@DodecaWeasel had a comment recently that shows the way this gamification was used to trick slaves:
I was reading a book about American Chattel Slavery called "Slavery's Capitalism" and that book made it clear how plantation overseers would use small prizes as an incentive to get slaves to compete with each other. Two able bodied slaves might compete with each other over a cup of sugar, or a hat (commodities which they otherwise wouldn't be allowed to have), for instance. The overseers would use this to get them to reveal their capacity for excessively hard work and, this part is key, then proceed to raise the harvesting quota on all the other slaves. Failure to meet quotas would result in one whip lash per pound by which they fell short. Here's the larger quote:
In other cases, enslavers used positive incentives to get people to pick faster, setting up races between individuals with prizes like a cup of sugar, a hat, or a small amount of money. But such speed-ups shouldn't be seen simply as attempts to import positive incentives into a system dominated by negative ones. They were also tricks, designed to get enslaved people to reveal capacities they were hiding. In Georgia, John Brown's enslaver Thomas Stevens would "pick out two or more of the strongest and sturdiest, and excite them to a race at hoeing or picking, for an old hat, or something of the sort. He would stand with his watch in his hand, observing their movements, whilst they hoed or picked across a certain space he had marked out. The man who won the prize set the standard for the rest. Whatever he did, within a given time, would be multiplied by a certain rule, for the day's work." But enslavers also whipped greater picking speed out of enslaved people in the field itself, forcing their targets to devote sustained attention and unrelenting effort to their speed and accuracy (less leaves, dirt, "trash," etc. in the picked fibers). This kind of invigilation reveals yet again the major differences between the labor system used on the cotton frontier and that used in the Lowcountry. It also reveals the essence of the enslavers' plan: to force enslaved people to show their left hands. Here, on the cotton frontier, enslavers "whipped up" enslaved people to force them to reveal capacities they were hiding, or that had not yet been created. "As I picked so well at first," remembered John Brown, "more was exacted of me, and if I flagged a minute the whip was applied liberally to keep me up to my mark. By being driven in this way, I at last got to pick a hundred and sixty pounds a day," after starting at a minimum requirement of 100. "Old man Jonas watched us children and kept us divin' for that cotton all day long," remembered lrella Battle Walker, and "us wish him dead many a time."
Similarly, under post-slavery wage servitude, we are incentivized as workers to compete with each other over small concessions, small privileges, for which we are supposed to be proud of having, but our overexertion in attempting to beat each other, and win those privileges, is used to raise the expectations on everyone else. Productivity increases while wages fail to keep up with inflation. More and more surplus value is extracted by the Capitalist, and we are inundated with "hustle and grind" propaganda.
I remember this shit when I worked fast food. The managers had us cheat the system by marking orders as complete before they were actually finished. This meant the order would no longer show up on the screen, forcing you to memorize all the orders. I refused to cheat because it just made the job a million times harder for no real benefit.
Nobody ever got a raise or anything for good performance, and the worst you got as punishment for bad performance was having to hear the managers complain, which they did regardless.
