[thinkingQueen]

My eyes were opened when a field called gamification appeared in the early 2010s. In a few years many gamification researchers had tens of thousands of citations, h-indexes nearing hundred. Well, if you think about it they’re gamers, they’ve been grinding their RPG characters, sniping skills and whatnot for thousands of hours. It’s only natural that these guys and girls figure out how to reach the maximum scientific high score.

Some of the gamification researchers are near the top 500 of that 2% list. Now ask yourself, is gamification something that should make you one of the top 500 scientist in the world? I doubt it, but modern science is a citation game. Nothing else.

[layman51]

Gamification as a field of study also reminds me a lot of this video[1] of a talk about tips for game developers. It is very interesting because it is from 2016 which is close to the time period you mentioned. I’m pretty sure this video has been shared on Hacker News a bunch.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4

[hansvm]

That feels like a certain xkcd [0]. If you can game the totally bullshit rankings then clearly your papers are worth something.

[0] https://xkcd.com/2385/

[lmm]

Thought that was going to be https://xkcd.com/125/. Iteration of the same concept I guess.

[xdavidliu]

reminds me of the fraudulent Ariely and Gino papers that were exposed a year or two ago, where a very common comment was "they're dishonesty researchers, of course they are going to be dishonest".