AP6 |
just what is it that makes video games so different, so appealing? matteo BITTANTI
The attention economy has shaped a discourse around engagement that has evolved significantly over the past two years. Recent studies report a continued contraction of average screen-based attention.
The conversation about engagement has evolved in a related way. Industry research from 2025 and 2026 highlights similar findings across sectors. Loyalty program members are increasingly pushing back against the old engagement strategies: points that expire, tiered access restrictions, and contact frequency driven by the operator’s schedule rather than the member’s interest. Museum visits are recovering to pre-pandemic levels only unevenly. Even among visitors whose expectations are met or exceeded, only a small portion remain engaged afterward. Curiosity remains a key motivator for attendance, and institutions that satisfy that curiosity are better able to retain their audiences.
The key insight is that there is not a universal engagement crisis. By most measures, individual engagement levels have increased. The real issue lies in the current design of engagement strategies — where sophisticated mechanisms for capturing attention, encouraging return visits, and increasing session duration and conversion have become so refined that they no longer serve the relationships they were intended to support. People generate engagement data, but this data does not necessarily reflect their experience. The meaningful engagement discussed here is not about the absence of measurement or revenue; it is about recognizing that measurement and revenue alone do not define the relationship.
The two contributions in this section approach this conceptual problem from different point of views.
Matteo Bittanti walks through four worked examples — Tetris, Dark Souls, Papers, Please, and Minecraft — to show what engagement looks like when a system answers an action and returns it as a consequence. He draws a sharp distinction between substantive game engagement and the extractive logics that have colonized parts of the same industry. Gamification, he argues, is the antithesis of play. The distinction matters because the same logic has now traveled outward from the game industry to almost every people-facing sector that measures attention.
Lisa Gong brings the same distinction into the operational level. Good engagement, in her words, should make the experience easier, not make the customer feel watched. Her piece works through the practical disciplines that distinguish operators who treat customers as ongoing relationships from those who treat them as conversion funnels. Refined commercial environments now require the discipline to ask what kind of attention each customer wants.
Their two contributions help develop the core of the issue: engagement as a relationship in which the system responds, the actions and outcomes remain legible, and attention is earned through care rather than captured through design. The following clusters — co-creation, ecosystem, engagement at scale — illustrate this through cross-sector practice.