
Soviet gamification - networked
http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html
======
huhtenberg
For what it's worth the "socialist competition" was widely regarded as a fake
and ultimately laughable construct by pretty much everyone in the country.
Sure, there were enthusiastic supporters, but they were few and far between
and they weren't actually looked up to by the unwashed gray masses. They were
regarded more like people who were really, _really_ proud of their boyscout
badges.

(edit) Reading other comments - I should clarify that what I said relates to
the 1970+ period, not the earlier years.

~~~
alive-or-not
That was probably true in the 80s, but from what I read back in the 30s, 40s,
50s the workers in USSR were a lot less cynical. In those days people could
very well see the socialist economy improving their standard of living,
education, health care, etc.

~~~
frozenport
In the 30s, 40s, early 50s, workers were a lot more DEAD!

I still have family who remember Stalin's purges, starvation and WW2. The same
people say life in the USSR was only reasonable under the later leaders like
Brezhnev. Nobody likes Gorbachev, but they would be first to admit that the
differences in their lives in the 1940s and 1980s were vast.

~~~
moxie
During the purges of the 30s and 50s, the most dangerous place to be was a
member of the central committee. Ordinary workers were not affected by the
bulk of the purges (and to some extent did not even realize they were
happening), with the notable exception of Jews during weird Stalinst
manipulations like the Mingrelian affair.

As recently as 2009, 60% of Russians preferred the Soviet days (with older
citizens that number is as high as 80%). And even for eastern bloc states like
the Ukraine, 46% of the population regrets the dissolution of the Soviet
Union.

~~~
mc32
In absolutist terms that might be true. But it's mostly irrelevant since on
average the regular population was not a member if the central committee.

It's like saying 'the most dangerous (deadly)' place in a prison is the
execution room on execution day. For most of the population the most dangerous
place was elsewhere.

> As recently as 2009, 60% of Russians preferred the Soviet days

Nostalgia is distorting and dangerous. It's like Western baby boomers who
think wistfully about the old days. There was more pollution, there was more
disease, there was less questioning of authority, there was more injustice,
there was more impending doom. Another analogy is how some people sometimes
perceive past relationships (ie. none of the troubles).

~~~
moxie
> Nostalgia is distorting and dangerous.

That's one explanation. Another is that things didn't actually change the way
people wanted them to. Where as Perestroika was supposed to be a transition
from authoritarian communism to democratic communism, the dissolution of the
Soviet Union resulted in a transition from authoritarian communism to
authoritarian capitalism.

State industries were basically given away to a small oligarchy through the
"loans for shares" program, which resulted in a virtually identical experience
for the average Russian, only without the nice state provided pension and
benefits.

Russia also has an enormous rural population, which was celebrated and
idolized through Soviet ideology. The transition to authoritarian capitalism
was accompanied by a cultural shift that portrays rural Russia as being
composed of stupid poor people.

The result is a lot of unhappy people.

~~~
mjn
I have very limited 2nd-hand knowledge, but that's the impression I've gotten
from the people I knew who grew up in East Germany. They wanted reform of the
system, but are unhappy with the reform they ended up getting. Some people
wanted only a modest reform from authoritarian communism to a more democratic
communism (as you mention), but even among those who wanted to abolish
communism entirely and "join the West", many people thought what that meant
would be adopting a democratic-socialist model along the lines of 1980s
Scandinavia.

Many people didn't even really believe that the West Germans had ideals much
different from theirs: they thought the idea that _Wessis_ were really
"capitalists" was Soviet propaganda trying to scare them away from
reunification, and assumed West Germany was probably, in reality, just full of
sensible social democrats. So it was a rude shock when they found out that
Frankfurt bankers were more like American bankers than like Swedish social
democrats.

The end result can be seen pretty clearly in the map of _Left Party_ election
figures:
[http://welections.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/germany-2009-d...](http://welections.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/germany-2009-die-
linke.png)

------
omonra
Author might want to learn about soviet laws about mandatory work & punishment
for 'absenteeism'

"On 8 January 1939, the government made clear that an unauthorized lateness of
20 minutes (or taking a break 20 minutes too long, or leaving 20 minutes
early) counted as absenteeism, grounds for mandatory dismissal (Pravda, 9 Jan
1939). Transportation breakdowns (a common event) were no excuse; a doctor's
certificate was required, and doctors who gave certificates too easily
themselves faced prosecution and prison.

Some workers still found it worthwhile to be absent and force a mandatory
dismissal, so that they could seek work in a place where labor books were not
closely read. Stalin put an end to this with a remarkable law,

Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, 26 June 1940 "On the Transfer
to the Eight-Hour Working Day, the Seven-day Work Week, and on the Prohibition
of Unauthorized Departure by Laborers and Office Workers from Factories and
Offices2"

This replaced the civil sanctions of the 28 Dec. 1938 decree with mandatory
criminal penalties: 2-4 months imprisonment for quitting a job, and 6 months
of probation and 25% pay confiscation for an unauthorized tardiness of 20
minutes. Both managers and prosecutors were themselves subject to criminal
prosecution if they did not enforce this law strictly."

Russian -
[http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%...](http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BC%D1%83%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%BC#.D0.9F.D1.80.D0.B8.D0.BD.D1.83.D0.B4.D0.B8.D1.82.D0.B5.D0.BB.D1.8C.D0.BD.D0.B0.D1.8F_.D1.82.D1.80.D1.83.D0.B4.D0.BE.D0.B2.D0.B0.D1.8F_.D0.BF.D0.BE.D0.B2.D0.B8.D0.BD.D0.BD.D0.BE.D1.81.D1.82.D1.8C)

English <http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/labor-discip.html>

~~~
mjn
(I'm the author.) What makes you think I'm not aware of those? The essay is in
effect an attempt to express skepticism about gamification by pointing out
that it looks _awfully_ similar to something that was tried in the '20s/'30s
in the USSR. Admittedly I make that point more clearly in the expanded paper
version of the essay (linked at the bottom), where I discuss the descent of
the '20s / early '30s gamification experiments into late-'30s Stakhanovism.

I think there is overall (including today) some pretty strong internal
difficulty when claiming to "gamify" work but still retaining the context of a
hierarchically controlled workplace where work is mandatory, with penalties
tied to the "game". Then it devolves into just another method of workplace
accounting & control.

~~~
omonra
Ok - apologies, I must have misread it.

It's just to me - discussing Soviet attempts at gamification without
mentioning things like the law I described or placement of peasants back into
serfdom (after they had been granted freedom 60 years earlier) is akin to
discussing whether Nazi train schedules were effective.

~~~
derefr
> discussing whether Nazi train schedules were effective

Honestly, that sounds like a great HN article.

------
alive-or-not
Author doesn't seem to know exactly how successful the Soviet Union was with
this tactic. In four years - 1929 to 1933 - it transformed from an agrarian
country, devastated by wars, to world second industrial power. Just a few
years later USSR was capable of outproducing in many areas the whole of Europe
under fascist control.

As a side node gamification drives me mad. IMHO only an idiot would care about
made up "achievements".

~~~
mjn
True, that's the pro argument (I'm the author of the linked essay). I think it
was clearly unsuccessful at the bit where it was supposed to drive intrinsic
motivation and worker autonomy, though. The USSR did manage to pull off a
crash industrialization, but was it really "socialist competition" or game-
like?

Part of my argument, though I make it more clearly in an expanded, short-paper
version of this essay [1], is that the "gamification" part devolved into just
regular old Stalinist command-and-control: production quotas and such, with a
thin facade of worker autonomy and "voluntary" competition spread across it.
That's one of the things people worry about with modern gamification as well,
that a "game" that's a mandatory part of your job is not really much of a
game, and more like old-fashioned, top-down control than the gamification
consultants' uplifting rhetoric would like you to believe (e.g.
[http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/19/local/la-
me-1019-lop...](http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/19/local/la-
me-1019-lopez-disney-20111018)).

[1] <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2115483>

~~~
alive-or-not
The Soviet economy was based on money a lot less than US or even socialist
Denmark. An average family would have enough savings to buy pretty much
everything they wanted (excluding luxury stuff, like holiday abroad or a
limousine), but the only place they were legally allowed to buy most stuff
were state-owned companies. A family would have to wait say 15 years in a
queue to buy an apartment, 7 years for a car and a couple of years for a TV,
vacuum cleaner or a washing machine. This is one place where a high achiever
could "cash" on his hard work, as he may be allowed to buy stuff w/o waiting.
Generally reputation, favors, networking played a bigger role in Soviet
economy and hard work could help with those.

Nice article BTW ;)

------
orbitingpluto
I remember reading an article about Soviet nail factories competing against
other nail Soviet nail factories. To boost production everyone ended up
creating worthless pin sized nails: one point per pin. To correct this they
shifted to production by weight, leading to crude low quality heavy nails.

Gamification doesn't work unless it actually means something.

~~~
mjn
As an academic, this sounds remarkably like what's going on with our own
"gamification" of academic publishing, with impact factors, citation counts,
h-indices, acceptance rate targets, journal points systems, etc. People do
strange things which happen to maximize ("game", as it were) those metrics.

------
CleanedStar
"Of course, the Soviet economy is not widely held up as a model of success."

I agree with you. The country went from a civil war and foreign invasion
(including by the US, something I'm sure 99% of Americans don't even know) and
then 25 years later were invaded by an alliance of Germany, Finland, Italy,
Hungary and other countries. Followed by a Cold War against a nuclear armed
opponent and its western European allies.

Yet during the 1930s, when starving veterans were being shot dead in the
streets of Washington DC, when unemployment in the US and Europe was over 20%,
the Soviet economy was booming. Massive steel factories were erected in places
such as Magnitogorsk, and factories building tractors to send to industrialize
agriculture. The US said Russia stole all technology from the US - until
Russia launched Sputnik. You can't blame the adversary for stealing IP when
they're doing things you can't do.

China also was a rural backwater, dominated by Europeans and Japanese until
the 20th century. Under the leadership of the politburo of the communist
party, its economy has been growing 10% a year since the early 1980s. People
say that is unsustainable, but they've been saying that since the late 1980s.
I'm sure their growth will slow down eventually, but they're already the
second largest economy in the world by GDP. Of course, the politburo is not as
left wing as it was during the height of the Cultural Revolution.

The USSR economy did stagnate when Stalin died, and people like Molotov were
sidelined. Capital spending decreased, policies like detente were enacted, and
the economy stagnated. The economy did very well before this change in policy
though. American and European workers and firms went to the USSR in the 1920s
because there was work and contracts in their growing economy, while the US
economy went off the hinges. Kind of like the current US unemployment rate
which is higher than anything since the mid-1980s.

~~~
nine_k
A former Soviet citizen here.

> Yet during the 1930s, when starving veterans were being shot dead in the
> streets of Washington DC, when unemployment in the US and Europe was over
> 20%, the Soviet economy was booming.

Oh yes. The US and Europe credited the Soviet Union well, and the Soviet Union
paid in gold.

At the same time, Soviet authorities robbed its own people, partly by putting
hundreds of thousands to forced labor camps, partly by just taking away their
possessions. The great hunger of 1935, with massive human casualties, has
happened because grain was expropriated from peasants to be sold for gold, and
the gold was spent to build massive steel factories and weaponry plants, using
American and German expertise.

With regard to shooting people dead, USSR was not shy of action at all.
Massive death sentences in 1935-1939 witch hunt campaign plus cruel oppression
of several riots against expropriations and hunger account for hundreds of
thousands of deaths.

(If you can't look this up in Wikipedia yourself, I'll gladly help you.)

Trust me, this is not a model of growth you'd enjoy.

Regarding gamification — yes, that was one of brighter ideas. Too bad that
real competition was often replaced by a fake that made bosses happy, using
massive falsification of results.

You want a competition between producers? Have you tried the so-called
'market'?

~~~
oddx
May be it was no best model, but about "hundreds of thousands to forced labor
camps"- it was about 1 million people in GULAG before second world war (0.59%
of 170 millions population). For modern USA incarceration rate is 0.74%. Are
you sure it's better model?

> You want a competition between producers? Have you tried the so-called
> 'market'?

Market is nice when you have many producers. But as soon as company became
'too big to fail' competition disappearing.

~~~
nine_k
I'm definitely unhappy with the US incarceration levels.

I still think that cutting wood or digging ore in Siberia (see e.g. the
weather in the fine city of Norilsk) is noticeably more cruel than serving
time in a US prison. A quick googling allows me to assume that forced labor as
a punishment has not been used in the US since 1940s, except for rare cases in
the military.

I very much hope the the US government, however crooked it might be, is not
considering high incarceration level as an engine of economic growth.

~~~
oddx
Yes, United States stopped using penal labor at twentieth
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour#United_States>). Soviet Union at
fifties.

I think 30 years lag is not soo bad considering level of social-economic
development of USSR and USA.

~~~
moxie
Penal labor is extremely prevalent in the US, and if anything, is growing
(over 1 million US prisoners today are engaged in penal labor).

It might not be "punative" penal labor, which takes it out of the category of
"forced labor." But US prisoners do labor in private prisons for private
companies, with the sole remuneration of reducing time from their sentences.

