Good stories have some meaning, or lesson in them, experience behind them, something they want to tell. "Manipulating" the emotions, making you read to the end etc are just ways to make the lesson easier to grasp. Play, as an activity, is useful to prepare for real situations, and similarly stories, I think, are helping so that you don't need to gather every experience first-hand. Of course there are many "junk stories where the lesson is not present, is outdated or downright harmful, but the stories, in general, are not time-wasters at all.

> On the one hand, I hate that I’m being manipulated by artificial constructs.

If you care mainly about things that wouldn't matter (or even make sense) if you were the only human, that ship had sailed. Might as well use it consciously.

Duolingo had the opposite effect on me. It started nagging me often enough to do things I stopped using it.

Merit badges and achievements are boolean: you don't have them, then you do a thing, and suddenly you do.

Learning something tends to be a gradual uphill climb: through practice and repetition you slowly become better. There are very few inherent concrete goals or thresholds, and it's generally fairly difficult to notice yourself improving because it takes place over a longer time period.

I struggle with perfectionism, which means while I enjoy learning I'm never hugely satisfied with the outcome. You can always bake a better cake, write better code, or whatever. But when you get that 'ding' of an achievement there's nothing even the most annoying bit of my head can argue about: I did the thing; there's no way to improve on it further. Annoyingly, that's far more satisfying for me.

It doesn’t really motivate, it’s a feeble attempt to boost motivation via extrinsic motivation.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), extrinsic motivation doesn’t work long term, doesn’t work if the extrinsic motivation stops, and most importantly, kills intrinsic motivation.

See Alfie Kohn’s book Punished by Rewards, containing dozens of pages of research proving the above.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punished_by_Rewards

Extrinsic motivation is short term, naive, and harmful - but people trying to control the uncontrollable still like it and use it because it gives them the illusion of control.

It does not serve the learners.

Some people respond more than others. I personally don't care about "achievements" in games at all, despite playing quite a lot of them. However, several of my friends play for achievements often, or alter their behavior so that they get more achievements while playing.

I like the point you bring up. That badges and such make gaming seem less of a wasted time. I know people who can't tolerate open ended games for this reason: no clear goals. Minecraft added The End dimension specifically because of people like this, so that they can "finish" the game.

It has links to status as well I think. Even the name achievements and badges reflect this, and also they're often featured on the profile of the player, so that people can quickly compare others and themselves.

Why does a bronze medal seem so much more significant than fourth place?