Platform:
Adrian Hon

Date: Wednesday 19 October

Time: 5:00PM

Location: Events Room (1502) and online streaming

Price: Free. Sign up for the in-person event // Sign up for the online event

Adrian Hon is co-founder and CEO at Six to Start, creators of the world's bestselling smartphone fitness game, "Zombies, Run!", with ten million players. He's author of A History of the Future in 100 Objects, a columnist at EDGE magazine, and has spoken at the flagship TED conference, the Long Now Foundation, GoogleX, and Disney Imagineering. Before becoming a game designer, Adrian was a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at Cambridge, UCSD, and Oxford.

In this talk, Adrian will speak about his brand new book, You’ve Been Played (Basic Books 2022), which explores the concept of Gamification. Gamification is the use of ideas from game design, like points, achievements, leaderboards, and missions, for non-game purposes. Over the past decade, it's grown from a mostly harmless curiosity to a cheerful tool of manipulation and coercion that's being deployed against hundreds of millions of workers, students, and citizens around the world. By adopting the friendly aesthetics and instant feedback of video games, gamification puts a new spin on older forms of reward and punishment – one that is becoming inescapable thanks to smartphones, wearables, and ever-present sensors and screens.