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Rethinking Gamification
Gamification marks a major change to everyday life. It describes the permeation of economic, political, and social contexts by game-elements such as awards, rule structures, and interfaces that are inspired by video games. Sometimes the term is reduced to the implementation of points, badges, and leaderboards as incentives and motivations to be productive. Sometimes it is envisioned as a universal remedy to deeply transform society toward more humane and playful ends. Despite its use by corporations to manage brand communities and personnel, however, gamification is more than just a marketing buzzword. States are beginning to use it as a new tool for governing populations more effectively. It promises to fix what is wrong with reality by making every single one of us fitter, happier, and healthier. Indeed, it seems like all of society is up for being transformed into one massive game. The contributions in this book offer a candid assessment of the gamification hype. They trace back the historical roots of the phenomenon and explore novel design practices and methods. They critically discuss its social implications and even present artistic tactics for resistance. It is time to rethink gamification!
346 pages, Paperback
First published June 16, 2014
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January 12, 2020
This is an edited collection by, I guess, experts in the academic field of gamification. I can only guess that, because until very recently I didn’t even know there was an academic field of gamification – never mind that there might be experts in it. I’m not going to cover every chapter – but every chapter is worth reading. I’ve learnt a lot from this book and it has inspired me to read a few other books now on the same theme – including some of the ‘classics’ of ludic theory, something else I didn’t know existed.
The chapter by Schrape is an application of Foucault to this whole field, as is implied in the title, Gamification and Governmentality. He links gamification back to marketing – gamification being the idea of applying game like features to non-game activities. This is an idea that we come back to time and again throughout this book. In the following chapter, Ruffino quotes Bogost – an influential theorist in gamification – who said that gamification should really be called explotiationware.
Schrape’s article refers back to a book I’ve only recently read and didn’t get around to reviewing – Auge’s Non-Places. The normal example of a non-place – and one Auge begins with himself – is the airport. Here you have no past. If you pay for a first-class ticket, you can sit in a first class seat, even if you otherwise live in a cardboard box somewhere. Few people go to these spaces to be in them – you go to them to be somewhere else. And they are often non-places in the sense that the differences between one of these spaces in Hong Kong, say, isn’t all much from one in that is in Sydney. A lot of this ‘non-place’ stuff seems to undermine us as people with histories, where our sense of self-worth generally comes from the distinctions that arise from our developing various forms of cultural, social and symbolic capital – all of which generally take decades to acquire. So, these ‘non-places’ are odd in how few of these distinctions were evident or actively considered. Like I said, pay for the first-class ticket and you are first-class, or you can be wealthy but fly economy and your distinction as a wealthy person seems to disappear. The distinctions between social groups in non-places appear less ‘ingrained’ than they certainly where in previous social formations.
But gamification has changed this back again. Frequent flyer point systems build rewards according to loyalty. Which then means that your past decisions impact your current life – where the more points you have, the more rewards you get and the more apparent those rewards are in how you travel (think Veblen’s Conspicuous Consumption), with special travel lounges for special people. All of which feeds into more standard notions associated with ‘merit’, something perhaps undermined by the earlier iterations of ‘non-places’. These ideas of conspicuous display following extensive investment of time and attention in gamified environments is a key aspect of games more generally, and of other prestige systems in society.
As I said, this chapter is concerned with Foucault and so the issues around surveillance become important here too – and, with Foucault, surveillance is seen as both a negative thing, and a productive thing at the same time. That is, there are clear benefits that help with motivation if we have a Fitbit and other new technologies that give us the data we can then act upon to improve our lives – however, this does come at the cost of being under 24-hour surveillance. We, as a society, seem to find it much easier to understand this as a problem when we learn about China’s social credit system, but to shrug it off almost entirely when it is Facebook or Google doing the surveillance – something I find particularly hard to understand. We tend to also think that liberalism is about being free and that this might also imply a repugnance for the kinds of hyper-surveillance associated with many of these technologies – however, it’s important to remember that Bentham was an early Liberal and that he came up with the idea for the Panopticon prison – something he would have been happy to have extended to society more generally. Also, the choice architectures of ‘paternalistic libertarianism’ that the authors of Nudge refer to themselves as, also imply something that people like Hayek might have appeared totally opposed to – that experts can or should design environments that encourage ‘better’ decision making by non-experts.
There’s an article here that discusses many of the non-game spaces where game-like features are being increasingly applied – education, work, politics, war-games… It is also interesting that in the case of education, games are often used as a mode of engagement for children (and obviously, this is one of the major reasons for its use in marketing too) but what is also interesting is that Vygotski was particularly interested in games, not least because he saw them as a way for young children to ‘test out’ being older. He literally says that children never play themselves in role play games, but rather someone a least a couple of years older than they currently are. I’ve been wondering if this is always the case – not that adults role play being older, but this testing out idea is always central to role plays and if that is part of the attraction.
I’m going to stop referring to authors from this book now – just ideas along the way. I’ve only recently learnt something about decimation I never knew before. I’ve always known we use it a little wrongly in English – although, some people say that we don’t, since its Latin meaning isn’t necessarily relevant to its English one. All the same, I know it means to reduce by one-tenth, while we generally mean in English to nearly completely wipe out. What I didn’t know was that it came from Marcus Crassus from the Spartacus revolt who, when one of his generals lost a battle against the slaves, he ordered his legions to be decimated – that is, to kill one-in-ten of his own troops. And then finding this out reminded me of something I read recently about World War One, where men in the trenches might be asked to ‘go over the top’ – but that this was often done by each soldier counting out one, two, three and then each third soldier having to go over the top to their near certain death. Which also meant them standing beside two men who had ‘been lucky’ in this particular game of chance. What a nightmare war can be. But this is another rather horrible example of when game elements can be anything but fun.
The idea that games can be a source of Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow is also discussed. Reading this book got me to track down Flow too, something I’ve been meaning to read for ages, but never have until now. The discussion is on digital games and how they are mostly about points – where points are the key economic system of motivation, you know, accumulating points in the way we might accumulate money. Once again, the idea that just adding gamified elements to horrible tasks will be enough to make them fun and motivate people to perform them is problematized. The other bit of this that is particularly interesting is the idea that games often imply either ‘cheating’ or at least ‘nearly cheating’ – bending the rules, if not literally breaking them. But that this might not be something that people providing gamified solutions might either anticipate or want to happen. Still, if the reward is great enough, game-like solutions might well encourage rule bending, at the very least.
There is a lovely chapter in which the history of gamification is discussed – but what I found particularly interesting was the idea that gamification often assumes that all you need to do is add game elements to some process and that will make it a game. Except that game elements (points, role plays, structures) are all well and good, but the thing that really makes a game a game is someone playing it. So, ‘designing’ a game is important – but it is nowhere near enough, especially if no one ever ‘plays’ the game. Keeping an eye on players and player involvement ought to be core here, but might not always be, given the designers might be more focused on the ‘outcome’ they are hoping the gamification will acheive
One of the issues with ‘gamification’ as a kind of data-ification of people is that, as one of the authors here says, identity becomes the same as ‘identification’ and identification is often based on data that is pretty easy to gather – date of birth, marital status, religious views. But the thing is that we change our identity, at least in part, by a process of ‘forgetting’ – and that isn’t really something data systems do, or as an author says, where ‘measure leaves little room for change in a person’s life’… Games are often understood as an escape from reality, but what happens when reality becomes a game? Is there an outside? And how do you resist such a game-like world? Is such a world still a game if you are ‘required’ to play? Some ways escaping gamification are discussed – but mostly they seem to be about smashing the games, rather than ‘disrupting’ them.
The problem is that as games become ever more ubiquitous in our lives they will also become less and less ‘obvious’. We like to think, in the Nudge example again, that we use games to provide ourselves with motivation to achieve what we want or what might be best for us – but that might not be quite true and what might be ‘best’ for us might not be as obvious as gamifiers assume. It might also be that games play us at least as much as we play them. And the games also have the advantage of being able to adapt to our desires and failings much more readily than we might be able to adapt them to our rationality. Again, I can’t help thinking of China’s social credit system – and how capitalism is much smarter in that the system doesn’t impose its will upon us, it just creates a system where the choice architecture makes the system’s will virtually inevitable. They quote Bogost – someone I am going to have to read – ‘When people act because incentives compel them towards particular choices, they cannot be said to be making choices at all’. The example given is of a young man who was using Strava (a bicycle riding/racing app that encourages you to go ever faster) and who was killed in trying to beat some high score. His parents sued the company – an interesting case, since I think the whole point of ‘games’ is that they do encourage us to push ourselves beyond our owm limits.
There is a lovely line in one of the chapters, that ‘video game design used to be about taking ‘lives’ from the player as a punishment, but now many games just take time from the player’s real life as the player has to repeat a section of the game’. The whole question of ‘grinding’ is discussed and this as both a means to develop the skills that will allow you to move to new levels, but also to gain the points that will move you up the leader board. This is where it starts to get more interesting, because particularly in multi-player games, individual players stop being the central idea, and teamwork becomes much more important. In fact, so much so that the ‘rules’ of the game also become less important in that learning to play the game is something that itself requires a total emersion while interacting with fellow players. Not only is life becoming more like a game, but games are becoming more like life.
As the author says, ‘if the goal of gamification is to engage a user in a non-game setting, then the endgame of gamification is the process by which the user is moved from the gamification reward-based grind into the non-game setting’. This is seriously interesting. A lot of the point of gamification is this idea of gaining points and the points being a kind of metaphor for also gaining skills. If you are doing this to change your life, then there is a problem here where the motivations that are being offered are extrinsic, while we have known for quite some time that people achieve much more using intrinsic motivations. In that sense gamification might actively work against what it is ultimately setting out to achieve. As such the author suggests that gamification might need to focus on ‘the non-reward-based aspects of game design’.
Similarly, the last chapter of this brings us to Aristotle – and the use of eudemonia in game design. Which just means that we ought to return to Aristotle’s ethics when we think of gamified applications. Rather than it being about getting people to become more efficient – we should be looking at how to allow people to become happy in the sense of Aristotle’s ‘good soul’. And to achieve this we might need to move gamification away from the ‘ludic’ – mostly focused on competition – and more towards the paidic – which involves more curiosity, exploration and transgression.
And since motivation is ultimately the point of gamification, then this also becomes important, since motivation is often about making the otherwise objectionable something people will choose to do. There is a lovely line that explains that this ‘paradigm has been called “chocolate-covered broccoli”’.
The importance of situation to all of this is also stressed – and that is because too often gamified applications simply assume that this is not relevant, that everyone will be motivated by points or the narrative structure of the game – when this is clearly not the case.
I’m finding the books I’ve been reading on gamification terribly interesting – sorry this review is so long, but as you see, the book covered an awful lot of ground, and I haven’t really touched on all of that in this review.
The chapter by Schrape is an application of Foucault to this whole field, as is implied in the title, Gamification and Governmentality. He links gamification back to marketing – gamification being the idea of applying game like features to non-game activities. This is an idea that we come back to time and again throughout this book. In the following chapter, Ruffino quotes Bogost – an influential theorist in gamification – who said that gamification should really be called explotiationware.
Schrape’s article refers back to a book I’ve only recently read and didn’t get around to reviewing – Auge’s Non-Places. The normal example of a non-place – and one Auge begins with himself – is the airport. Here you have no past. If you pay for a first-class ticket, you can sit in a first class seat, even if you otherwise live in a cardboard box somewhere. Few people go to these spaces to be in them – you go to them to be somewhere else. And they are often non-places in the sense that the differences between one of these spaces in Hong Kong, say, isn’t all much from one in that is in Sydney. A lot of this ‘non-place’ stuff seems to undermine us as people with histories, where our sense of self-worth generally comes from the distinctions that arise from our developing various forms of cultural, social and symbolic capital – all of which generally take decades to acquire. So, these ‘non-places’ are odd in how few of these distinctions were evident or actively considered. Like I said, pay for the first-class ticket and you are first-class, or you can be wealthy but fly economy and your distinction as a wealthy person seems to disappear. The distinctions between social groups in non-places appear less ‘ingrained’ than they certainly where in previous social formations.
But gamification has changed this back again. Frequent flyer point systems build rewards according to loyalty. Which then means that your past decisions impact your current life – where the more points you have, the more rewards you get and the more apparent those rewards are in how you travel (think Veblen’s Conspicuous Consumption), with special travel lounges for special people. All of which feeds into more standard notions associated with ‘merit’, something perhaps undermined by the earlier iterations of ‘non-places’. These ideas of conspicuous display following extensive investment of time and attention in gamified environments is a key aspect of games more generally, and of other prestige systems in society.
As I said, this chapter is concerned with Foucault and so the issues around surveillance become important here too – and, with Foucault, surveillance is seen as both a negative thing, and a productive thing at the same time. That is, there are clear benefits that help with motivation if we have a Fitbit and other new technologies that give us the data we can then act upon to improve our lives – however, this does come at the cost of being under 24-hour surveillance. We, as a society, seem to find it much easier to understand this as a problem when we learn about China’s social credit system, but to shrug it off almost entirely when it is Facebook or Google doing the surveillance – something I find particularly hard to understand. We tend to also think that liberalism is about being free and that this might also imply a repugnance for the kinds of hyper-surveillance associated with many of these technologies – however, it’s important to remember that Bentham was an early Liberal and that he came up with the idea for the Panopticon prison – something he would have been happy to have extended to society more generally. Also, the choice architectures of ‘paternalistic libertarianism’ that the authors of Nudge refer to themselves as, also imply something that people like Hayek might have appeared totally opposed to – that experts can or should design environments that encourage ‘better’ decision making by non-experts.
There’s an article here that discusses many of the non-game spaces where game-like features are being increasingly applied – education, work, politics, war-games… It is also interesting that in the case of education, games are often used as a mode of engagement for children (and obviously, this is one of the major reasons for its use in marketing too) but what is also interesting is that Vygotski was particularly interested in games, not least because he saw them as a way for young children to ‘test out’ being older. He literally says that children never play themselves in role play games, but rather someone a least a couple of years older than they currently are. I’ve been wondering if this is always the case – not that adults role play being older, but this testing out idea is always central to role plays and if that is part of the attraction.
I’m going to stop referring to authors from this book now – just ideas along the way. I’ve only recently learnt something about decimation I never knew before. I’ve always known we use it a little wrongly in English – although, some people say that we don’t, since its Latin meaning isn’t necessarily relevant to its English one. All the same, I know it means to reduce by one-tenth, while we generally mean in English to nearly completely wipe out. What I didn’t know was that it came from Marcus Crassus from the Spartacus revolt who, when one of his generals lost a battle against the slaves, he ordered his legions to be decimated – that is, to kill one-in-ten of his own troops. And then finding this out reminded me of something I read recently about World War One, where men in the trenches might be asked to ‘go over the top’ – but that this was often done by each soldier counting out one, two, three and then each third soldier having to go over the top to their near certain death. Which also meant them standing beside two men who had ‘been lucky’ in this particular game of chance. What a nightmare war can be. But this is another rather horrible example of when game elements can be anything but fun.
The idea that games can be a source of Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow is also discussed. Reading this book got me to track down Flow too, something I’ve been meaning to read for ages, but never have until now. The discussion is on digital games and how they are mostly about points – where points are the key economic system of motivation, you know, accumulating points in the way we might accumulate money. Once again, the idea that just adding gamified elements to horrible tasks will be enough to make them fun and motivate people to perform them is problematized. The other bit of this that is particularly interesting is the idea that games often imply either ‘cheating’ or at least ‘nearly cheating’ – bending the rules, if not literally breaking them. But that this might not be something that people providing gamified solutions might either anticipate or want to happen. Still, if the reward is great enough, game-like solutions might well encourage rule bending, at the very least.
There is a lovely chapter in which the history of gamification is discussed – but what I found particularly interesting was the idea that gamification often assumes that all you need to do is add game elements to some process and that will make it a game. Except that game elements (points, role plays, structures) are all well and good, but the thing that really makes a game a game is someone playing it. So, ‘designing’ a game is important – but it is nowhere near enough, especially if no one ever ‘plays’ the game. Keeping an eye on players and player involvement ought to be core here, but might not always be, given the designers might be more focused on the ‘outcome’ they are hoping the gamification will acheive
One of the issues with ‘gamification’ as a kind of data-ification of people is that, as one of the authors here says, identity becomes the same as ‘identification’ and identification is often based on data that is pretty easy to gather – date of birth, marital status, religious views. But the thing is that we change our identity, at least in part, by a process of ‘forgetting’ – and that isn’t really something data systems do, or as an author says, where ‘measure leaves little room for change in a person’s life’… Games are often understood as an escape from reality, but what happens when reality becomes a game? Is there an outside? And how do you resist such a game-like world? Is such a world still a game if you are ‘required’ to play? Some ways escaping gamification are discussed – but mostly they seem to be about smashing the games, rather than ‘disrupting’ them.
The problem is that as games become ever more ubiquitous in our lives they will also become less and less ‘obvious’. We like to think, in the Nudge example again, that we use games to provide ourselves with motivation to achieve what we want or what might be best for us – but that might not be quite true and what might be ‘best’ for us might not be as obvious as gamifiers assume. It might also be that games play us at least as much as we play them. And the games also have the advantage of being able to adapt to our desires and failings much more readily than we might be able to adapt them to our rationality. Again, I can’t help thinking of China’s social credit system – and how capitalism is much smarter in that the system doesn’t impose its will upon us, it just creates a system where the choice architecture makes the system’s will virtually inevitable. They quote Bogost – someone I am going to have to read – ‘When people act because incentives compel them towards particular choices, they cannot be said to be making choices at all’. The example given is of a young man who was using Strava (a bicycle riding/racing app that encourages you to go ever faster) and who was killed in trying to beat some high score. His parents sued the company – an interesting case, since I think the whole point of ‘games’ is that they do encourage us to push ourselves beyond our owm limits.
There is a lovely line in one of the chapters, that ‘video game design used to be about taking ‘lives’ from the player as a punishment, but now many games just take time from the player’s real life as the player has to repeat a section of the game’. The whole question of ‘grinding’ is discussed and this as both a means to develop the skills that will allow you to move to new levels, but also to gain the points that will move you up the leader board. This is where it starts to get more interesting, because particularly in multi-player games, individual players stop being the central idea, and teamwork becomes much more important. In fact, so much so that the ‘rules’ of the game also become less important in that learning to play the game is something that itself requires a total emersion while interacting with fellow players. Not only is life becoming more like a game, but games are becoming more like life.
As the author says, ‘if the goal of gamification is to engage a user in a non-game setting, then the endgame of gamification is the process by which the user is moved from the gamification reward-based grind into the non-game setting’. This is seriously interesting. A lot of the point of gamification is this idea of gaining points and the points being a kind of metaphor for also gaining skills. If you are doing this to change your life, then there is a problem here where the motivations that are being offered are extrinsic, while we have known for quite some time that people achieve much more using intrinsic motivations. In that sense gamification might actively work against what it is ultimately setting out to achieve. As such the author suggests that gamification might need to focus on ‘the non-reward-based aspects of game design’.
Similarly, the last chapter of this brings us to Aristotle – and the use of eudemonia in game design. Which just means that we ought to return to Aristotle’s ethics when we think of gamified applications. Rather than it being about getting people to become more efficient – we should be looking at how to allow people to become happy in the sense of Aristotle’s ‘good soul’. And to achieve this we might need to move gamification away from the ‘ludic’ – mostly focused on competition – and more towards the paidic – which involves more curiosity, exploration and transgression.
And since motivation is ultimately the point of gamification, then this also becomes important, since motivation is often about making the otherwise objectionable something people will choose to do. There is a lovely line that explains that this ‘paradigm has been called “chocolate-covered broccoli”’.
The importance of situation to all of this is also stressed – and that is because too often gamified applications simply assume that this is not relevant, that everyone will be motivated by points or the narrative structure of the game – when this is clearly not the case.
I’m finding the books I’ve been reading on gamification terribly interesting – sorry this review is so long, but as you see, the book covered an awful lot of ground, and I haven’t really touched on all of that in this review.
March 20, 2023
Not a bad book, but a long and difficult one indeed. Out of the books on gamification that I’ve read for my thesis, this is the most complex one. The many authors who collaborated to this book are undoubtedly knowledgeable, but most of them have very similar things to say and I think the book could have been shorter if they didn’t keep repeating things someone else said some dozen pages before. Again, it’s an interesting book, offering a different prospective from others in the same field but, unless you’re really down for a long read, I wouldn’t recommend it.
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