25 Ways to De-Gamify Your Climbing
How To Make Rock Climbing Less Like Duolingo
Those paying attention cannot have failed to notice that climbing is now widely understood to be about using geology to score the highest number of points possible. Though historically about the quality experiences it gives to you, climbing has been transmogrified into being about point scoring and tick collecting. This transformation is so comprehensive that famous video gamers are now drawn to climbing due to it being “the most video game form of exercise”.
The process by which this has occurred is known as gamification, a technique used by behavioural scientists to turn activities into games and thereby maximise productivity and profit for big business. Gamification systematically dangles elements such as points, badges, leaderboards, and achievement levels in front of humans like carrots, which they learn to see as valuable and chase as if they mean something in of themselves. Implementation of this practice has led to a transformation where the joys of climbing — the thrill of exploration, the rhythms and feelings of movement on rock, and serene connection with nature — are overshadowed by the single-minded maximally efficient pursuit of the points. Consequently, the essence of climbing as an intrinsically valuable, deeply personal and enriching experience has been lost.
However, not everyone is simply content with being reduced to a number scoring machine. Indeed, de-gamification movements are already well established in running and in cycling. Here too dissent is growing, and a burgeoning de-gamification movement is rising among rock climbers. From Aidan Roberts emphasising his experiences over his numbers, from progressive coaches telling their clients to reject grades, to being the topic of discussion on highly influential climbing podcasts, anti-gamification sentiment is increasingly widespread, and may well become climbing’s next zeitgeist.
Despite this, there have been relatively few systematic considerations of how a climber can act to meaningfully reject the influence of gamification.
This post seeks to address this. Here follows 25 different ways you can actively resist gamification in your own climbing life. Here we will focus on de-gamification specifically, and will not be discussing ways of deepening one’s climbing experiences — that will have to wait for another post. Nonetheless, implementing some or all of these methods will bring you closer to the mindset Roberts has recently been advocating, and which was the traditional and organic way of being a climber prior to the commercialisation of rock climbing.
Minimising The Points
The first category of techniques concerns deliberately selecting rock climbs which the gamified mind cannot justify. It cannot justify them because the number of points that can be scored using the rock is meagre given the amount of effort required to make an ascent. In other words, the points-per-unit-effort is very low. The gamified mind seeks the ‘soft touch’ the ‘quick tick’ and the ‘holiday grade’. You will seek the opposite.
#1: Seek Out Sandbags
Attempt climbs with very low points-to-effort ratio.
#2: Go To Areas Known For Being ‘Hard For The Grade’
Visit the places on Earth known to have the lowest points-per-unit-effort ratios on Earth. Trying a ‘low grade’ circuit at Fontainebleau is a good place to start.
#3: Try Things Not In Your Style
The lowest points-to-effort ratios are likely to be in styles you are bad at.
#4: Climb Multipitch Routes
Hundreds of metres of climbing but only one set of points. The longer the better to minimise points-to-effort.
Maximising The Effort
The second category of techniques again involves decreasing the points-to-effort ratio, but instead of simply selecting hard rocks, it concerns approaching those rocks in a way inconsistent with maximum efficiency. This is either because you are allowing values other than efficiency to determine your climbing, or because you are deliberately trying to reduce efficiency. All of these methods consciously and willfully exchange efficiency for altering the quality of the climbing experience. The gamified mind truly cannot comprehend this, so give it a try.
#5 Attempt Climbs In Good Style
Style is a value that cannot be reconciled with gamification. By choosing to climb in good style you deliberately limit exposure to information and technology so as to being maximally reliant on your own human powers. As such, the number of points you'll be able to extract from the rock in good style is invariably going to be less than if taking a gamified point maximisation approach. Good style demands high ability and yields the highest quality of climbing experiences. Though it is possible to reframe style as a game-within-a-game, and many websites and athletes do this, it is always important to keep in mind what actually makes good style good. There's far more to it than just having different categories to score points in.
#6: Remove Technology
Deliberately use less technology than would be maximally efficient for scoring the points. Attempt bolted routes without using the bolts, solo routes, take a minimalist rack, use suboptimal shoes, don’t wear a kneepad, leave the fan at home, don't look up beta on YouTube. See how relying on your body feels. It’s always worth asking yourself “am I fishing with dynamite?”1 Alternatively, you could even use no climbing tech whatsoever; no shoes, no chalk, no pads, no bolts, no gear, no rope and thereby get close to how a palaeolithic man would have felt climbing the rock.
#7: Add Handicaps
Consider deliberately handicapping yourself. Wear a blindfold, use one arm, or don’t use any arms.2 Notice how the reduction in efficiency goes hand in hand with changes in experience.
Discrediting The Points
The points system underlying the gamified vision of climbing actually makes little logical sense. Organising one’s life around such a flawed system is like building one’s house on sand. Luckily, solid philosophical foundations for climbing are well established and are there for you once you’ve decided to build your house on the rock itself.
#8: It’s All Relative
Difficulty in climbing is relative. It is relative to the individual, to the time and place of the ascent, to the conditions, to knowledge, to skill, to equipment. The points system is relative to the rock type, to the style, to the crag, to the area and its community, to the country and its people. This leads to inherent incommensurability both between climbs and between different people's experience of a given climb. Acting as if the points are on some absolute scale is delusional. In the words of R. L. G. Irving: “Experience will probably show that numbers are just as inadequate a means of grading a climb as they are of grading a dinner”.3
#9: The Points Are Biased
Consider watching Dr Kimbrough Moore’s videos on how the points system is systematically biased in favour of certain characteristics. Are you playing a rigged game?
#10: The Points Aren't The Point
Most philosophies of climbing aren't about collecting points and ticks. You wouldn't know this from contemporary social media output, but go back only a short while and you will find magazine articles and books dedicated to discovering and articulating what climbing is really all about. It's well worth knowing of all these diverse approaches and training yourself to notice which of these motivations are driving you at any given time.
Removing The Points Entirely
The most decisive way to eliminate gamification in your climbing is to eliminate the presence of numbers, points and ticks. You can’t be living your life by the points if there are no points up for grabs. In the resulting vacuum you are forced to reflect upon what is left over.
#11: Make Up Eliminates and Link-Ups
Dave Parry recently identified eliminates as “the ultimate rebellion against [the] commercialism of climbing”.4 Inventing link-ups can serve a similar function.5 In both cases you just make something up. No points can be derived from this, especially if the climbing is ‘illogical’. “It's just for you, just climbing. We could be onto something here.”
#12: Practise Deliberate Ignorance
You can’t be climbing for the points if you don’t know what they are. Consider adopting the GILC approach when visiting crags for the first time.
#13: Perceived Exertion
If measuring progress is important to you then consider applying the principles of perceived exertion to a familiar route to see how you’re going. You don't need numbers or points to do this.
Retiring The Tick
Ticks are distractions that take us away from the real meaning of climbing: the experience of being there, climbing rock. In the words of José Ortega y Gasset: “One does not climb in order to tick; on the contrary, one ticks in order to have climbed.”6 Indeed, one can climb without ticking at all.
#14: Delay The Tick
Break the connection between making an ascent and the dopamine hit of adding it to your logbook. Wait several days after an ascent before ticking the route.
#15: Replace Ticks with Descriptive Diary Entries
Adopt a principle of writing a diary entry describing your most significant climbing experiences. Do not make reference to grades.
#16: Jump Off One Move Before The Top
Occasionally, you may wish jump off one move before the top of the route. You can’t claim the tick, but was the climbing still valuable?
Emphasise The Concrete, Ignore The Abstract
This category of techniques are to do with focussing on the “cold stony reality” of climbing and the experiences it yields.7 These things are the concrete substance of a climbing life. The points are just abstract re-representations of these things.8 The aim here is to direct more attention towards the concrete, while directing attention away from the abstract.
#17: Reframe Ascents In Geological Terms
Instead of explaining the ascent you've made in terms of a name and a grade, explain it only in geological and experiential terms. “Today I climbed up a buttress on the long gritstone escarpment overlooking the Hope Valley. It was a slab into a sudden roof, which you have to really commit to in order to get around.” Try to speak of ‘making an ascent’ rather than of ‘getting’ or ‘doing’ a climb.
#18: Delete Your Logbook
Believe it or not, the climbs still happened whether you record the points or not.
#19: Don’t Film, Be
You don’t need to prove to anyone that you scored the points you did. Use the reclaimed time and attention to focus on what it is like to be there in that place climbing the rock.
Using Gamification Against Gamification
Most of what we have discussed here is how to resist what is known as gamification-from-above: where companies and institutions indoctrinate climbers into the gamified worldview. In this section, however, we are to discuss gamification-from-below: using gamification techniques to resist gamification-from-above.9
#20: Practise Statistical Judo
This is the replacing of one set of points with another set of points that track quality experiences. Eventually the intrinsic goodness of such experiences will shine forth at you, at which point you can stop counting them.
#21: The Rawsight
The onsight is not the ultimate way to score points. The ultimate way is to score the points without knowing how many points you’re about to score, nor any other information for that matter. This style has been termed the ‘rawsight’. Use this game-within-a-game to come to the realisation that grades are merely safety information, and aren’t points at all.
#22: Taking Gamification All The Way
Consider the gamified mindset: that the efficient pursuit of the points is all that matters. What are the full implications of this worldview? Is this compatible with viewing the Earth as something that exists merely to score points with?
Rejecting Gamifiers and Gamification
This category of methods is two-pronged. Firstly, it is about reducing one’s exposure to climbing’s gamification industrial complex as well as its worldview. Secondly, it is about developing an intellectual immune system that allows you to immediately identify gamified attitudes and messaging, and arming you with the arguments with which to defend a richer account of what climbing is all about.
#23: Silence The Gamifiers
Unfollow companies, coaches and influencers pushing or living the gamified mindset. This is probably the single best thing you can do for your philosophy of climbing. Unplug from this world and reclaim your life.
#24 Read Anti-Gamification Climbing Literature
There is a great history of writers arguing against the gamification of climbing, even if they aren’t directly calling it that. Read the works of climbers such as Geoffrey Winthrop Young, George Mallory, Frank Smythe, R. L. G. Irving, Reinhold Messner, Doug Scott, John Redhead, Phillip Bartlett, John Gill, Arno Ilgner, Paul Pritchard, Francis Sanzaro and Modern Climber.10 There is also a reasonable amount of academic writing on the gamification and de-gamification of climbing, in particular by Richard G. Mitchell, Ian Heywood, Neil Lewis, Dave Hardy, Ben Levey, Pam R. Sailors and Gunnar Karlsen.11
#25 Read Wider Anti-Gamification Literature
The gamification of the entire world has been discussed by writers such as Max Weber, Jacques Ellul, Josef Pieper, Neil Postman, Iain McGilchrist and Paul Kingsnorth. A couple of contemporary writers are working on the gamification of sport specifically, namely Steven Conway and Emanuel Hurych.12
Conclusion
Some of these are ongoing practices, some are for use only while you break the spell of gamification, and others can be adopted now and again so as to rehearse the knowledge that the meaning of climbing does not lie in numbers, grades, ticks or efficiency. Once liberated from the gamified mindset you can selectively return to it in full knowledge of what you're doing and why you're doing it. Under these circumstances the tools of gamification can then even be empowering, rather than enslaving.
Mortal beings aren’t meant to be optimised point collecting machines.
Reject the gamification of climbing.
Smythe, F. S. (1942). British Mountaineers. William Collins. Page 48.
Those seeking an extreme approach might consider wearing roller skates, wearing boxing gloves, or adding knives to one’s landing (at your own risk!!).
Irving, R. L. G. (1937). Relativity In Mountaineering. In The Alpine Journal.
Maybe eliminates can be the ultimate rebellion against commercialism of climbing. Go out, make something up, climb it, enjoy it. And then don’t tell anyone about it, don’t record it, don’t grade it. It can’t be monetised, can’t be leveraged for likes, and nobody can tell you what fingerboard metrics you need to be pulling. It’s just for you, just climbing. We could be onto something here.
Parry, D. (2024). The Art of Eliminates. In Pennine Lines.
We reached the top of the crag after an enjoyable scramble, and later meandered back to the Pen y Grwyd Hotel. There we met an expert. He asked us where we had been, and we described a trifle vaguely the route we had taken. He was horrified. “Why,” he said, “you’ve been up a bit of Route Two, some of The Avalanche, a portion of The Roof,” and so on and so on. “You haven’t done a climb at all.” He spoke like a bishop admonishing a curate for putting too free an interpretation on the passages from the Scriptures. We felt crushed and humiliated. For all our enjoyment, for all a splendid and exhilarating scramble, we hadn’t done a climb at all.
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The literal, folkloric and even strictly geological memories of mountains faded to the background of climbers’ consciousness. Little roman numerals appeared besides the lines drawn on illustrations of peaks in guidebook illustrations. The Alps became a matrix of numbers and lines.
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Debatable article
Also, I loved the concept of "rawsight". I also didnt know I was a GILC hunter until. How wonderful it is to know now!