GTA

I tried out being a delivery driver. While riding my bike around London with a really big backpack and a bright green jacket, I had an unexpected dejà-vu. A memory of ‘GTA San Andreas’ flashed in my mind, a video game I truly loved when I was a kid, just like many kids in my generation.

The game had a great main story, but what was revolutionary about it was the number of side missions one could access, filling so many more hours of gameplay to get to that damn 100% completion. You could activate some of these missions by entering taxis, police cars, firetrucks, ambulances. These missions were typically short and straightforward, driving from point a to b, sometimes then to c, picking up somebody, putting out a fire with an hydrant, stopping a criminal one way or the other. As you completed one mission, you immediately had a new one popping up on your screen.

My first deliveries felt weirdly similar. You turn on the app, a delivery pops up. You need to drive to a specific point. You start biking. Your character moves on a virtual map. You arrived! Confirm you arrived by sliding a bar on the app. Pick up the order and new directions are already on your phone. Bike some more, arrive near the target. Find the house number. Find a spot to park the bike. Ring, walk the stairs, deliver to the customer. Confirm delivery. A new delivery mission pops up.

Pokémon Go brought Pokémons to life. Delivery apps made GTA side missions a reality. You can call this ‘gamification’, sure, but it goes beyond what this term typically refers to. It is not the progress bars LinkedIn uses to convince you to add more information to the profile. This is a real job, with actual money and food. By tracking location, using a mobile app, and disassembling a delivery jobs into easy-to-perform chunks, the experience is built like a game, like a series of missions for your character.

And just like in a game, it was fun to follow this clear stream of short actions and instructions, with a continuous feedback loop rewarding you for each task you perform. You feel quite accomplished at the end of the day. You have worked hard, you know how many deliveries you did, how many kilometers you biked, how much money you made.

Unlike video games, though, delivery apps have a hard time keeping up the fun over time. In GTA, missions level up, or involve different actions over time, or allow you to swap to other side missions or the main story. Deliveries don’t. Addresses change, sure. But the activity is perpetually identical. Repetition curbed my initial enthusiasm. You are left with the reality of the job. Biking back and forth in London’s traffic, to bring burgers to hungover people. The illusion is gone, but it was fun while it lasted.