You've Been Played

How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation--and what we can do about it

Amazon workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen - if they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If they don't, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China uses badges to track their citizens, and any app with in-game purchases uses them to empty your wallet.

Points, badges, achievements, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. In You've Been Played, game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations, schools, and governments use games as tools for profit and coercion. These are games that we often have no choice but to play, where losing has heavy penalties. You've Been Played is a scathing indictment of a tech-driven world that wants to convince us that misery is fun, and a call to arms for anyone who hopes to preserve their dignity and autonomy.