The Gamification of Society. Группа авторов

      Introduction: Gamified Capitalism

      The most widely shared definition of gamification presents this process as the transposition of game elements into non-game contexts (Deterding et al. 2011). This definition, derived from “gameful studies”, is based on two streams of research: game theories produced by the humanities and social sciences (HSS) on the one hand, and applied design research on the other. The latter is mainly fueled by video games and establishes the structure of games as operational in terms of involvement, progress and creativity.

If the first current feeds the reflections of the second, the HSS still explores, criticizes and analyzes far too little the practices related to gamification. However, the fields of application in regard to gamification are multiple and wide-ranging. Work¹, education, health, the media, citizenship, emotional relations and the quantification of the individual are all concerned by gamified practices. As for the research conducted on gamification, it most often concerns technical objects or processes (digital or not) and does not address gamification as logic – whether it is a matter of “empowerment” or a manifestation of the “new spirit of capitalism”. Consequently, gamification as a “model” (structure) and “referent” (charged with social value) needs to be considered beyond its objects of application.

Within the public space, initiatives in the areas of education through games, learning through games, raising public awareness through games, advanced computing for the benefit of science through games, managing one’s lifestyle through games and other initiatives based on the principle of playing games are rarely questioned. Any commentator who is a bit curious but also questioning, as are – ideally – social scientists, runs the risk of being seen as a sad character. However, this book proposes to bring together various studies (on early childhood, political action, quantified self, etc.) that question what games and their “mechanics” do to the social world. The contributions gathered here question the social meaning given to games and the mechanisms that have enabled them to become legitimate resources for action. More specifically, some of them show how, through gamification, several organizations try, and sometimes succeed, in transforming individuals and producing lasting effects on them – in terms of skills, capacities, understanding of their environment, etc.

      The positive attributes spontaneously lent to play (pleasure, social connection, relaxation, emulation, etc.) present it as a clever solution to make many of our not very playful activities more engaging. Driven by design, the challenge here is “broke reality” (McGonigal 2011), that is, to use play as a prism or mediation that, whatever the activity considered, would be capable of “making people feel the quality” of it, and would be able “to prevent suffering, and to create real, widespread happiness” (McGonigal 2011). Gamefully designed, this activity can be transferred to the game field which then extends far beyond its primary spheres of relaxation and leisure. That is how we become homo ludens (to twist Huizinga’s (1951) terminology somewhat), in the literal sense of a kind of homo who occurs or exists through play, even when he works, votes, eats, walks, etc. (McGonigal 2011).

      We are not, however, faced here with an extensive definition of play that exhausts its outlines. Playing games, here, is closer with the idea of the underlying structure of games than with the creativity of play. It coincides with the distinction that was made by Caillois (2001) between paidia and ludus, and it induces concrete effects on gamified actions and objects. As Deterding et al. point out:

      Whereas paidia (or “playing”) denotes a more freeform, expressive, improvisational, even “tumultuous” recombination of behaviors and meanings, ludus (or “gaming”) captures playing structured by rules and competitive strife toward goals. (2014, p. 6)

This definition of a game has similarities with that favored by other central authors in the gamification literature, for whom “a game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Salen and Zimmermann 2004, p. 93). This gamegamification connection will be remembered for the centrality of the aspects of structure, rules, goals and competition/conflict, as well as the centrality of objectification, as opposed to a more “subjective” play:

      The game is distinguished from play as the external of the internal, the objective of the subjective, the structure of the idea, the consequence of the principle, the thing of the act, the object of the mental attitude …. (Triclot 2011, p. 12, author’s translation)

      Moreover, following Belin (2001) or Brougère (2005, 2012; and in the present work), we will underline the permeability of the two aspects in the sense that:

      This matter of the game refers, more broadly, to the organization of the game space, which itself corresponds to the setting up of the framework of the experience [potential space]. (Belin 2001, p. 104, author’s translation)

      We can therefore understand this game/play semantic distinction as an intentional marker of the centrality or priority given to aspects of, on the one hand, structure for the game and, on the other hand, “playful attitude” with regard to play, to use Henriot’s terminology (1989).

This tension between regulation – into a competitive backdrop – and the expression of the subject is obviously not insignificant today. Individual freedom with no limits other than those set by the individual himself is indeed posed as a fundamental value, even as an impassable mantra of the “consultants of happiness” (Cabanas and Illouz 2018, author’s translation) and other followers of “personal development” (Stevens 2011; Marquis 2016). Even though gamified devices are the results of complex social and economic processes that take place over a long period of time, most of their promoters – designers or users – emphasize the individualized use they make possible. While play is a modality of action in which individual and collective practices are intimately intertwined (Hamayon 2012; Le Lay 2020), gamification tends to erase the social traces of play in order to promote solipsistic aspects, for example through the aspect of the exaltation of competition or individual performance. This is particularly true in the case of quantified self devices (see Chapter 5 of the book, written by Éric Dagiral) where the progression of individual scoring connects with the intimate sphere. Other examples could easily be found in the economic field, where companies have long since articulated individualized performance evaluation (Dejours 2003) with gamified devices (Rolo and Le Lay 2015; Savignac 2017a).

Such a distortion of playing games leads to the exploration of several avenues of research, which can be linked to the more general question of the constituents of the neoliberal program (Foucault 2008), particularly in its “late” Austro-American form (Brennetot 2013). According to this philosophical,

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