Most research on games concludes that these structures can be effective at motivating action, and researchers generally predict that games will increasingly be used as the methodology of choice to change individual behavior. In practice, this has meant that the power of games to change behavior is shamelessly instrumentalized as gamification spreads to thousands of situations in which a company merely wants to tune, herd, and condition the behavior of its customers or employees toward its own objectives. Typically, this involves importing a few components, such as reward points and levels of advancement, in order to engineer behaviors that serve the company's immediate interests, with programs such as customer loyalty schemes or internal sales competitions. One analyst compiled a survey of more than ninety such "gamification cases," complete with return-on-investment statistics. Ian Bogost, a professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech and a digital culture observer, insists that these systems should be called "exploitationware" rather than games because their sole aim is behavior manipulation and modification.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 984