Gamification as Creation of a Social System

Gamification. Critical Approaches, 2015

The growing popularity of gamification techniques in marketing, user engagement and workforce management makes it important to broaden our understanding of this issue. I argue that instead of simply adding a fun factor to boring activities, gamification creates a new, highly controllable social system. By using game metaphors and mechanics, a designer can influence the behaviour of a subject, but also make him or her easier to supervise and more prone to being used as part of big data. She can initiate competition between some players and silence other potential conflicts. This social system creation resembles the establishment of markets as spheres of economic activity, researched by economic sociologists. Nonetheless, gamification forms a system particularly suited to the designer’s interests, granting her full control over institutions and rules, which makes consideration of underlying power inequalities especially crucial.

The Gamification of Society, 2021

The applications of gamification and the contexts in which game elements can be successfully incorporated have grown significantly over the years. They now include the fields of health, education, work, the media and many others. However, the human and social sciences still neglect the analysis and critique of gamification. Research conducted in this area tends to focus on game objects and not gamification’s logic as its ideological dimension. Considering that the game, as a model and a reference, laden with social value, deserves to be questioned beyond its objects, The Gamification of Society gathers together texts, observations and criticisms that question the influence that games and their “mechanics” have on wider society. The empirical research presented in this book (examining designers’ practices, early childhood, political action, the quantified self, etc.) also probes several different national contexts – those of Norway, Belgium, the United States and France, among others.

Wyższa Szkoła Społeczno Gospodarcza w Przeworsku, 2019

Technical advancement of the modern world, popularity of social networks is significantly changing the direction in education. Both the future of the education and of society in general depends nowadays on understanding by all participants of educational process of the direction of a strategic development of education. Along with the leading scientists and experts in the field of informational technologies, many modern teachers, philosophers, theologians and journalists, discussing a complex of problems of gamification in education, note that process of application and intensive development of informational technologies in the educational sphere has the hidden ambivalent character. The goal of gamification, which is an educational approach to motivate students to learn by using video game design and game elements in learning environments, is to maximize enjoyment and engagement through capturing the interest of learners and inspiring them to continue learning.

Gamification as the process of turning extra-ludic activities into play can be seen in two different ways: following Bataille (1975), we would hope that play could be a flight line from the servitude of the capital-labour relationship. Following and Benjamin (1939), however, we might discover that the escape from the drudgery of the worker leads to an equally alienating drudgery of the player. I argue that gamification might be seen as a form of ideology and therefore a mechanism of the dominant class to set agenda and to legitimize actions taken by this very class or group. Ever since the notion of gamification was introduced widely (Reilhac 2010; , scholars have suggested that work might be seen as a sort of leisure activity. This article analyses the controversial dialectics of play and labour and the ubiquitous notion of gamification as ideology.

Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada

The publication of a special issue on Games and Gamification by Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada (RBLA-The Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics) recognizes the role of games and gamification in the discussions on language and language learning/teaching. It not only invites researchers to report on their most recent findings in the area, but also legitimizes its relevance and value in furthering studies in Applied Linguistics in Brazil. Games and Gamification The relationship between play and learning is not new. Historically, play has been recognized as a mediator of learning processes, including all phases of early childhood education, simulators for training, among other things. In Homo Ludens-a seminal work published in 1938 on playfulness in its various forms in cultures of all places and across time, the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga argues that the activity of playing, or a playful attitude, is an archetypal experience that extends beyond human 1 Associate Professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). The tenets of her research have been complexity theory, situated learning, communities of practice, Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) as well as mobile learning and mobile applications. 2 Professor of Secondary and Technical Education, and of the School of Letters-Publishing Technologies at the Federal Center for Technological Education of Minas Gerais (CEFET-MG). Dr Racilan specializes in language teaching and learning experiences in interface with digital technologies, mobile devices, digital games, and ecological approaches.

2014

Instructors find a gap between what they experienced in school in the mid-to-late 20th century and the experiences of students entering college in 2012/13. In the United States, the influx of almost universal access to technology has marked this generation in a way the previous generations must work to understand, and gamification is a strategy used in areas like marketing to gain participation from this age group. Gamification is a strategy that employs game mechanics, techniques, and theory in areas that traditionally are not set up to function like a game. The purpose of this study was to define gamification in the context of a college classroom. Using Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, this study employs the method of heterotopian rhetorical criticism and the methodology of autoethnography to analyze World of Warcraft and re-imagine experiences in the game through critical communication pedagogy to enact change in the traditional college classroom. Three fundamentals of gamification emerged from the findings and laid out a general definition of gamification. It must consist of high-choice, low-risk engagements in a clearly structured environment.

The Sociological Review, 2017

‘Gamification’ is understood as the application of game systems - competition, rewards, quantifying player/user behaviour - into non-game domains, such as productivity and fitness. This is meant to motivate the user towards certain tasks. Such practice is deeply problematic for it represents the capture of ‘play’ in the pursuit of neoliberal rationalisation and the managerial optimisation of working life and labour. However, applying games and play to social life is also central to the Situationist International, as a form of resistance against the regularity and standardisation of everyday behaviour. We explore both meetings of games and work, and the antithetical political and cultural agendas they come with. We argue that ‘situations’ represent a truer gamification than ‘gamification’, for they transform non-games into games, rather than transferring game elements out of playful contexts and into managerial ones. Since the original ‘gamification’ term is now lost, we develop two alternatives for distinguishing between these two practices of introducing game elements into socioeconomic life: ‘gamification-from-above’ (motivational neoliberal optimising and rationalising) and ‘gamification-from-below’ (playful Situationist anti-work practice). We conclude with a renewed call for the latter, which is an ideal form of resistance against gamification-from-above and its capture of play in pursuit of work.

The Business of Gamification, 2016

In its simplest sense, ‘gamification’ is a recently established ‘user experience design’ (UXD) method that aims to increase user engagement by implementing game style incentivisation mechanics into non-game environments, contributing to closing the ‘semantic gap’ in the user experience (UX) by providing a higher level of engagement for people using machines. Yet this has somehow lead to an over complicated, evangelical and mystified manifestation of gamification as an ideology in and of itself. This paper posits that all that is actually needed for successful and ethical gamification is a dialectical construction of motivation, jeopardy, and reward within an ideological architecture that synchronises brand values in an internal and external facing feedback loop; one that unites the Employee Experience (EX) with the Customer Experience (CX) and the Shareholder Experience (SX).