The Gamification of Society. Группа авторов

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 but taking into account the course of the game? What are the mechanisms that organize this decision? Are they related to play with the presence of rules or other processes that do not refer to it? Is uncertainty maintained or reduced? Ultimately, what is the level of hybridization of the game?

1.11. Conclusion

So the challenge seems to me not to deconstruct the term “gamification”, but rather to show that it has never been constructed, except through commercial opportunities, as a slogan. We should not take slogans for reality. The world is not gameful, or playful, and the reality of what is at stake leads us to think that it is likely to be less and less so if it ever was. A world in which perhaps we play more – we already find this idea in the 18th Century with the importance taken by gambling – is not a world that has become a game. A world in which some people claim that everything is play or a game, or that everything can, even must, become so, is not a world turned into a game if we show that the so-called gamification is not a transformation of the world into a game, at most a new trick using play and game as bait, in the words of Erasmus. The goal of motivation – to motivate people to do something rather than to invite them to play – is indeed very close to a logic of trickery. Play is not aimed for its own sake but for what it would achieve from a potential player.

      Beyond this logic that can be questioned, related devices and practices are proposed and must be analyzed by avoiding considering them a priori as games or play (and the question would be for whom and why). We have proposed two avenues of analysis that are not mutually exclusive and that allow us to escape the unproductive dilemma “game/play or no game/play”, suggesting moreover that there is somewhere a created frontier, whereas frontiers are constructed through collective practices (especially language). On the one hand, it is a question of considering these objects as hybrids and grasping how different dimensions (playful or not) are combined and the effects they have on practice. There is no serious game; there are hybrids between a game and other reality (pedagogical device, for example). There is no gamification but a hybridization based on the implementation of elements from games, especially video games. On the other hand, if we think of play as a frame, we need to question the effects of the devices on the frame that this can produce. Are we still in the non-literality of the playful frame? Is it a return to the primary frame or the production of a new, tertiary frame that modulates the playful frame and that would need to be explored?

      1 1 This chapter is an adapted English version of a text which is based in part on the analysis of the use of the term “gamification” in the French-speaking context.

      2 2 Expression present in the abstract of a paper proposed for a conference on the gamification of society.

      Chapter written by Gilles BROUGÈRE.