How Gamification, where everyday tasks are turned into challenges, is revolutionising how we shop, spend and save

Ping! A notification pops up on your phone.

"Hi, just checking in to let you know that I’m about to make your first automatic saving of £20.59," chirps a chatbot. "Exciting times, eh? Have a great morning! :)" Score! Dopamine surges through you as you feel the thrill of winning the bot’s approval. Even better, that extra cash you’ve saved means you can go shopping. You log on to an app and follow a Pokemon Go-style augmented reality treasure hunt around London until you find a poster which, when you scan it with the camera on your phone, reveals a 3D model of a pair of trainers not yet on release. Congratulations! You can buy these before anyone else – just enter your card details as instructed on the app, plus your delivery address and they will wing their way directly to you. Cue a tinny trumpet fanfare.

If this sounds like science fiction, it’s not. It’s gamification. To ‘gamify’ is to use game concepts, such as points and rewards, to engage us in activities. Fitbit gamifies exercise by awarding badges for distance milestones. Hinge is gamifying dating with its system of ‘likes’. Duolingo gamifies language learning with different levels to complete and a points system that rewards daily play. Now a new generation of apps, bots and websites is doing the same with the stuff that makes the world go round — we’re playing games with our money.

Take Plum, a programme launched by London-based entrepreneurs Victor Trokoudes and Alex Michael in 2016, which aims to help you increase the amount you save each month. Think of it as the Fitbit of financial prudence. It operates via Facebook — head to its page and you can enter into a Messenger conversation with its ‘chatbot’ and give Plum read-only access to your bank transactions (kept secure via encryption) by filling out simple forms. The app then analyses your spending, calculates small amounts of money that you can afford to save and automatically transfers this to a secure savings account, which you can access at any time. Whenever you spend less than usual, a notification (littered with emojis) pops up to congratulate you like you’ve just scored a goal; you can also change your ‘mood’ settings to play the saving game at various different difficulty modes, from the default ‘normal’ savings to ‘ambitious’ (50 per cent more savings) or ‘chilled’ (25 per cent less savings).

Then there’s the London-based saving app Chip. Founded by Simon Rabin in 2016, it uses an algorithm to analyse your banking transactions and calculate what you can afford to put aside based on your spending habits. Then it deploys gaming elements such as goals (which you can set — for instance buying a new car) and a constant stream of chirpy messages to keep you saving. Or should that be playing? "We realised very quickly that the behavioural science behind Chip — an almost independent authority telling you how much you can afford to save at intervals throughout the month and putting that money away for you — was incredibly powerful," says Rabin. He claims that 68 per cent of users are saving 5 per cent of their net income every month, compared with the national average of 1.7 per cent.

These apps, as well as multimillion-dollar fintech (that’s financial technology) disruptors such as Monzo, the mobile-only bank, and Revolut, the digital cash transfer and exchange app, are taking advantage of the Competition and Markets Authority’s new Open Banking rules, which came into force in January to encourage competition in the banking industry. They enable customers at the UK’s nine biggest banks (including Barclays, HSBC and Natwest) to give third parties secure access to their account data, while keeping their money safe with encryption.

They are also taking advantage of basic human psychology. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that controls your brain’s reward and pleasure centre and gives you a hit when you ‘win’ — a vulnerability that tech firms such as Facebook have admitted to exploiting to keep you hooked. Rabin says that "Chip’s communication is designed to make the saver feel pride and a sense of achievement with every save". The dopamine-inducing congratulation notifications are addictive. Consumer psychologist Carolyn Mair points to the reward effect: "When we desire something, our expectations about having or owning it make our excitement stronger and therefore increase the release of dopamine. Once we have the item and experience the pleasure, the dopamine subsides such that we need another exciting episode to trigger dopamine again."

In return these apps gain your loyalty. Say they decide, in future, to launch money-making products such as bank accounts, which will enable them to make loans and take interest payments: they already have an established and loyal client base. Chip, for example, is launching ChipX at the end of the year, a plug-in overdraft and lending platform. There will be a subscription fee — as yet undetermined — which is how it will start making a profit.

It isn’t just saving money that gamification is changing, however. It is also revolutionising how we spend our cash, including in the field of investment. Plum is about to launch a new feature that allows you to invest from as little as £1 at different risk levels — Conservative, Balanced and Growth — just like beginner, intermediate and advanced levels in your favourite video game. This is how Plum will make money; it is also a way of making investing more fun and open to anyone. Netherlands-based Bux, meanwhile, is an investment app plastered with bright graphics that was founded in 2014 and aims to make ‘stock trading exciting for everyone’. Users can play using a ‘demo account’ with virtual credits to practise risk-free investing and are encouraged to ‘battle for honour’ against friends to top the leader board of ‘best trader’. When you are confident that you know what you are doing, Bux gives you the option to start trading real money and investing in companies such as Facebook and Tesla.

Then there’s the way shopping is being gamified. The most basic way in which this happens is the trend for limited-edition ‘drops’, such as those favoured by streetwear megabrands Supreme and Palace, which often require prospective buyers to register their interest weeks in advance, creating a sense of competition. But increasingly labels are adopting more sophisticated techniques.

The Nike+ app, launched in 2006, helped pioneer the idea of connected fitness and now has millions of members working out in order to unlock exclusive products and Apple playlists: for example, the current Vaporfly challenge, where Nike+ Run Club members are required to complete a marathon over 10 days to unlock early access to the new Vaporfly 4 per cent Flyknits. The brand’s Snkrs app, launched in 2015, guarantees ‘insider access on the latest, including launches, drops’ through gamifying the trainer-buying experience. Last year US sneakerheads could purchase a pair of Nike SB Dunk High Pro Momofuku Kicks only — deep breath — by first scanning a picture of the menu at celebrity chef David Chang’s Fuku East Village through the camera function in the app. Nike used a similar augmented reality treasure hunt in London this April for the Sean Wotherspoon Air Max 1/ 97 release, encouraging users to race to a secret location where they could scan an image on their phone and win the trainers. "Treasure hunts work because we find the chase more pleasurable than the actual catch. It delays gratification, which makes the catch — or find or win — even more satisfying," explains Mair. "By turning shopping into a game, brands are tapping into our innate survival mechanisms. We want to win, to beat our competitors."

If it seems all fun and games, that’s not to say gamification is without its critics. Studies show that games and their extrinsic rewards (trophies, badges, etc) can be damaging to our intrinsic motivation, which gets us to do something without the buzz of reward or congratulation. Meanwhile Ian Bogost, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and author of Play Anything, notably called out gamification and has criticised the way it ‘transforms the boring into the extraordinary. Take your job: now you’re getting points for operating your desk properly, and suddenly it’s enjoyable?’ Mair agrees. There is a finite limit to the desirability of shopping gamification because ‘the more people join in, the more mundane it becomes’. It is only exciting while it is exclusive.

Whatever you make of it, the trend for financial gamification doesn’t look likely to go away any time soon. Next, Chip plans to launch a new feature, ‘Squad Goals’: essentially a multiplayer mode in the game of saving. If several friends are Chip users and are, for example, saving up for a holiday or festival together, they can race each other towards the financial goal via a virtual progression board, rather like the one on Pointless. This ‘peer pressure to top up savings’ leads to players saving an average of £30 each month, according to Rabin. ‘This has truly gamified the whole saving experience.’