Behind the question of gamification lies the question of knowing what is perceived and experienced: for whom is the use of the gamified object a game and why? For whom it is not? This takes into account their positions: designer, organizer (if the case arises), actor, observer, researcher. There is no gamification in the absolute, but always a situated gamification, in the sense that the device’s design, which consists of taking up supposed elements of play, can be experienced more or less as a game.
1.8. Counter-example of flow or optimal experience
To think differently about these questions, I propose a detour through the question of optimal experience, a concept far more solid than gamification. Csikszentmihalyi constructed the notion (flow, optimal experience) from the game, from an analysis of its characteristics (Csikszentmihalyi and Bennett 1971). For Csikszentmihalyi the game appears as:
A socially or individually structured form to constitute the experience of the flow. It is a framework, a device through which you can have this experience that is voluntary, self-directed and detached from “real life”. (Csikszentmihalyi 1979, p. 268)
He thus considers that the game allows for a particular experience, that of flow (see Brougère 2005 for a more in-depth presentation of the concept), which is not true for all games and all players. In fact, he discovers in the game an experience that he will investigate its existence in other human activities. He is careful not to find play everywhere, but rather a type of experience that can be developed elsewhere, in leisure (which has points in common with play) and in work (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 2002). Transforming an activity so that it can become an optimal experience and carrying out analyzes in this sense have two advantages over the process of gamification, which sometimes refers to the same questions: to distinguish play from the experience it can generate or, more broadly, not to consider that what can produce this type of experience is necessarily play, not to see play everywhere; to approach the question in terms of experience, since devices are of interest only in so far as they generate an experience. The problem of gamification is to believe that play is in all the game elements (and of video games in particular) and to limit the question to that of devices without taking into account the experiences produced (beyond the question of motivation). Are there players in a so-called “gamified” world?
1.9. Play and frame issues
It seems to me that, far from being a development of thinking linked to play, the issue of gamification most often refers to confusion about what play is. Can we leave it at that? It is not, however, a question of enhancing the term serious game, which Bogost (2015) does, which poses problems of a different nature, but which we must deal with here because the notion of gamification extends, as we mentioned above, to a serious game. We speak of an oxymoron to evoke this notion, stressing that adding serious to game means saying both “it is a game” and “it is not quite a game”. We could, by taking up the Goffmanian concept, speak of modalization (which appears in the need to add the term serious which modalizes the game) because the game is already the result of modalization, of counter-modalization or over-modalization.
If we refer to the frame theory mentioned above, we can distinguish the primary frame of ordinary life from the modalized or secondary frame; the latter refers to the primary frame while modifying the meaning of the targeted action, such as a pretend fight and all forms of play. What then of a serious game, gamification, a pedagogical game, which seem to me to be the result of a new modality: play as now a primary frame is transformed to have effects. This produces a new frame that is no longer marked by the entertainment, or even frivolity, of the playful frame.
Is this modalization a return to the primary frame (a deludicization, degamification), a deconstruction of the game, of what constitutes play in the game? In fact, modalization would be a way to return to the primary frame or to produce a new primary frame. Is it a maintenance of the playful frame, a shift in meaning within the same frame? Is it a new frame by adding a new modalization that modifies the playful one without making it disappear, just as the secondary frame did in regard to the primary one? But let us recall that if the central aspect of this frame is the disappearance or reduction of the effects, this new modalization would re-introduce effects that are not those of the primary frame, while distancing itself from the playful frame. Serious games and gamified activity would then be neither a primary nor a secondary playful frame, but a new, tertiary frame, by modalizing the playful frame. The game would remain a reference but transformed by re-introducing effects. We may, however, wonder whether this new frame is not often the object of fabrication or falsification; we refer here to Goffman’s (1974) frame analysis of spies and espionage, which leads to the production of a secondary frame whose traces are erased so that it can be interpreted as a primary frame (the crook is a policeman, the American spy is a German). Here, does one not erase by the fact that it is no longer a game, that a new frame has been constructed but that in a logic of trickery that we will call efficiency, motivation, it is a question of making the actor believe that he or she is a player?
There is no answer other than a reflection on the frames of the experience nourished by empirical data, articulating observation (point of view of an external observer or participating observer) and the words of the actors to grasp the meaning they give to the experience in order to deduce the frame produced: a return to the primary frame, maintenance of a playful frame, creation of a new frame that is difficult to think about but interesting insofar as it would make it possible to highlight a complex reality that is both playful and not quite playful anymore.
Let us recall that one could be in the second frame without interpreting it as such, and thus find oneself in a primary frame (or believe it). If we take the tertiary frame of modalized play as something else (serious games, gamification), it is possible that one does not understand this modalization. Thus, depending on the situation, games may be used as a non-overmodalized secondary frame, or it may be used in the primary frame, or even in a complex tertiary frame; one is then both in the game and in a logic of effects, for example in terms of learning. We can also look at the content side and evoke the hybrid notion.
1.10. Hybrids and hybridization processes
Indeed, what characterizes these different devices (Alvarez and Djaouti 2010) or practices (serious gaming, serious playing, gamification) is that they combine aspects that come from play (and which in some cases remain, are experienced and perceived as such) with other elements that are not. It is probably necessary to accept that this is the production of hybrids, products or practices resulting from hybridizations between play and other dimensions. The main one is the one that refers to educational logics and devices; however, they have in common with play to resort, if not always, at least often, at the non-literality, to simulation, to exercise in the sense that to exercise is to do without really doing. One produces hybrids that will be experienced as games by some but not by others, and this, for many reasons, playful culture being one of the main reasons. If we define playful culture as the result of play experiences, it is indeed from this culture that a new experience will be perceived then eventually enjoyed. This playful experience does not always go in the same direction. Depending on the situation, it can allow one to appropriate a simulation as a game (Martin 2017) or, on the contrary, to perceive the distance to the game as one practices it in the context of a leisure activity (Lavigne 2016).
Hybrids combine elements that come from what is considered a game, and others that refer to realities (work, education) that can be thought of as antinomic to play. This produces objects or practices that are neither play nor non-play, that can be perceived as play or not, experienced by the actors as play or not. The criteria that I developed (Brougère 2005, 2012) allow us to understand the use of the terms “game” and “play” in the face of complex realities. They can allow us to see what, in these hybrids, tends toward play and/or limits this dimension. Is it still a matter of non-literality, of frivolity or consequence management? Who decides and under what conditions, without giving too much importance to the initial decision
