What We Lose When We Gamify Reading

At the dawn of 2026, I spent an irresponsible amount of time cataloguing what I did in 2025. There are so many ways to aggregate a personality these days: Letterboxd kept track of how many movies you watched this year, Fitbit tallied the number of steps I took, the New York Times has the data on how many times I beat Wordle in three. According to Spotify Unwrapped, I spent most of last year listening to Talking Heads (and I did briefly hang my whole identity on this statistic). Even Discord chimed in to tell me my Top 5 Emojis used in 2025—my #1 was “ROFL Face”. However, as a writer and fiction professor, the biggest statistic that floods my algorithm every January is books: how many books did I read this year? What was your reading goal? Fifty books? One hundred? Let’s compare, and by that I mean: let’s compete.

One the surface, there’s nothing really wrong with this behavior. If I compare myself to other readers on social media (again, by “compare” I mean “compete”) and it gets me to read more, isn’t that a net positive? And isn’t it also positive that I can share my reading tastes with my fellow humans and find community? It’s true that Goodreads apps, social media, and end-of-year reading goals have encouraged us to read more. But, to our detriment, it is also affecting how we are reading.

Reading goals aren’t a new phenomenon—there’s a whole generation of us who grew up with the promise that, if we read a certain number of books in a summer, our local library would be obligated to throw us a pizza party. It’s not necessarily bad to count your books or to aim for a certain number. I think about my students, some of whom barely completed one novel in the entirety of their high school career, and the voice in my head says: anything to get people reading is a good thing.

If we’re gamifying our reading, we stop reading widely: we pick different versions of a story that we are guaranteed to like, and with that we lose a sense of well-roundedness, a sense of discovery and surprise.

But even if we’re reading more, all this quantifying is forcing readers into harmful patterns. First and most obvious, when we read to hit a goal rather than simply for pleasure, everybody reads as fast as possible to hike up their numbers. It’s like the entire reading public is a high school freshman trying to cram To Kill a Mockingbird at midnight the day before the assignment is due. We technically finish the book, but we retain nothing. Ask someone what they thought of A Guardian and a Thief, they’ll say, “Who knows? That was ten books ago.” More worrisome, when we read fast, we experience nothing. The book does not have a chance to burrow into our heart.

The second problem is: it’s less and less likely that A Guardian and a Thief is even on a person’s list if they’re shooting for a tally of, say, one hundred books a year. If we’re trying to read fast, the best strategy is to pick books that read easy. Generally this means books that are prose-light, plot-forward, and propulsive. It means we’ll forego a Moby Dick or a Middlemarch in favor of five declensions of A Court of Thorns and Roses. (Before the pitchforks and torches emerge, I should mention that I adore fun, propulsive books. We need these kinds of stories in our life, for the joyous escape of it. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read A Court of Thorns and Roses. I’m saying you shouldn’t only read it.)

If we’re gamifying our reading, we stop reading widely: we pick different versions of a story that we are guaranteed to like, and with that we lose a sense of well-roundedness, a sense of discovery and surprise. On a deeper level, it also means that we give up the art of reading slowly.

When I’m in a workshop, it feels like damning criticism when someone responds to a story by saying, “it was kind of slow.” But there are books that are meant to be read slow, and we’re in danger of losing that nuance. There are stories that pull a reader forward by asking the question, “What will happen next?” but there are other stories, that don’t pull a reader exclusively forward, instead they let our imagination spread out in all directions and we ride through the book on the question: “What is this experience?” My favorite books often do a little bit of both. The point is, there are books that deliberately decelerate the reading experience—sometimes they do it with density of prose, sometimes by ballooning the pace with lengthy bouts of interiority or description. Sometimes nothing “happens” in the way we expect plot to “happen.”

Books like this can frustrate and baffle. Their joys must be earned. Middlemarch, to go back to an earlier example, is a slog. But that’s because it is a novel of accumulation rather than momentum. By the end of the book, you know every thread in the web of an entire community, and how they all affect one another. It is immersive and intimate.

There’s a now-infamous exchange between Oprah Winfrey and Toni Morrison where Winfrey, having read Beloved, asked Morrison if she often heard from readers who had to stop and double back on sentences, “just trying to take it all in.” Morrison replied, “That, my dear, is called reading.”

Morrison is not being elitist here—she’s defending immersive reading. A book should make you stop mid-sentence and think, or stop to re-read the same paragraph because the words are so delicious. They should make you absorb each moment carefully, to get the complex picture that’s being presented to your brain.

So how do we resolve the need to quantify our reading habits with our need for a deeper reading experience? I’m not sure there’s a simple solution—we are addicted to data and intent on improving ourselves over enjoying ourselves. I appreciate an app like Storygraph, which tabulates aspects of the books you’re reading—the pace, mood, and character complexity. It’s not the full meal, but at least it’s something. For reading widely, there’s discovery to be had among novellas, which thanks to their short length can get away with being weird and different. But don’t eschew long books entirely: perhaps if someone needs to read one hundred books in a year, they could count Moby Dick as five.

But if you can find a way to prioritize the experience over the numbers game, I encourage it. Maybe it’s okay for our fitness apps log fewer steps if it means we escape our treadmills and take a leisurely walk outside. Maybe it’s okay to read ten books in a year and simply enjoy them. This year, in lieu of posting a full 2025 reading list, I just posted a few bits of favorite prose I’d read. Just nine sentences from nine different books, very granular. But unlike the endless forgotten lists from previous years, those words feel like they just might stick in the memory.