Someone I know scored copies of two books for me, books which appeared gaming-related based on their covers.
Today, I started reading one of them. It's an O'Reilly title, "Gamification by Design".
Turns out it's not about writing games. It's about exploiting the psychology that hooks people into games to hook them into, well, pretty much anything.
I'm about halfway through. I'm not going to bother finishing it. There are two main reasons for this: (1) it comes across to me as instructions in how to exploit people, which I'm not interested in doing, and (2) it repeatedly tries to drive readers to some website, presumably the authors', to the point that it feels to me like an extended ad for the website. (Perhaps this is largely because other advertising has poisoned that well so thoroughly, but it has.)
I'm reminded of an incident in my past, when I listened to the wrong person and ended up with a book titled something like "How to date young women for men over 35" (precise title lost to decades-old fuzzy memory), which on reading I felt would have been more honestly titled "How to date-rape young women for men over 35". I dithered for a long time over what to do with it; I did not want to turn it loose into the world lest it end up in the hands of someone exploitive enough to (ab)use the techniques described, but it goes very hard with me to burn any book, even that one. If I'd known a girl just emerging into womanhood, I might have given it to her as a form of "here's an example of exploitation you should be aware enough of to defend yourself against". I no longer recall what became of it. But I feel vaguely similarly about this: it strikes me as a social evil, in that it is instructions in how to exploit people.
It has, for me, rather tarnished O'Reilly's image to find it under their imprimatur. It's a bit as if (to exaggerate) there were an O'Reilly book titled "How to run an effective scam".
I'm not sure what to do with it.