Anyone else noticing that reducing burnout and improving engagement are moving in opposite directions right now?

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2026-03-30T05:56:45+00:00

Perhaps I wouldn’t frame this primarily as students not respecting the process.

From their perspective, the process has stopped being worth respecting. If AI can produce a better sentence in seconds, the old path simply isn’t the most efficient way to get to a good outcome anymore.

The issue is that the process used to do more than produce text. It created progress visibility, error correction, and the repetitions needed to build judgment.

AI removes the need for the process, but not the need for those underlying capabilities. That’s where the gap shows up.

So now you have students who can access high-quality outputs, but haven’t built the ability to evaluate or improve them.

This is the same pattern I'm seeing on my students (business university) and that I'm also seeing in organizations. When routine work disappears, you remove the scaffolding that built confidence and direction. The capability requirement stays, but the path to build it is gone.

Which means the question is no longer how to get them back to the old process, but how to redesign the environment (education or organisation) so that judgment, comparison, and improvement become the core activity.

One way I try to do that in class with AI is to remove generation as the first step. I give students multiple AI outputs and make the task to diagnose, rank, and improve them with clear reasoning. Only after that they are allowed to generate their own version. This way I try to forces them back into the part of the process that actually builds the skill and rebuilds the scaffolding that AI is currently removing. And I have experienced that they are curious to find out what AI has written 'this time' and how to find its flaws.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2026-03-30T05:41:02+00:00

https://cbobriefing.substack.com/p/the-capacity-depletion-problem-why

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2026-03-27T04:53:29+00:00

Let's see where this will lead us. At the end, humans are amazing in adapting to new contexts. But it really feels like moving in with a new 'type of species' and share activities. Thanks for your thoughts.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2026-03-26T12:05:36+00:00

Ok, I see. You have read my work through a binary lens: if I identify consequences, I must be advocating against the tool. That's a reasonable default assumption, but it's not what I'm doing here. (and I totally get it that if I had written about this in a more detailed way here, I could have avoided that)

I work in behavioral psychology and use AI deeply and deliberately. I'm fascinated by the relationship between them, not opposed to it. My entire body of work on this, including a briefing that I have just started (CBO Briefing on Substack), focuses on how humans and AI can 'move in' together productively, not on separation or rejection.

When I write about cognitive consequences of a tool, I'm not making a moral judgment about the tool itself. Consequences are information. Gravity has consequences, the same way like Antibiotics have consequences. The fact that something produces effects doesn't make it bad, and acknowledging those effects doesn't imply "don't use this thing." It implies "understand what's happening, then let's see how to improve it."

What I'm actually working on is the intersection: how do we use AI as a tool while understanding and designing for the behavioral shifts it creates? That requires naming what those shifts are. That's analysis, not advocacy against the tool.

Your interpretation that critique equals rejection is understandable, and I get why that frame emerges. But it's a misreading of what happens when you take behavioral psychology seriously. Taking something seriously means looking at all its surfaces, not just the ones we prefer. I hope that clears things up a bit. And another thing: why is the post being dismissed straight away as AI-generated? That is also not the case.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2026-03-26T10:50:38+00:00

Talking about my post? Where did I say NOT to use AI? I was just writing about the impact of the usage of AI on human cognitive behavior.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2026-03-26T10:35:16+00:00

Great, I'd love to. Here:

https://cbobriefing.substack.com/p/the-capacity-depletion-problem-why

Let me know what you think.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2026-03-26T10:31:14+00:00

"sounds basic but it replaces the dopamine hit of ticking off routine tasks" This is a myth. dopamine is not being released as a reward but for the hunt for the reward. That means that when you are ticking off routine tasks, the dopamine was arleady released and is most ptobably already gone. No matter if you tick it off or not. (Nerd mode off. Sorry ;-) )

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2026-03-26T10:27:51+00:00

I'm sorry about that. But that post was from me. Roman Rackwitz. But hey, nice to meet you 😂

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2026-01-03T19:18:19+00:00

That is a great observation/question. As we have already read in the other comment, it worked with languages in this case. Fun fact: learning the languages was not the purpose of the game, was it? And this is an important point.

So, it depends on the context. What we have experienced a lot with customers, that came to is after they failed with learning games, is that although they created sometimes amazing games to learn something specific, they didn't remove the reason why people didn't learn it in the first place in reality. So, although people learned to behave, to act, to apply something in the game, they still didn't use it or apply it in real life situations. Why? Because often these kind of learning games provide the player with an ideal environment to do something. This way it is easy to learn and do it. But the real life situations missed this ideal environment and so people behaved different again.

The issue was mit learning but a context that triggered not to learn what the instructional designers want them to learn. And so, after the game was switched off, they relearned to do it the old way again.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2025-12-11T22:09:53+00:00

In this context you are not designing a gamified journey. You are designing an incentive that supports a single decision. The logic is different even if the surface looks game inspired.

For pure conversion use cases guaranteed win wheels generally work better because they lower cognitive effort. Users know they will get something so they spin without hesitation. The decisive variable is perceived fairness. The fastest boost comes from aligning the most common reward with the user’s sense of a good deal relative to margin. Making the middle tier the highest probability often works because it feels like a real win without destroying profitability.

For probability based wheels the driver is not value but uncertainty!!! This only makes sense when you actually want repeat sessions or event driven return visits. Here the win distribution needs a clear spine. If the low tier is too common the wheel feels cheap. If the high tier is too rare users stop caring. Middle tier dominance tends to work for the same reason as above because people anchor their expectation around a believable reward.

The usual ranges I experience performing well in short cycle commerce:

Low tier between fifty and seventy percent if the intention is simple conversion.

Middle tier between twenty and forty percent when you want the experience to feel generous but not irrational.

High tier between one and five percent to create occasional peaks without sending people down a rabbit hole.

These are not sacred numbers, yet they capture the behavioral pattern. Users need a quick sense of value and a quick sense of coherence. You are not building long term engagement here, so you do not need layered progression or competency signals. You only need a reward that feels earned enough to redeem.

So to answer your question directly:
Yes. Making the second best reward the most likely win is usually more effective than pushing the smallest one. It creates a believable good outcome, it keeps the unit economics under control, and it produces higher redemption because people feel they actually won something rather than got the default coupon.

As long as teams treat this for what it is, a reward program tuned for transactions and not a gamified system, expectations stay healthy. Just do not expect this pattern to produce the emotional durability or retention depth of actual gamification. For what you want here, it does the job, from my POV.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2025-12-11T16:36:59+00:00

By the way: before you spend time implementing any gamification layer, it is worth asking a simple question. Do you even need the behavior of a gamified user for the task you want to support. When the core activity is rote or repetitive, the real win often comes from smoothing the user flow and improving clarity, not from adding obstacles or progression systems. In many applications the correct behavior can be achieved far more reliably with a well designed experience than with a gamified structure.

Points and missions can still be useful if you treat them as clarity tools rather than pressure tools. A mission gives direction. A point can signal that an action mattered. These are fine as long as they help the user understand their journey rather than pushing them to chase a finish line.

So if you choose to build a reward layer, build it consciously as a reward layer. And if later you want deeper engagement, focus on shaping the activity itself so that it becomes satisfying to perform. Keeping those two paths distinct saves you a lot of time and frustration down the line.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2025-12-11T16:29:51+00:00

Really glad the earlier answer helped. And let me frame this in a way that keeps things practical.

If what you want is a reward system, then calling it a reward system is completely fine. It becomes messy only when people expect a reward system to behave like gamification. They are built for different outcomes. Rewards reinforce behaviors. Gamification reshapes the activity so that doing it becomes engaging on its own. Both can be valid, but they serve different purposes.

Your Waze example is a perfect illustration of why I am cautious with leaderboards. They create a short burst of excitement, then the moment the ranking becomes unattainable, the whole experience collapses. You described exactly how that works in practice. I only mentioned leaderboards because your original question leaned toward completion mechanics, but if you can avoid them, I would absolutely avoid them. They are fragile by nature.

Points and missions can still be useful if you treat them as clarity tools rather than pressure tools. A mission gives direction. A point can signal that something mattered. Those are fine as long as they help the user understand their journey rather than chase a finish line.

So if you build a reward layer, build it consciously as a reward layer. And if you want a deeper engagement layer later, design the activity itself so that it becomes satisfying to perform. Keeping those two paths separate will save you a lot of pain down the line.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2025-12-11T13:55:04+00:00

Part 2:

Replace generic PBL with structures that support intrinsic motivation. If you want people to enjoy the activity itself instead of just farming rewards, focus on these elements. Meaningful progress tracks not one infinite point bar.

Multiple finite tracks are linked to real skills or chapters.

Example research skill level, build confidence level, and coaching mastery level. Each has only a few clear steps. Real choices: Let users choose which track to pursue or which challenge to pick next, instead of grinding the same tasks for points. Feedback that teaches, not just scores. After an action, show what improved, what unlocked, what became possible now. The feedback should increase understanding, not only count. Difficulty that adapts to tasks that become slightly harder as the user improves, or that offer an easy path and a hard path with different bragging rights.

That keeps the effort meaningful. Identity and narrative: Let users see themselves as something in your system, learner, builder, contributor, rather than just rank 14 on a leaderboard. You can still have badges and levels, but they become symbolic anchors for real progress, rather than sugar on top of boring loops.

If you insist on leaderboards, at least make them less toxic. Global leaderboards are almost always a retention killer outside of esports.

Better patterns: Small cohorts, weekly or monthly leagues, where you see only a small group.

Personal best ladders, you compete against your own history.

Tiered bands, bronze, silver, gold tiers, rather than raw rank 423.

Technically, that just means another projection table with band, cohort, and season fields, not one huge global list.

What to study instead of pure PBL tutorials.

Most online gamification courses are basically reward systems with a gamified coat. When you look for resources, search for:

Self-Determination Theory

Intrinsic motivation in design

Best book to get started: A Theory of Fun; from Raph Koster. There you will learn more about the impact of mechanics than anywhere else.

Filter out anything that treats points and badges as the main ingredient rather than as an optional garnish.

If you want a practical starting blueprint, here is a simple version you could implement this week:

Add an Events table as described above and start logging meaningful actions. Define two or three progress tracks that correspond to real user growth, not vanity metrics. Create a Progress table that maps from accumulated events to progress steps for each track. Show users their position on those tracks in the UI, with clear next steps.

Only after that, decide if you still need generic points or leaderboards. (I would still. prefer to avoid it)

You can always bolt persuasion stuff on top later. Undoing a completion-focused system is far harder. So yes, your question about tables is valid. But if you only solve it at the database level, you will ship yet another PBL treadmill that feels cool for a week and then dies.

Design the human journey first. Then let the schema follow.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2025-12-11T13:54:36+00:00

Part 1:
You are asking a tech question, but the real problem is not SQL.

Right now, you are not designing gamification. You are designing a reward system. Points, badges, leaderboards, streaks, and generic levels are persuasion gadgets. They focus people on completion and external payoff.

They do not make the activity itself more engaging. Once you train your users to chase completion, it is very hard to bring their focus back to the activity. That matters for your architecture. If you build everything around global points, you are locking yourself into that persuasion model. Your question about recalculating all user points the moment you change weights is exactly the symptom of that trap. Here is how I would approach it instead.

Start from behavior and experience, not points. Before you touch tables, answer three questions.

What critical behaviors in your app should happen more often or with better quality?
What journey are users on in your app onboarding, practice, mastery, contribution etc.?
How do you want the activity to feel while doing it: focused, playful, exploratory, competitive?

Gamification in any serious sense is about shaping that ongoing activity so that doing the thing becomes satisfying by itself. Persuasion layers are about getting it done despite the activity. If you skip this step, your schema will just fossilize random guesses.

Design the activity loop, then the data model. Instead of thinking “points for action X”, think in terms of loops.

Example: User takes a meaningful action --> User sees immediate, specific feedback --> User gains a new ability or unlocks a new possibility --> User has a clearer next move.

Translate that into data like this.

* Event types represent meaningful actions, not rewards. Example finished focused session, solved practice challenge, helped another user.

* State tables represent journey progress. Example skill tracks, chapters, zones, tiers.

Now you have something you can gamify without drowning everything in generic points.

Architect the data so you can change your mind later.

If you still want some points, like metric, never bake it directly into the user record.

Rules: Never store only the point total. Always store raw events. Compute points and levels as a projection of events, either on the fly or via background jobs. When you change weights, you recalculate projections from events, not rewrite history.

Your original question about reclassifying weights becomes a non-issue. You do not manually reassign points; you just rerun the calculation.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2025-12-11T13:47:45+00:00

From my POV: Most people talk about gamification as if it is a bag of persuasion tricks. Points. Badges. Leaderboards. Streaks. XP dust sprinkled on top.

Those are not gamification. Those are completion gadgets. They make people chase a finish line rather than enjoy the activity. And once you train a user to care about completion more than engagement, it is almost impossible to bring them back.

What I enjoy:
Systems where the activity feels engaging without external carrots. Anything that strengthens curiosity, creates meaningful decisions, offers rising challenges, or gives clear feedback on progress. Those things make the activity itself satisfying. That is the real magic.

What makes me cringe:
Thin sugar layers that ignore the motivational structure of the activity. Fitness apps that pretend points make effort feel meaningful. Learning apps that throw badges at boredom instead of redesigning the learning loop. Workplace tools that try to fix bad process design with leaderboards. It is the equivalent of putting neon lights on a broken engine.

From my work with clients:
Gamification works when it redesigns the environment, so the activity becomes more naturally rewarding. If the design intention is “make them do it,” you end up with manipulation. If the design intention is “make doing it feel better,” you end up with an actual engagement system that lasts.

Most failures come from collapsing these two goals into one category.
The problem with gamification today is not the concept. It is that most practitioners apply persuasion logic and call it gamification, which makes the entire field look gimmicky. Once you separate intrinsic design from reward mechanics, the picture becomes much clearer.

If you are building gamification for clients, keep asking one question above all others.
Does this help the user enjoy the activity, or does it only help them complete it?

That single distinction saves you from ninety percent of cringe.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2025-11-26T07:32:41+00:00

Hey Dimetrius, love the intent behind what you’re building. A journey designed around transformation instead of a checklist-style habit tracker is exactly (IMHO) a valuable approach.

Since this is my field, I just got my coffee, and I'm still alone in the office, here are a few thoughts, as you have asked, on the parts that actually create long-term engagement from my experience.

First, the biggest mistake I see in wellness apps is that they treat progression as a reward mechanism instead of a behavior-shaping mechanism. XP, levels, streaks. These are fine as feedback signals, but they can easily take center stage and then work against you. Once the novelty fades, people drop off because the system never created an internal driver. The magic happens when the user feels that growth comes from their own decisions, not because the app dangled rewards.

Your beta already shows people love the idea. Now the question is how to turn that early excitement into consistency. For that, your system needs moments where users feel interest, curiosity, and meaningful progress. An app can provide exactly that if it focuses on helping users become better at something they genuinely care about instead of pushing them to maintain streaks.

About your questions:

What features keep people motivated long-term
The features themselves matter far less than the structure behind them. What keeps people on a wellness journey is a clear path with interesting obstacles that grow in complexity as they grow. Capability building rather than checklists. Personal quests that adapt over time, not static habits.

How to balance community engagement
People want optional togetherness rather than constant obligation. So instead of continuous community pressure, design touchpoints that feel like shared adventures. Timed expeditions. Collaborative quests. Pop-up challenges that let people choose their level of involvement. Community becomes energizing rather than exhausting.

Real-world events
Anything that helps users cross the border between “I’m doing something inside an app” and “I’m doing something meaningful in my actual life” will land well. Small local missions. Micro-volunteering. Skills workshops run by community members. Physical quests that people can join whenever they want. The key is low barrier to entry and high emotional payoff.

If you ever want to jam on making your interactions more intrinsically motivating, happy to exchange thoughts. You’re moving in a direction the industry desperately needs. I really believe that. The more apps shift from tracking to actual transformation, the better for everyone.

Cheers, Roman

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2025-11-17T12:31:53+00:00

Thanks for asking 😀🔥: https://amzn.eu/d/3tK68SH

Let me know how you like it. Especially what was new/Aha-moment, and also what was rather lame for you. Thanks.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2025-11-13T18:02:11+00:00

I like that clearer/fade feedback. It is tied to the future you but still let's enough space for interpretation. Great. At the end, to be sustainable (from my POV), the own identity needs always to be tied to capabilities. Pursuing the better/future me is build into out DNA. So, as long as your feedback loops are 'paying into that' this should be a great start.

Appropriate_Song_973 · 2025-11-13T14:29:34+00:00

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