Game mechanics have seeped into the real world and are quietly reshaping it. Do you take that for granted too?

When you are handed a “quest” and it works on you, do you ever ask whether this is a form of control?

Sun Chengyuan has just started first grade, and she has an after-school dance class to get to. After more than an hour of dancing she comes home and, without stopping for dinner, hurries to finish the day’s assignments in an app called Zuoyehezi. Every evening Zuoyehezi issues a report on how the whole class did, with the three fastest finishers listed at the top. Sun Chengyuan does not want to fall behind.

Ma Qiaoke, an anime fan, got hooked on capsule toys in college. Over the past two years the machines have turned up everywhere — on side streets, in subway stations, in shopping malls. She can never resist twisting out a couple: swap cash for tokens or scan a QR code to pay, grip the knob, click, and a capsule rolls down the chute. A few years on, her collection fills an entire large storage bin.

When she shops, Wang Lili always asks whether the store has a membership card that earns points. A little over a month ago, having just bought a coffee, she noticed the Costa Coffee app she had been using for more than a year suddenly play an animation congratulating her on becoming a Costa Gold member. Free money out of the sky. She was thrilled.

Li Yanfei fell headlong into the fandom of Rocket Girls 101, the group that debuted out of Idol 101. To win resources and perks for her favorite member, she got several hundred spare QQ accounts and passwords from her fan group’s admin. The moment she has a free minute she logs into them and pumps up her idol’s popularity numbers. Each account takes a little over a minute; over a full month, she reckons, she worked through more than a thousand QQ accounts.

Not long after this year’s Spring Festival, 27-year-old Zhou Zhaoguan began setting his alarm 20 minutes earlier. As soon as he has washed up he opens Ant Forest inside Alipay. A little after seven, he has worked out, is when Ant Forest settles up the energy. Once he has collected his own, he taps into each friend’s avatar and steals theirs, a few grams at a time.

Sun Chengyuan, Ma Qiaoke, Wang Lili, Li Yanfei, Zhou Zhaoguan — all of them have fallen into a system called gamification.

Ma Qiaoke understands gamification best, and understands how it connects to the capsule toy.

The click a capsule makes as it drops was written down by the Japanese as an onomatopoeia: gasha, pronounced roughly “gacha.” Mobile game developers later took the word straight over to describe the card-draw mechanic in their games. Card-draw games eventually became a genre with a name of their own, konpurīto gacha — literally, “complete gacha.”

When she got hooked five or six years ago, card-draw games had not yet caught on. For Ma Qiaoke back then, capsule toys were simply anime merchandise. Because of the size of the capsules, the toys inside are all small, which makes them look finely made. They suit the chibi style, and women like them more. She would fall for a series, learn that certain figures could only be pulled from a machine, and then go hunting for one.

Slowly her attitude shifted. Now, walking past a machine on the street, she will stop and twist out four or five. Even when the series and characters mean nothing to her, she will do one or two: “Well, I’m here, might as well.” She still calls capsule toys merchandise, but they are not like ordinary merchandise. “When I buy other merchandise I know exactly what I’m after… gachapon is just more fun.”

That fun goes beyond the satisfaction of simply buying a thing and settling the bill. Capsule toys come in sets, and which one you get depends on luck and timing. At worst, you can empty the whole machine and still not get what you came for. “You don’t necessarily know what you’re going to pull. But if you get really lucky and hit the character you love, you feel blessed, and you’re happy all day.”

One year at a comics convention, Ma Qiaoke stood at a Pokémon machine, ringed by boys a little younger than her. Click — she fished out the capsule, twisted it open, and found a Mew. It was not the character she wanted most, but the boys behind her whooped and shrieked. Mew is one of the legendary Pokémon; in the games it was originally set up to be uncatchable, and was only later made catchable by special means, and even then only with great difficulty. Mew is rare, so everyone loves Mew. Even though Ma Qiaoke would rather have had a Snorlax, she could not help feeling that this pull was far more exciting than usual.

Still, she has always felt the thrill of a capsule machine cannot touch a card-draw mobile game — even though the shared etymology hints that the two run on the same mechanism: a near-gambling loop in which you have already paid, but still need luck to get what you want.

As a devoted player of Fate/Grand Order, one of the highest-grossing mobile games around, she has spent several 648-yuan top-ups on it — 648 yuan being the largest single top-up Apple’s system allows. She spends far more on the game than on capsules, and finds it far harder to stop, because for the same money a game delivers a more direct and more varied payoff.

A character pulled in FGO is not just artwork on your phone; it also makes you stronger in battle and clears stages faster. The developers hired voice actors for the characters as well, so the game keeps you company by ear. When she fails to pull what she wants, Ma Qiaoke will usually quit a capsule machine after five or six tries — “but my self-control in a game isn’t as good as it is in real life.”

That may be one reason all of this is called gamification and not gachaponification, even though the capsule machine predates the card-draw mobile game by decades.

Chasing gain and dodging harm is the most primal human instinct. Driven by it, people keep doing whatever pays them. In the real world, effort does not always pay. In a virtual game world, developers can guarantee that it does — and that it pays at once.

A 2007 report in Southern Weekly titled “The System” laid out in detail how The Legend of Mir 2, an online game of that era, pulled players in deeper step by step. Spend money and you could buy top-tier gear and materials; your character’s combat power rose; you became someone thousands looked up to. But there is always someone stronger, and an endless run of battles and ranking systems widened the gap between one character and the next, and the gap tempted people to pay again.

For the first time, developers saw how simple it is to steer human behavior, so long as the reward is large enough. The keys are numbers, competition, prompt feedback, room to grow, and never putting an obstacle in front of the player that cannot be cleared. Fed one small win after another, players will repeat a simple, mechanical action forever — topping up their account, for instance.

Then people began to wonder what would happen if the mechanism were carried into the real world. Some believe gamification can remake habits for good — the belief held by Liu Ye, founder of Zuoyehezi: “The game is the end; learning is the means.” The company’s website says: “Zuoyehezi Primary wraps learning in a game — through stage-clearing, head-to-head duels and class-group battles, children go from ‘I have to study’ to ‘I want to study.’”

Sun Chengyuan, at least, is exactly what Liu Ye hoped for. She will hold off dinner to get her homework done early in the app, all for a place on the daily activity leaderboard Zuoyehezi publishes each evening. Three or four minutes late and she drops out of the top three; half an hour late and she cannot make the top ten.

Apart from the copying drills she still has to do by hand to learn how to write characters and words, most of her homework has moved into apps. The one for spoken English is called Kouyu 100. A voice comes out of the phone: “Good morning, Peter.” Sun Chengyuan repeats it: “Good morning, Peter.” If she reads it well the phone says, “Nicely read!” and she claps her hands and moves on to the next line.

Cram schools like Xueersi go further, with online daily check-ins backed by a nakedly financial mechanism. Check in on 20 days in a month and the deposit you paid at the start is refunded in full — and the deposits of the children who fall short are divided among the ones who finish. Does Sun Chengyuan have a feel for money now? Her mother, Chen Lina, hesitated over that. What she can say is that each completed check-in automatically produces a small certificate on the phone, and her daughter treasures it.

Children are small, and small favors always work on them — just as those born in the 1980s and 1990s stayed pleased for days when a teacher drew a five-pointed star in their exercise book.

Sun Chengyuan is nowhere near the child most deeply shaped by all this. Zuoyehezi has a dedicated stage-clearing mode that turns practice questions into levels: clear a level and you earn coins, and every attempt burns stamina points. The whole thing is identical to the match-three games popular now. Sun Chengyuan has not played it, but Chen Lina has seen other children in the class using it. On Zuoyehezi’s national leaderboard for that mode, a girl in Changchun has piled up 308,000 points — more than three times the score of whoever is in second place.

A similar app, 17zuoye, once caused a scandal. It had built in a farm-building game much like the once-inescapable Happy Farm; the coins children earned by answering questions could be spent on planting fields and raising cows. Parents were furious. How could a homework app contain a game? Under pressure, 17zuoye shut the feature down, and the Ministry of Education, the National Office Against Pornography and Illegal Publications and other agencies opened investigations, promising a hard look at games, celebrity worship and tipping inside education apps.

Chen Lina sees nothing wrong with it. Her daughter takes to it, does her homework eagerly every day, and it is not a bad way to build a study habit. Her only worry is that Sun Chengyuan spends all day staring at a screen and loses her feel for the physical world.

When gamification is applied to daily life, it usually arrives wrapped in some idealistic purpose. That makes it easier for people to sink into the game with a clear conscience. Zhou Zhaoguan believes that the time and effort he puts into Ant Forest will end up as saplings in China’s northwest, a contribution to the environment.

Alipay launched Ant Forest two years ago. It, too, resembles Happy Farm: you gather energy and use it to grow a virtual tree. Besides stealing from friends, you gather energy by using Alipay’s features — counting your steps, paying in shops, settling water, electricity and gas bills, riding the subway with Alipay. Save enough and you can trade it for a sapling, which Alipay really does plant.

Zhou Zhaoguan got hooked early this year. At first he only wanted something to do together with his wife. In Ant Forest, two people can grow a tree jointly, and if one of them waters it, the other gets an Alipay notification. Both of them work long hours, and an occasional ping like that let him feel the other person was there.

The more he played, the more Ant Forest rearranged his life. Once he had worked out that around seven each morning the app settles the previous day’s payments and starts generating energy, he began getting up 20 minutes earlier so that washing up would not cost him his collection window. He stopped sleeping in on Saturdays and Sundays too. “Sleeping in isn’t a good habit anyway.” Getting off the subway, he is now happy to walk an extra stretch, because more steps mean more energy. WeChat Pay has been dropped: anywhere Alipay works, Zhou Zhaoguan uses Alipay.

He knows this is all Alibaba’s calculation — “they obviously have their own business model in mind” — but he brings up the trees in the northwest himself. “At the start I was collecting energy out of a public-spirited feeling… people my age have a fairly strong environmental conscience, I’d say.”

And yet, given how deep his obsession runs — over dinner with a high-school classmate he had not seen in years, a few sentences in, he asked whether the classmate played Ant Forest and whether they should add each other on Alipay — it is hard to argue that the environment is the main reason he opens the app whenever he has a moment.

Ant Forest is in fact a game, so it carries everything that makes games hard to put down. Growing one tree, he estimates, takes about a year. Perhaps what really holds him is that orderly, visible progress. Growing a tree is set as the goal, and a few simple taps a day let him watch himself close in on it.

Playing Ant Forest gives him something to look forward to and something to feel proud of, which does not stop him from wishing it went faster. If paying Alipay five or ten yuan a month would double his daily energy, Zhou Zhaoguan thought about it and decided he would gladly pay.

The company that has mastered this whole apparatus best may still be Tencent. It is the country’s most professional game maker, and when it set out to gamify Produce 101, the result was the most elaborate mechanics and the most frenzied fans anyone had seen. Li Yanfei, who once voted in Super Girl, had kept clear of fandom for more than seven years. Since falling for one member of Rocket Girls, “I’ve now done every single thing I used to sneer at.”

A little over three months in, she has spent more than 7,000 yuan. Besides flying out of her own city to a concert, her biggest outlay was the group’s first mini-album in August, four songs long. “The Goose is so shameless,” she complains, using the fandom’s nickname for Tencent. What should have been a straightforward group album went on sale with a separate purchase channel for each member: buy enough and you unlocked perks for that member in turn — an exclusive video, a big screen in Myeongdong in Seoul, the small TV screens at Beijing’s airport. Worse, Tencent ranked the members by sales, and the top seller won a slot on the Times Square screen. To fans, all of this was exposure their idol could win.

War was one spark away. During Produce 101, every contestant fought alone, working to survive to the next round. After the show ended and the group debuted as Rocket Girls, Tencent split the album sales by member and revived the vote-based competition of the show itself. Fans panicked, then organized again. The heads of each fan group told their members: “Don’t buy the group album yet. Wait for orders.”

Li Yanfei’s group was no exception. She will not name the idol she supports, because the rivalry between fan groups is vicious and she does not want anything she says to draw hate onto her. The group soon drew up a battle plan covering how much to buy and when. “One heavy hitter in another member’s fandom bought more than 40,000 albums by herself — several hundred thousand yuan poured in.” Li Yanfei calls the whole thing terrifying. “I spent a few thousand myself.”

The entire fandom loathed the purchase scheme Tencent had designed, and every one of them was swept into it anyway. Li Yanfei believes the sales figure for a first EP is itself an argument — proof to Tencent, to Wajijiwa and to the rest of Rocket Girls’ management that a particular member is worth something, and grounds for tilting more resources her way later. “I believe she matters, so I threw money at it.”

Tie the resources a member receives directly to what her fans give, and whipping up their passion costs Tencent nothing. The whole broadcast of Produce 101 worked that way. Li Yanfei was lucky to miss it; by the time she noticed the show it was nearly at the final. Only after it was over, going back to watch the early episodes and the outtakes, did she fall for it.

Produce 101 built in every kind of voting method, or, in the show’s own word, “likes.” An ordinary Tencent Video user could give 11 likes a day, a paying member 121. Weibo users could also give 11 a day, but only one per contestant. Tencent’s Weishi, which almost nobody had been using, added a voting function — verify a phone number and you could like there too.

The commercial tie-ins ran further still. The cosmetics brand Yingshu opened a like channel; so did BeautyCam, so did Xiaohongshu, so did Zhonghua Toothpaste. Want to send your idol into the debut lineup? Then say nothing and start liking. Phones made voting far easier than in the days when Li Yanfei followed Happy Girl and had to vote on the family landline: one yuan a call, one call one vote.

The wildest thing she has done is organized vote-farming. She joined the QQ group that ran it out of curiosity, found the mood feverish, and threw herself in. “Every other activity in our fandom stopped. Everyone was farming votes.” Every night she bound 100 QQ accounts to her phone, switched between them as fast as she could and worked through the tasks — tapping the heartbeat counter under her idol’s page on Tencent Video. More heartbeats, more exposure.

After a while it wore her out. She had just left a job that had not gone well and joined a new company, and no sooner had her life and her sleep settled down than the vote-farming tore them up again. “Some campaigns start after midnight, and then I can’t stop thinking about it, checking my phone over and over, not asleep until two or three. My whole head was in bad shape.” And it did not always work. Sometimes another member’s fans pushed their numbers higher, and everything she had put in came to nothing. “You lose the will to keep going.”

She wonders whether following a star has to be like this. If you loved an established performer instead of a manufactured idol, would it still be this punishing? She has no regrets, all the same. She still loves her idol and feels she draws real strength from her.

It is just that there is no way around it. The rules of idol fandom were gamified long ago. Whoever gets the most votes, whoever sells the most albums, stands at the top of this world.

Gamification was never a new idea. People tracing its history usually go back to the end of the 19th century, to a company called Sperry & Hutchinson that handed out trading stamps to retailers, who in turn gave customers stamps in proportion to what they spent. Collect 1,200 of them and a customer could trade them in with Sperry & Hutchinson for the goods they wanted.

Plenty of companies still do it. Convenience stores like Lawson let you swap stamps for limited-edition merchandise; Hong Kong’s Wellcome supermarket runs “rewards” like a cookware set for a few hundred stamps. Wang Lili enjoys the whole process. Besides Costa Coffee, she signs up wherever a membership program is on offer, even at a milk-tea shop like T-Plus, where the points are a terrible deal: 10 yuan spent earns one point, and one point is worth 0.1 yuan.

Trading stamps count as the earliest practice of gamification because they meet its basic requirements. Quantify: record the user’s behavior as a number. Reward: stamps buy goods. Keep it simple: spending money is all it takes to earn them. Together they form a plain but effective loop that holds a customer to a steady buying habit.

Many psychological mechanisms make gamification work, and none of them is complicated. A 2015 paper in Psychological Theory held that they include, at minimum, classical and operant conditioning — give someone a reward and they learn a behavior; expectancy theory — if people believe an action will certainly produce a result, they are readier to take it; and goal-setting theory — when a goal is specific, measurable and within reach, people are more willing to move toward it.

As noted above, a game, being a virtual system, is the easiest place to control behavior, rewards and the link between the two. It makes obvious the proposition that human beings can be worked by a mechanism. And so, as games matured and their hold on people became plainer, people tried to apply them to every field that was not a game.

In 2010 the game designer Jane McGonigal gave her famous TED talk, “Gaming Can Make a Better World”. Her example: when a game asked players to survive in a world that had run out of oil, they learned to conserve oil inside the game, and that carried into their lives outside it; while hunting for ways to beat the game, they also came up with a range of ways to save oil in the real world. “My goal for the next decade,” she said, “is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games.”

McGonigal did not spell out the psychology, but another game designer, Jesse Schell, did that same year, explaining in detail how people are made to spend money over and over in a game like Happy Farm. Then he asked whether this really differs in kind from ordinary life. Schell cited a professor at Indiana State University who did nothing more than rename the points students earned for each assignment and each attendance check as “experience points.” Student motivation went up.

Schell predicted that games would one day be everywhere, and these arguments opened a whole debate about gamification. Could fields that are not games be rebuilt around game mechanics, and change how people behave? From about 2010 on, searches for “gamification” on Google kept rising.

The debate ran hot for a few years, until Fortune published “Looks Like That Whole Gamification Thing Is Over” in 2014. It listed a long run of failures and forecast a grim future for the field. That same year, several Finnish researchers went through 24 empirical studies of gamification and concluded that it does change habits and does improve how people do certain tasks — but only certain tasks, and only in the short run.

At the same time, scholars started to worry that gamification would change how people think. Camilla Dahlstrøm of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology argued in a paper that in certain settings, a gamified setup weakens intrinsic motivation: people act for the reward or to avoid the penalty, rather than because the thing itself is worth doing. Put another way, a person can be run by a gamified program.

The talk about gamification drifted away from the mainstream, but the practice never stopped. Once smartphones were everywhere and mobile technology could reach further into the physical world, the experiments did not thin out — they multiplied.

Some apps log how far you walk each day and award you medals. Some log your habits and let you build a city with them. On October 25, the front page of Apple’s App Store carried a feature called “How to Get Kids Learning English Happily,” recommending an app, Run, Fox, Run (《狐狸快跑》), described this way: “One night, an evil demon king steals away a child’s power of speech. From then on the child sets out with a little fox and a band of friends on an adventure to defeat the demon king and win language back.” Scroll down twice more and the next feature is titled “How to Build Habits With Games.”

Look around, and Jesse Schell’s wish appears to have come true.

At the interviewees’ request, all names in this article are pseudonyms.

Images from: Wikipedia, uxplanet.org, Face Entrepreneurship