Gamification

= Gamification is the concept that you can apply the basic elements that make games fun and engaging to things that typically aren't considered a game. In theory you can apply Game Design to almost anything.

URL = http://gamification.org/wiki/Gamification

Discussion

Play as Labor

Chin Jungkwon:

"Gamification combines labor and play, two activities of different natures, into one so that work can be seen as fun. While this is the raison d'être of gamification, it is, at the same time, the source of problems that come along with it. Criticism of gamification aims at two problems that are logical corollaries when mixing two activities of different natures such as labor and play. Firstly, in pursuit of an external objective, play as a free activity with no purpose can be spoiled. Secondly, in making play out of an activity that should be executed seriously, both play and work can be spoiled. In gamification, labor adapts to play. However, in this possibility of turning labor into play lies the reverse, that of turning play into work.

Nick Yee asserts that video games turn play into labor. “Video games are inherently work platforms that train us to become better game workers. And the work that is being performed in video games is increasingly similar to the work performed in business corporations.” Elsewhere, I have claimed:

whereas during the transition from the agricultural society to the industrial society the body was reconstructed through military-style discipline, the body reconstruction during the transition from the industrial society to the information society takes a play form. The new gaming generation is reconstructing their bodies into new digital blue-collar workers without even realizing it.

The paradox of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) is that even as we say it is a world to which we can escape after work, in reality it works us to exhaustion. Many players actually consider gaming as duty, tedium, and another job. They bemoan that they cannot stop playing despite being tired.

An extreme case of play becoming labor is players who are hired by game companies to play games as a profession. Julian Dibbell did a thought experiment with players who are engaged in this “alienated play,” in which he examined what they did after work. He thought that if they considered gaming as work, they would avoid it after work. Interestingly, however, a good number of players went to internet cafes after work and continued to play the exact same game. It was sincere play. Just as combining work and play does not spoil play, it does not spoil work either. After seeing “labor as play” at a Chinese game room, Dibbell concluded that “play can be productive.” He writes that the “digital environment can be especially effective in channeling play toward productivity,” but we should not rule out the possibility that the phenomenon can be a symptom of workaholism, where workers cannot let go of work even after leaving it.

The logic behind the most severe criticism of gamification is interestingly rooted in two authorities of play theory. As is widely known, Huizinga clearly distinguished play from daily life. According to Huizinga, play is not daily life, and is an autonomous act that exists with its own unique order in a separate space and time, disconnected from all material interests. In other words, play does not and cannot produce material gains. Roger Caillois follows Huizinga in defining play as an unproductive activity, claiming that it is “an occasion of pure waste.” Although Huizinga lamented the disappearance of play and argued for its resurrection, he did not want play to become daily life and lose its unique character. Huizinga would almost certainly see gamification, where material gains are sought through play, as a clear breach of the spirit of play.

In contrast to Huizinga and Caillois, Celia Pearce argues that “neither play nor games is inherently unproductive.” She says that play and games have their own productive attributes, and they are themselves a form of cultural production, “a form of folk art.” Pearce thus denies what Huizinga considered the essence of play: the existence of the “magic circle” that distinguishes play from daily life. The nature of the capitalist society that Huizinga lived in is different than the ludocapitalist one we live in today. “The boundaries between play and production, between work and leisure, and between media consumption and media production are increasingly blurring. In the process, the sacred ‘magic circle’ … is also beginning to blur.” Consequently, reality itself becomes more and more pataphysical. “Not only do player-producers simulate simulations, they propel them out into the real world so that reality becomes the playground of the virtual.”

Julian Kücklich calls play that has become labor in this fashion “playbor.” Modding, which gamers enjoy as a mere hobby, produces real economic value. The subculture of modding brings enormous profit to corporations by, for instance, creating new brands, prolonging product life, boosting customer loyalty, reducing the cost of research and development, and providing a pool of human resources. Tiziana Terranova states that this is thus a form of labor, and that play becomes “free labor” when the “knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.” This “free labor is structural to the late capitalist cultural economy.” In other words, today’s digital industries are actually living off of what media consumer/producers (“prosumers”) produce through play and make available for free.

In the past, utopian socialists argued that under socialism, labor would become play. Today, their utopia is being materialized, not according to the tenets of socialism, but rather in a capitalist way. Is labor in late-capitalist society really a liberated form of labor, like play? Or so long as it takes place under the conditions of capitalism, is it still alienated?"

(https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/179187/play-and-labor)