Benjamin Carlier

Today I want to talk about playing. I've been passionate about playing and especially gaming since I was a kid. I mean ... I'm not very original, you probably have been too. I played football, board games, video games, the list goes on.

What I did not realise was that I was always learning something along the way: collaboration, social skills, strategy, better reflexes ...

This post is about how to learn through playing and gaming.

Why it actually works and the psychology behind it#

Research consistently shows gamification has a meaningful positive effect on learning outcomes. But the why is more interesting than the what.

The most compelling explanation comes from Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a 40-year body of research in developmental psychology. It argues that humans have an innate drive to grow - and that drive is powered by three psychological needs:

Autonomy - feeling like your actions come from your own will, not external pressure
Competence - feeling capable of mastering challenges
Relatedness - feeling genuinely connected to the people around you

When learners feel autonomous and competent, the quality of learning is qualitatively different: knowledge is retained longer, processed more deeply, and applied more creatively. Conversely, extrinsic pressure - mandatory courses, grades you don't care about - actively undermines the very motivation it's trying to create.

Well-designed gamification resolves this tension. Points, levels, and streaks become vehicles for those feelings rather than substitutes for them.

École 42: where the game is the curriculum#

I have a really good example to demonstrate this, my school, École 42.

What 42 doesn't have: professors, classes, tuition, or degree requirements. What it has: a fully gamified, peer-to-peer curriculum where students earn XP, unlock levels, achievements, and advance by having their work reviewed by peers.

What I dit not know is that 42's gamification system failed the first time.

On the first iteration in 2014, nearly half the cohort disengaged. The problem was something you often experience in restaurants: too much choice. Students quickly found themselves facing 50+ projects with no structure. Cognitive science is clear on this: above five to seven options, people stop feeling empowered and start feeling paralyzed.

The fix was counterintuitive: reduce the freedom. 42 restructured around a competence tree - completing one project unlocks one to three next projects, gradually opening the full curriculum. It preserved autonomy while making the path legible. The 2015 cohort, starting with this redesign, was dramatically more engaged.

Two other design choices stand out.

Peer correction system: students review each other's code to advance, which maps directly onto the "relatedness" need from SDT - and mirrors professional engineering practice so closely that graduates step into code review culture at their first job with near-zero adjustment.
Self-imposed deadlines: 42 doesn't impose deadlines, but lets students set their own. Research shows that a deadline you choose feels like an act of autonomy; one imposed on you feels like a constraint. That distinction changes everything about motivation.

GitHub has been gamifying you for years#

You probably did not think about it, but GitHub is one of the most successful gamification implementations in the tech industry, and you interact with it every day.

The contribution graph - that grid of green squares - is a streak counter and progress bar in one. When GitHub removed streak counters in 2016, researchers studying the change found that long-lasting streaks became significantly less common almost immediately. A small UI element had been shaping developer behavior more than anyone realized.

In 2022, GitHub added personal achievement badges, displayed publicly on your profile. The design philosophy is deliberate: it doesn't rank you against other developers. It tracks your progress. That distinction - personal growth over competitive ranking - is exactly what SDT predicts should work. And it does, across experience levels, without making anyone feel publicly inadequate in the process.

Platforms like CodinGame, Advent of Code, and Codewars have applied the same logic more explicitly, turning algorithm practice into puzzles, annual community events, and martial-arts-style ranking systems. Millions of developers engage with them voluntarily, in their spare time, to practice skills they could just as easily ignore.

What this means for your daily work#

You don't need a new platform to start applying this. The principles are transferable to how you structure your own growth.

Start small: gamify your todo list. It sounds almost trivially simple, but a task list with a daily completion counter, a streak indicator, or even just a satisfying visual checkbox does something real: it makes progress visible. That's the core of what gamification offers. Not complexity - legibility. When you can see that your effort is producing results, you come back tomorrow.