The lever

A misconception about gambling machines and games is that players are entirely motivated by extrinsic factors like potential wins, and it's the variability that leads to addiction. But people interested in gambling are also interested in achieving a complete immersion in the virtual activity, and it's that effect that designers of gambling machines work to achieve.

Temu

When I first used Temu, I was surprised to see how little there was to do. Temu's visuals of luck-based games are mostly animations. This is the bare minimum of user active engagement, requiring one tap at most.

Low-effort mechanics, asinine discounts on strange items, and the absurd level of spam in the notification center create a sense of urgency for purchasing often, not expensively. The game isn't to gamble on discounts, but to gamble on the quality of the products ordered; the most hardcore Temu users have a lot of small-value purchases. I don't think it's fair to call this "gambling" in the usual sense; users receive their ordered items, but it's the item quality relative to the price and discounts that create a dopamine lever, in anticipation for the big reveal. Is the ordered item going to be a steal, or a flop?

In these instances, I feel that gamification is done out of a desire to stand out to the target audience, rather than as a lever of engagement. Users could potentially spend insane amounts of money on items from Temu, but most people are turned off by the casino-like aesthetic.

A worse example is adding a monetary value to a cookie clicker. Cookie clickers operate on the same principle (you can make a game out of everything as long as you attach a counter to it) but they only become "dangerous" if you nudge users to connect a payment method to it. For most digital products, the vast majority of gamification cases are harmless, most are a turn-off, and few take advantage of dopamine levers. The aim isn't to keep users glued to an interface, but to get them to spend money.

A prominent example of what is *not* gamification, but a severe dopamine lever, is the infinite feed from Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. It's hard to call these addictive mechanics *gamified* because they're not about the emotional pay-off of... I don't know, memes? They're about leveraging a variable reward system to get users to see a lot of ads.

In these situations, gamifying the interface would probably be socially conscious, like: adding a progress bar that counts the number of memes you watch, unlocking achievements for not being a doom scroller, sharing them on social media to motivate others, setting daily, traceable goals to reduce the time spent watching reels, etc.