Overgamification is the reason we keep playing, but it's also the reason we stop

I've spent my most recent weekend split between two extremes. Firstly, I was playing a game that hammered me with rewards every single time I did anything, and secondly, I played a game that just let me get on with it and find my own dopamine hits. One of them I turned off and uninstalled immediately once I had got through that beautiful, noisy, flashy onboarding period, while the other, I intend to pick back up again later today.

It's been more than a few years (twenty?) since games like World of Warcraft mastered the constant flood of notifications and feedback - or compulsion - loops that now dominate everything from social media to news channels. At the time, keeping people interested was a great way to stop them from wandering off to other mediums; from going to the movies, or reading a book. But now, in 2026, almost everything is running the same way, certainly almost anything that runs on a computer, console or mobile phone.

While we all joked when, in 2013, Microsoft introduced achievements for Netflix, the interlinking of gaming with other sectors was starting to really ramp up. We called it gamification at the time, and it was quite fun when you could do your school revision, or pass another age verification training course at work by tapping away at buttons and scoring points. But now, almost everything is gamified, and that's, perhaps (ironically, uncomfortably) especially true in the biggest mobile games.

Can you gamify a game? Yes. The same as you can salt salt.

Fast-forward to today and you'll find that the vast majority of eCommerce sites (certainly those powered by Shopify) feature spinning bonus wheels, discount codes for newsletter sign-ups and even chaser emails should you dare to stray from the page. I don't think it'll be long before we get 'solve the puzzle' or 'wave survival' minigames for discount bonuses at this rate. Even here in sunny Blighty we get entered to win prizes if we use a restaurant app while dining in.

If everything has an app or app-like features, and everything sings and dances when we interact with it, then where do we go when we just want to relax and NOT be overstimulated? Well, the answer is still, of course, games. There's plenty out there that don't blast you in the face with numbers and rewards... Premium games or games where you've paid the ad-free tithe are a start. I keep falling back into Suzerain, Six Ages and Hundred Days-sized holes, and while part of that might be because they are narrative-focused, premium and built for longer playtimes, they're also respectful of your time and effort.

Rad Habits

In fact, the biggest counterargument to games that don't have aggressive advertising, monetisation or notifications is often that 'we're in a limited attention economy'... however, when you look at mobile MMORTS like Rise of Kingdoms, State of Decay, Aniplex's Resident Evil Survival Unit or even - the modern classics - Last War, Royal Kingdom and Merge Mansion, they are not hypercasual games vying for a short five minutes of your time. These are giant games that hope to hook you for 100+ hours, and so, fundamentally, they're aiming to score your attention for the same time as any of the previously mentioned premium offerings. We are in an attention economy, but we're also in an hours-in-the-day one.

The big problem, then, is that most things are habit building. A long time ago, a manager of mine sang '21 days to learn' to us in a dusty GAME warehouse. (If you must know, it was to the rhythm of 21 Seconds to Go by early 2000's UK Garage pioneers So Solid Crew). His point was that it should take about three weeks (twenty-one days) for all of the staff in a branch to develop a new habit, because most humans only need to do something three times in order to learn it - the reason for three weeks was due to some staff only working one day a week.

Muscle Memory

The problem isn't learning it, though; it's that nowadays everybody I speak to says that they grow dependent on the high-energy buzz that they get from starting a new game, but that this constant hit simply never holds up. This is especially the case with those running the hookiest, heaviest adverts across the stores. Hypercasual taught us that these hooks could get stuck right into you, but they were never designed to keep you in for months. They were there to get you in, get you winning, and then inject more adverts so that you ultimately either earned the publisher loads of money from your ad watchtime or you paid for the advert-free version.

But that simple £1.99 per head model isn't what you find through the adverts that promise it. Nowadays it's a winding onboarding laced with dancing icons, fun minigames and story hooks. It's why games like Last Fortress or the previously mentioned Resident Evil: Survival Unit start out feeling like entirely different games; because they can hammer you with more hooks before they open up into MMORTS. If you make it through that, then you might just be willing to dance the daily mission dance and stick around to become a big fish.

There's the rub(e)!

There, at the normally 4-6 hour sweet spot, you're transferred to the new game, and then it becomes a case of endurance. Monopoly Go now challenges you to socialise to gather pieces and rolls; State of Decay nudges you toward an Alliance for the next stages; Merge Mansion slides in challenging levels that burn through your energy and boosters.

If you've made it to this point, when spend or socials kick in, you've already been fully trained, and the bursting explosions and deluge of awards and achievements for repeating actions dozens of times have already dug in. You might have already paid, or you might be close to doing it again in order to get that buzz again, or you might just wait to log in the next day to quickly tap through 15 different areas of the UI to refill your energy or items.

They demand your time; they don't really respect it. They've simply trained you to expect rewards when the (notification) bell rings. And that, to bring this whole thing back around to my starting point, is not actually enjoyment or relaxation; it's training, it's brain power, and it's problem-solving to optimise your actions or... worse, do as much as you can in as short a time as possible.

Sadly, mobile's highest revenue games often represent the reason that mobile isn't taken as seriously as 'traditional games' and why the ever increasing library of games that do respect your time are in a constant battle to find their audience here: Because a lot of people come to mobile for the same reason they go to social media or TikTok - to be stimulated, not to relax or invest time in another world.

And who can blame them, when that notification bell rings every other minute?