Actionable Gamification

It's only May, but this is a strong contender for worst book of the year.The author bounces wildly between two contrasting frames of mind - on the one hand, he seems to presume that you know him, he's famous, and you're reading his book to glean any morsel of wisdom from his written word. And then to hedge his bets, he'll spend paragraphs trying to convince you he ought to be famous and all of the above ought to apply. He keeps alluding to NDAs with famous clients and massive consulting contracts that overturned entire industries, but then begs you to join his failing Facebook group or tweet to his dead hashtag every single chapter.The writing/editing of the book was overall quite poor, with sentences like “For which he was known for” and “... may serve as a more interesting way for you to engage in an entertaining way” standing out (not verbatim as I was listening on audio). Speaking of audio, I listened to the Audible edition and the narrator felt quite poor. At the very least, he didn't contribute to the book feeling genuine.This fits very snugly into my category of “[a:Malcolm Gladwell 1439 Malcolm Gladwell https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1564001739p2/1439.jpg] and [a:Daniel Kahneman 72401 Daniel Kahneman https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615917414p2/72401.jpg] fan club” books, where their literature is copied directly or quoted uncritically. If you want to save yourself one headache you could just read their work I suppose.Overall, this feels very strongly of “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. It's all well and good to say that gamers are driven by a set of core drives, but they get stretched so much by the end that (at best) normal marketing campaigns are forced into his framework, and (at worst) horrifically manipulative practices are justified as games.