In a sense, gamification of this type – surveillance-driven, offering only a simulacrum of choice – is both the opposite of QAnon's sprawling enticements and a source of the purposelessness it preys upon. The more your work resembles a rigged game you have no choice but to play, the more likely you are to seek meaning and community elsewhere, and the more likely it may seem that hidden manipulations lurk behind all public rhetoric. "Companies that treat their workers like the robots they wish to replace them with," Hon argues, "also motivate workers by telling them they're part of a greater mission." But there's nothing authentic about most of the opportunities, incentives and targets on offer. They are, in the words of the academic and game designer Ian Bogost, pure "exploitationware": software loops whose ultimate purpose is to extract the maximum possible value at the minimum possible cost.
