is to undo the game, to escape from the game and to somehow transform a game into something other than a game (not even into a serious game that falls under another logic, that of producing a game). It is therefore paradoxical that a degamification process is called gamification; that we make people believe that we are transforming work or any other aspect of society into a game when we are using elements for an activity that asserts itself as something other than play and that we think would allow the attractiveness that we find in it. If it is not a matter of getting people to play, but rather engaging in an activity (e.g. shopping) and motivating them to do so, elements that would be supposed to capture costumers (such as points or badges) may suffice. We find here the origin of the concept related to marketing (whose purpose is to attract and capture customers), which may refer to the intention to motivate for objectives other than purely commercial ones, for example educational.
Following Bogost (2015), we can also wonder about the question of the elements that are transferred from the game to the gamified device. Indeed, many of these elements (competition, teams, rankings by level, emblems or badges, real-time feedback, clearly defined objectives, etc.) are not specific to the game, but are found in many practices because the game takes on characteristics from the world outside it. By taking over elements of the game, we can therefore take over elements, from outside of the game, which feed into the content of the game, without making the activity play. Counting points is an activity that is very present in some games, but just as much in everyday life, starting with school.
1.3. Contents and play elements
To understand the error of this vision, we must come to the essential characteristics of the game. According to Reynold, quoted by Bruner:
The playfulness of an act does not pertain to what is done but to the way it is done (4-6) … Play possesses no instrumental activity of its own. It derives its behaviour patterns from other affective-behavioural systems. (12) In play, behaviour, while functioning normally, is uncoupled (and buffered) from its normal consequences … Therein lies both the flexibility of play and its frivolity. (7) (Reynolds 1972; quoted by Bruner 1975, p. 11)
What the game does is to make these characteristics possible, which can be considered, following Goffman (1974), as a transformation (a modalization, he writes, favoring a musical metaphor) of the frame of ordinary experience for a new frame that constitutes play, with reference to this primary activity, but without all its consequences. A game is a device that makes it possible to produce a playful experience without always succeeding in doing so. As for the elements of the game, they are both elements taken from the primary frame (and the points belong to this frame) and elements that allow the playful framing, such as the fictional elements that set up the “pretend”.
If you take elements of the game, you do not take play; play is not about the content, the elements, but about how you produce a frame. The game takes up the elements of the world; by taking up the elements of the game, we can only take up the elements of the world. Henriot (1969) evoked this to explain the success of the playful metaphor: since the game is a metaphor for the world, the world can in turn be interpreted as a game without the strictly playful dimension being present.
Gamifying is therefore neither producing a game (we are only limiting ourselves to elements and these elements do not constitute the game), nor necessarily producing a play experience that depends on the use that will be made of the device, on the meaning that will be given to it. Under these conditions, the gamified device may very well produce play, whether or not it is faithful to the expectations of its designer, but only the empirical analysis of games can show this. It is possible that the presence of elements that one has the habit of finding in the game is sufficient for some to produce a playful frame.
1.4. Gamification: an old practice
However, novelty should be put into perspective. What is new is undoubtedly a new place for play, both in social experience and in thought, and this is linked to the importance taken by video games, as a mass leisure activity, but also as a new object that encourages reflection on game and play. Thus, what structures the reflection on gamification seems to me quite close to what I had highlighted in Jeu et éducation [play and education] (Brougère 1995). Gamification could thus be a new notion for an already old practice that consists of giving the appearance or certain aspects of play to use Erasmus’s expression again (1529) to an activity that is not a game, and this by relying on devices that take up elements of the game or that resemble the game. The old methods consisted of using cubes or a lotto to propose an exercise that was presented as a game. Today, these are applications that take up certain aspects of video games. Of course, such a phenomenon is no longer confined to the field of education, which perhaps gives it more visibility. But it is indeed in the field of education that we have seen in the past this phenomenon of gamification, in the sense that it is not a question of proposing games (which could have been done in other contexts such as the Fröbelian kindergarten), but of giving the appearance of a game to attract the student while avoiding making a game, because learning is serious. The discourse of the time (beginning of the 20th Century for the French pre-school) evoked the idea of promoting games and not the play always suspected. Another dimension of gamification then appeared, distance from play, to the benefit of devices that were supposed to be playful (because they were gamified) but that kept the idea of an activity that one could control from the game or the ludus, that did not go out of control or into an uncontrollable fancy – that is paidia according to Caillois, evoked by Deterding et al. (2011).
Gamification could only be a trick, a way to make people believe – “bullshit” according to Bogost (2015). It would not be a question of making people play, but of motivating them to do something by giving the feeling that they are playing in the very controlled frame of a game, or rather a device that takes up aspects of the game itself.
1.5. Extension of the notion of gamification
What makes it difficult to think about this notion of gamification is that, as Seaborn and Fels (2015) point out, its meaning is not limited, even in academic articles, to the meaning given by Deterding et al. (2011):
Gamification has been used to describe two additional concepts: (1) the creation or use of a game for any non-entertainment context and/or goal, and (2) the transformation of an existing system into a game […] In education, the term “gamification” has been used to refer to digital-based learning (DGBL) and serious games generally. (Seaborn and Fels 2015, pp. 17–18)
The success of the term means that it refers to various realities: beyond the devices themselves, some evoke situations that are meant to be gamified or rather playified, ludified. But the success of the term gamification can lead to erasing these differences. The creation of a serious game becomes gamification and soon we will talk about the gamified life of children to mean that they play! It seems to me that the use of the term is free of any rigor and that is why it can be an object of research – on the condition that its use is analyzed – in no way a concept; or if it is a notion, only the approach of Deterding et al. (2011) allows us to establish a minimum consensus for this.
Thus, in this delirium on the words game and play, freed from any relation to a reflection on what it is, we can find the idea of gamifying a game2. I will stop here to say that at this level it is no longer possible to intervene; perhaps it is a fake language in the era of fake news (which would be the equivalent of gamification, the gamification of information and politics).
It seems to me that the complexity of the situation points to the underlying idea that it is not play and yet it is play. A parallel can be drawn with the use of the term ludique in French, meaning playful (Brougère 2015). Indeed, for a long time, the term ludique remained the academic term it was when it was first coined, with the aim of compensating for the absence
