target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_d00742bb-5eac-5c0f-a71b-837c23ee59b9">2 worlds that are inherently failing and that evolve within a market considered essential to social functioning, in its capacity as a processor of information (Davies 2018). But however deficient they may be, individuals must nevertheless be put in a position to improve themselves in order to reach the state of “human capital”, that is to say, to become an agent who is an “active economic subject” (Foucault 2008) – not the passive object that classical liberalism wanted to see in them.
With their model of the individual as a bearer of individual “skills”, the proponents of neoliberalism have turned labor force into “capital-competence” to be exploited and made to bear fruit in the course of his socio-professional trajectory. This is supposed to comply with constantly updated arbitrations in the domestic, educational and professional spheres in the aim of determining the best possible use of “scarce resources”, whether innate or acquired. The classic figure of the “free individual” and its subjectivity succeeds that of the “entrepreneur of the self” (Foucault 2008, pp. 231–232), ready to confront other “entrepreneurial individuals” on the market.
Within this framework, anything that can contribute to absolute and relative self-improvement is welcome. Discovering one’s potential, increasing one’s performance and adapting to market requirements require the same use of tools, techniques and theories that are supposed to facilitate the constant renewal of the learning, necessary to distinguish oneself positively from one’s competitors. Gamified devices are part of these tools and are all the more powerful because gamification (ab)uses mechanisms that are specific to play – such as the pleasure of launching and immersing oneself in the game, perfectly aligned with neoliberal pre-suppositions: free and open competition, the search for superior performance compared to competitors in order to ensure victory or immediate profit.
It seems then necessary to question precisely what is said about the gamified technical media that aim to measure in real-time physical constants during the effort, progress during learning, comparative scores of improvement of one’s performance in any field. Do they boil down to the simple technological translation of monitoring health or learning that is compatible with the necessities inherent in social relationships (at work, in leisure, etc.)? Or do they work, by encapsulating them in gamified forms, to the production of relational and behavioral norms acting in the definition of what physical, cognitive and social capital should be? And what about scoring and self-tracking tools that are supposed to “capture” the intensity and quality of an individual’s insertion into a professional or friendly network? Do they constitute the digital shaping of less visible, but nevertheless active, old practices in terms of social and symbolic capital? Can it be said that these different ways of counting, accumulating and appearing in the eyes of others are related to the transformation of subjectivities that some authors currently perceive? In this, it would be possible to return to the question of self-management, relative to an individual who has become a “project” (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; Pharabod et al. 2013). Tools and practices thus lead us to question what “values” are attached to these quantifications and measurements: economic value, performance, involvement, etc.
As we can see, the discussions are rich in potentialities, and a single book will not be enough to survey even superficially the research avenues that have been sketched out. However, the contributions gathered here, due in particular to their disciplinary diversity (sociology, anthropology, political science, education sciences, etc.), are intended to demonstrate the relevance of a controlled use of the notion of gamification. To this end, the approach can be divided into several lines of thought, making up the four parts of this book.
First of all, the book aims to provide a critical framework for the term “gamification”, through its theoretical discussion (Chapter 1, Gilles Brougère) and empirical examination, from perspectives defended by gameful designers (Chapter 2, Emmanuelle Savignac). From there, three main topics will then be deployed.
The first will deal with socialization through play, with two contributions: the importance and long-standing construction of the legitimacy of play, from a historical perspective, particularly in the educational practices of children, but also those dedicated to the elite (Chapter 3, Elisabeth Belmas); the study of a gamified system of toilet training by young children and the questions that this raises with regard to what is learning, how the body is considered and a certain vision of childhood and parenthood (Chapter 4, Victoria Chantseva).
The second axis not only discusses the developments in the use of gamified devices, but also in the field of gambling and what they produce in regard to individuals. Both bodies and subjectivities are invested in by gamification mechanisms that borrow various sociotechnical devices such as applications and connected objects (Chapter 5, Éric Dagiral). We are talking here about the “gamification” of self-quantification processes (data, objectives, attention, etc.) and about the production of involvement of the users of these programs. A second contribution investigates the influence of gambling in the social space. It questions the effects of the “gamblification” of society through the dual prism of expanding gambling law and gambling addiction (Chapter 6, Aymeric Brody). Both of these texts analyze involvement and its levers, as well as the resistance or, to a lesser extent, the accommodations that individuals put up against it.
Finally, in the last axis of the book, the political and social extensions of play will be investigated through two contributions: the progressive gamification – which the author re-historicizes – of political campaigns underlines the development of a new relationship with political speech and action (Chapter 7, Éric Treille); then the study of the question of crowdsourcing through data games. The chapter not only questions the system of promises linked to the sharing of “benefits” but also the redistribution that proceeds together (Chapter 8, Julian Alvarez). Both these texts are about the public’s willingness to practice the action in a gamified manner: for one, militant – sometimes in its most narrow interpretation, and for the other, contributory – because of a crowdsourcing process. Campaigning and collective work are here not only geared toward gain (success or capitalization) but also contribute to the trivialization of the “game shape” and its extension in the public space.
While the controlled use of the notion of gamification makes it necessary not to mobilize it on all sides, its capacity to shed new light on a wide spectrum of social spaces and phenomena, subject to intense sociotechnical reconfigurations, is no longer in doubt. This book aims to demonstrate this.
1 1 We will refer here to the previous work of various authors and contributors to this book in the context of the analysis of the “work of gamification” (Savignac et al. 2017).
2 2 The neoliberal individual is above all a biologizing “machine”. The subjective dimension – the body affected and worked by sexuality – is not taken into account in its depth, because this would mean having to develop a theory of the body, a theory of social relations and a theory of work that is too complex to model in mathematical form, and to reduce it to the sole “informational” aspect.
Introduction written by Stéphane LE LAY, Emmanuelle SAVIGNAC, Jean FRANCES and Pierre LÉNEL.
