There is NOTHING wrong with Israel Gamifying War (2012, Re-Examined)
In November 2012, the Israel Defense Forces ran a points-and-ranks system on their public blog during Operation Pillar of Defense, and the gamification industry split into two camps overnight. One camp said the IDF had crossed a line. The other camp went quiet because nobody wanted to be the person defending a war website. I wrote this post in the second week of that conflict, and I took the position almost nobody was willing to put their name on: there is nothing wrong, in principle, with a country gamifying its own self-defense communications. Fourteen years later I still think the original argument holds, with one clarification I want to add up front so the rest of the post can do its job.
The clarification is the difference between a tool and an application of the tool. Whether the tool of gamification is morally legitimate is one question. Whether any specific military operation is justified is a completely different question. This post is about the first question only. I am not relitigating the 2012 conflict, I am not arguing for or against any side, and I am not saying every country should gamify its war communications. I am saying that if you accept that a country has the right to defend itself with cars, with the Internet, with Twitter, and with public communications generally, then there is no special reason to ban the gamification layer of those same tools. That is the entire load the original post was carrying, and it is the entire load this restored version still carries.
Speed Run Notes
- Gamification is a tool. Cars are a tool. Twitter is a tool. The Internet is a tool. Countries already use all of these tools in war and we do not call the tools themselves immoral.
- Most modern games were built by importing war mechanics into civilian contexts. Points, badges, ranks, and capture-the-flag come from the military, not the other way around. Calling gamified war “sick” while celebrating war-themed games is the inconsistency the original post was pointing at.
- Every effective wartime communication, gamified or not, recruits the same Core Drives: Epic Meaning & Calling, Social Influence & Relatedness, Scarcity & Impatience, and Loss Avoidance. The Octalysis lens did not invent these motivators. It named them.
- The tool-neutrality argument is strongest for self-defense, weaker for offensive operations, and silent on whether any specific operation is justified. That is the editorial line I want readers to hold while reading the rest of the post.
- The 2012 argument was about whether a category of behavioral design should be banned from defense contexts. The answer was no in 2012 and the answer is still no in 2026. Specific applications are a separate conversation.
Table of Contents
In This Article
About the Creator
Yu-kai Chou is a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer whose work has impacted over 1.5 Billion Users worldwide through work with LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast.
He has taught and lectured at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His books have been referenced by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and 3,700+ more. Check out Books by Chou here.
I am the person who wrote the original 2012 argument that gamification is a tool, not an ideology. That framing is the same framing I have taught from the Octalysis Framework for two decades. The framework does not endorse the goals a designer points it at; it describes the human Core Drives a designer is recruiting whether or not they put a “gamification” label on the work. That is the lens I am bringing back to this 2012 post, because the tool-versus-application distinction is exactly what most readers were missing in the original outrage cycle, and it is what makes the argument hold up fourteen years later.
The Original 2012 Argument (Preserved)
The original post opened with a quick background of the Israel Defense Forces conflict during Operation Pillar of Defense. From November 14 to 21, 2012, the IDF launched operations in the Gaza Strip in response to thousands of rockets fired into Israel over the prior decade, including roughly a thousand in 2012 alone. Alongside the operation, the IDF rolled out an “IDF Ranks” system on its blog where readers earned points for reading, commenting, watching, and sharing official content, then leveled up into ranks and badges. The social media world pounced. Outlets including TIME and ReadWriteWeb published strong criticism. One widely shared line argued that rewarding people for tweeting while innocent people were dying made the writer sick.
My 2012 position, which I am preserving here, was that the criticism was directed at the wrong target. The criticism treated gamification as if it were a uniquely distasteful weapon. It is not a weapon. It is a tool. And the original post laid out the argument in five moves I want to walk through again, because each move is still load-bearing.
Move one: most games were built to mimic war, not the other way around
Gamification is the application of game elements in non-game contexts. The historical reality is that most games, since their earliest forms, are the application of war elements in non-war contexts. Operations and practices of war predate organized games by millennia, and the original mechanics were about defending or invading territory, staying alive, and keeping soldiers motivated through dreadful conditions. Soldiers kept score by enemies defeated. Some warriors hung enemy skulls as trophies. Capture-the-flag is a literal battlefield practice that became a recess game. The most popular win-state in modern video games is “enemies destroyed.” Where do badges come from? The military. When a soldier completes missions, they earn a badge that represents recognition and honor.
If a person is going to call gamified war communications distasteful, the consistent version of that position is to also call war-themed games distasteful, because the games are the import of war mechanics into civilian life. Pretending to be in a war when nothing is at stake is the part of the human psychology that deserves the second look. Pretending you are in a game during an actual war, so that morale stays up and the work becomes bearable, is closer to a coping mechanism than to a moral failure.
Move two: self-defense already involves things much harder to defend than a points system
When a country is defending itself, it does many things. It kills. It trains people to kill. It spends tax dollars to fund the killing. It restricts civil liberties. It runs propaganda. It surveils citizens. The 2012 post pointed out that after the Twin Towers fell, the United States accepted radical departures from prior practice in the name of defense, including reduced privacy protections, a years-long military operation in Afghanistan, and a separate military operation in Iraq. When Bin Laden was killed, large crowds gathered in front of the White House and at Ground Zero to celebrate, and the announcement generated five thousand tweets per second.
If celebrating an enemy’s death on Twitter at five thousand tweets per second is acceptable as a national reaction to one attack, then a points-and-ranks system on a defense blog during a sustained rocket campaign is not the bright line everyone tried to draw it as. The reaction to gamified war communications was about the label, not the substance.
Move three: gamification is the least sickening tool a country can reach for during a war
Wars run on tools. Some countries send spies. Some sabotage the other country’s economy by dumping currencies. Some assassinate leaders. Some torture prisoners. Some build a very large bomb and drop it. If a country has a website and the website turns into a system that motivates citizens to read, comment, and share verified information, and if that activity helps the country win the conflict, then a points system is among the most peaceful, benevolent, and effective war tactics on the menu. Compared to the alternatives a defense ministry has access to, badges on a blog do not register on the same severity scale.
Move four: gamification is a tool, just like cars, Twitter, and the Internet
This is the line I want to highlight because it is the entire spine of the original argument. Gamification is a tool to achieve desired goals, just like cars, Twitter, and the Internet. It would not be distasteful for a country at war to use Twitter, vehicles, or the Internet to support its operations. In fact it would be irresponsible for them not to use those tools. So why would the gamification layer of the same activities be the place to draw the moral line? Either the tool category is acceptable in defense contexts or it is not. There is no consistent reason to single out the gamification subset.
Move five: a right to gamify is not a duty to gamify
The 2012 post explicitly did not say every country should gamify its war communications, and I am not saying that now. Whether a particular gamified system is well designed, whether it actually helps, and whether the country should run it at all are downstream questions. The original point was upstream of all of that. There is nothing wrong, in principle, with a country exercising the option. People who live under constant rocket fire are not in the same position as people watching from countries at relative peace, and the writers calling the IDF program sick from outside the conflict were rendering a moral verdict on a tool category they were not the ones using.
Why I Made This Argument: Tool vs. Application
Here is the framing I want to make explicit, because it is what most readers in 2012 missed and it is what the editorial revisit lets me add cleanly.
There are two questions in any conversation about gamification in a charged context. The first question is whether the tool itself is legitimate. The second question is whether the specific application of the tool is justified. The original post answered the first question and was silent on the second. That silence was deliberate then and it is deliberate now.
The first question, tool legitimacy, is the question a behavioral design framework is allowed to answer. Octalysis can tell you what the tool is, what it does to human motivation, and what it costs and produces. The framework can identify when the tool will be effective, when it will burn users out, when it will produce White Hat versus Black Hat outcomes, and when it should not be deployed at all on craft grounds. None of that requires picking a side in any specific conflict.
The second question, application justification, is a question about specific operations, specific actors, specific facts, and specific moral claims. Whether any given war is just is a question for international law, ethics, history, and the affected populations. It is not a question that gets resolved by behavioral design theory and it is not a question this post is trying to answer. A reader who agrees with the original argument can hold any position on the underlying conflict. A reader who disagrees with the original argument has to explain why the gamification subset of communication tools is uniquely off-limits while the others are not.
Keeping these two questions separate is what lets the original argument age. If I had bundled them together in 2012, the post would now read as a verdict on a specific operation, and verdicts on specific operations look very different in hindsight than they did in real time. By staying on the tool layer, the argument keeps doing the same work it was doing then.
The Octalysis Behind Any Defensive Operation
Look at any historical wartime communication, going back centuries, and you will see the same human Core Drives being recruited. The Octalysis Framework did not invent these motivators. It named them and organized them. Every effective defensive communication, gamified or not, is running on some combination of the following.
Core Drive 1 (CD1): Epic Meaning & Calling. The sense that you are part of something bigger than yourself, that your contribution matters to a story larger than your individual life. Epic Meaning is the engine behind every “defend our home” message in human history. It is the reason civilians under attack often report a strange clarity of purpose that they did not have during peacetime. The IDF’s points-and-ranks system was layering Core Drive 1 over content that already carried it. The system did not create the meaning. It made the meaning more legible.
Core Drive 5 (CD5): Social Influence & Relatedness. Unit cohesion, peer accountability, the feeling of being seen by others who share your situation. The leaderboards and shared progression of any wartime communications platform are the digital expression of practices that armies have used for thousands of years. Soldiers stand and march together because Core Drive 5 makes the standing easier than it would be alone. A blog ranks system is the same principle applied to civilian readers under sustained attack.
Core Drive 6 (CD6): Scarcity & Impatience. The motivator that comes from operational windows, time pressure, and the recognition that some opportunities will not be there tomorrow. Wartime is, by definition, a Core Drive 6 environment. Every “now is the moment” message in human history runs on this drive. A gamified blog adds urgency to engagement, but the underlying urgency was already there because the rockets were already there.
Core Drive 8 (CD8): Loss Avoidance. The motivator that comes from protecting what you have rather than acquiring what you do not. Loss Avoidance is the entire conceptual basis of “defense.” Defending civilians, defending territory, defending family, defending the future of a community: every framing inside a defensive operation is a Core Drive 8 framing. A gamified communications layer makes the loss-avoidance framing easier to act on, faster to share, and more measurable in its reach. It does not introduce the framing. The framing was native to the situation.
The point of running this lens over the 2012 controversy is to show that the question “should the Core Drives be active in wartime communications?” is not actually a real question. The Core Drives are always active in wartime communications, regardless of label. The only question that ever existed is whether the application of those Core Drives to a specific conflict is justified. That question is outside this framework’s scope, and the original post said so.
Where the Argument Holds and Where It Doesn’t
I want to be precise about the boundaries of this argument, because the same precision is what protects it.
The argument is strongest for self-defense. When a country is being attacked and the gamified communications are recruiting citizens to read, share, and stay informed about a defensive operation, the tool-neutrality argument runs at full strength. The alternatives a defense ministry has access to are far more violent than a blog ranks system, and refusing the lighter tool while accepting the heavier ones is incoherent.
The argument is weaker for offensive operations. If the same tools are pointed at recruiting public support for a war of choice rather than defense of homeland, the case is less clean. The tool itself remains morally neutral, but the application has more weight to carry. A reasonable critic can accept the tool-neutrality argument and still object to a specific deployment on the grounds of what the deployment is for. That is a coherent position and the original post does not foreclose it.
The argument is silent on whether any specific operation is justified. This is the part that matters most for how the post ages. The 2012 post did not say Operation Pillar of Defense was justified, did not pick a side between Israel and the Palestinian territories, and did not assign moral blame for the conflict. It said only that the gamification layer of one party’s communications was not the right place to draw the line, given everything else that party was already doing under the heading of defense. That distinction is what makes the post defensible to read in 2026 with whatever views the reader holds about the underlying conflict.
The argument applies to every country, not just one. The same logic that protects the IDF’s right to gamify also protects every other country’s right to gamify its defensive communications. If the principle were “only countries I agree with may gamify,” that would not be a principle. It would be a preference dressed up as one. The principle has to run consistently or it does not run at all.
What Has and Hasn’t Changed Since 2012
Fourteen years out, some things look different and some things look exactly the same.
What has changed: the field of gamification has matured. Octalysis has been adopted across organizations spanning education, healthcare, fintech, defense recruiting, and consumer apps reaching well over a billion users. Frameworks for distinguishing White Hat motivation from Black Hat manipulation are standard practice. The professional conversation about ethical design has deepened. A wartime communications platform shipped today would face better-informed scrutiny than the 2012 IDF program did, and that is healthy.
What has not changed: the public response to gamification in any charged context still tends to attack the label rather than the substance. Critics still treat the presence of points and badges as if it were the moral content of the system. The same people who scroll engagement-optimized feeds for hours about a war will still object to a points system on the website of one of the parties to that war. The inconsistency the original post named is still the inconsistency.
What has also not changed: the underlying Core Drives are unchanged. Human motivation does not get a software update. The drives that make a citizen read, share, and act in 2012 are the same drives that move them in 2026. A defense ministry that understands those drives will use them whether or not the label “gamification” is attached. The question is never whether motivation is being recruited. The question is what the recruitment is for, and whether the design treats users as ends or as means. That question is the same question I have been writing about since the original post was published, and it is the same question my book Actionable Gamification works through across more than five hundred pages.
If a reader walks away from this post with one sentence, I want it to be this. Tools are tools. Applications are applications. The conversation about whether gamification belongs in defense contexts was always a conversation about applications dressed up as a conversation about tools. Once you separate the two, the original 2012 argument is straightforward, and the harder questions move to where they actually belong.
Related Reading
- Octalysis: The Complete Gamification Framework
- Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling
- Core Drive 8: Loss Avoidance
- Actionable Gamification: The Book