it is clear that these apps for physical activity encourage and encourage us to exercise more consistently and professionally and to make it more fun and engaging. And as far as physical activity alone is concerned, I see nothing wrong with it. What worries me personally is if you look at these apps in a somewhat more general context: they are apps that add to the apps for managing our time, which obviously always aim to maximize the efficiency of how we use our time ». Productivity as the final goal, more than well-being: «Then there are those who also want to gamify sleep who tell you what time to go to sleep: also in this case it is clear that they are tools aimed at well-being and also at maximizing our efficiency, because it is always through these claims that they are promoted. So the problem is not the fitness apps: but that these too fit into a social framework in which gamification is used only for one purpose: to make us more performing, more efficient, more productive». So? «I don’t want to go so far as to say that the giants of Silicon Valley are hetero-directing our behavior to maximize our production capacity, however it is clear that we are not always the first beneficiaries of maximum efficiency and rationalization of our behaviour. The risk is that we are treated like machines to squeeze more and more, but making everything more fun».
It is inevitable that the gamification of sport and our free time will continue to grow in the years to come. It’s also nearly impossible to predict how: twenty years ago, on the other hand, we never imagined we’d be able to track our sleep patterns (and our snoring, and our tummy and back tossing) and then share them on a social network, and instead here we are going to bed when Sleep Cycle tells us (I don’t, I swear). However, it will be necessary to resist, and adopt only what will really improve the tenor of our lives, and not the performance of our living. Don’t make everything a game, therefore, because the battle for our attention and for control of our time is not a game at all: sleep as much as we like, walk without knowing where we’re going, idle when and how we feel like it.