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.
1
Paradoxes of Gamification
Writing about gamification is a paradox which is not only related to the term but also to considering that such a term can be used as if it was a concept; the uses of the term are in no way stabilized. The question is intensified for me by the fact that, in French (my mother tongue), the term gamification has imposed itself without being translated, and none of the proposed translations having met with great success1.
We may wonder about its rapid revival by the academic world. Is it a fear of missing out on the en vogue concept? The academic world has been criticized for its reaction time in the face of new phenomena, as was the case with video games, and one wonders if this is not going too fast now. Admittedly, this revival can be critical and, in accordance with ambient fashions, it is often a matter of deconstructing the notion of gamification; the problem is that this deconstruction took place even before the concept was constructed. Perhaps this is a beautiful metaphor for our (post)modernity, where one would have all the less stability of thought, the more destruction would precede construction.
Gamification is not, for me, a concept but a phenomenon, a practice (partly linguistic) to be studied and not to be deconstructed because the uses of the notion are very varied and there is nothing truly constructed that can be deconstructed. And one quickly arrives at a set of paradoxes that I will try to highlight before proposing alternatives for thinking about this question.
1.1. Game and play
Let us begin with the definition often taken from Deterding et al. (2011): “Gamification is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts”. This seems to be the most frequently cited definition, as Seaborn and Fels (2015) attest in their meta-analysis of academic articles on gamification. I will try to draw the complex and paradoxical consequences for thinking about gamification using this definition before asking whether it captures all the uses of the term gamification today.
The term is in connection with the difference between game and play. It is said that it is unknown to the French who could not grasp it. This is not the case. Indeed, if French, alongside other languages, has only one term, jeu, to designate something that is distinguished in English, this does not mean that there is confusion, as language develops a polysemic logic, which means that from similarities, from family resemblance to speak like Wittgenstein ([1953] 2001) and from all kinds of associations, each term in the French language will designate different things without making the language unusable. This is how language works, which is more economical than multiplying new words ad infinitum. A certain principle of economy (which does not, however, overlap according to languages, since the economy is not located in the same place) organizes the use of a language. To take a slightly different example, in French like in English one plays the guitar and plays chess (jouer de la guitare and jouer aux échecs), while in Spanish it is tocar or jugar. But who would argue that in French or English the two actions are confused? It is the same for the word jeu as “object” or “system” (game) and jeu as “action” (play). In general, the context allows us to distinguish the two. Nonetheless, I claim that it is an advantage of the French language, as Henriot’s work (1969, 1989) shows, to have a single term; this makes it possible not to conceal the fact that behind the jeu (game) there is play in English as well as in French, but perhaps it can be forgotten in English. While game (and therefore gamification) is on the side of the device, it is indeed a device intended for play, a term which underlines that there can be playful activity without a specific device; but in the other direction, even if a game can remain on a shelf or if the mediocrity of its design results in that no one plays it, it has nevertheless been designed to play. In their text, Deterding et al. (2011) refer to the game as the ludus, as defined by Caillois: “ludus (or ‘gaming’) captures playing structuring by rules and competitive strife towards goals”. This is to emphasize that the game only makes sense in relation to play or playing, even if it is one extreme of play, the one that supposes rules and structuring – on the other hand, but we will not develop this here, or find the toy that refers to another extreme of play, the one that Caillois calls paidia. The game is not the opposite of play, it is a device that makes possible certain forms of play, those that require media to develop, from board games to video games, through games of skill or construction sets. We could consider that the game is original, seizing elements of nature to structure itself – we think of the traditional games known among others under the term awalé and which use seeds – before being reified in media, devices that are increasingly complex not only from a technical point of view but also in terms of their playful principles. If the game is not play, it is closely related to play, and this can be meant by the idea of the game itself (but this is also true of the toy) as reification of play. This should be understood as a historical and cultural process that leads to inserting traces of experiences (here, play) into objects (here, games). We cannot separate the game from play, there is only a game in relation to a play horizon, which is what the French says using one word jeu, that gives the advantage of avoiding separating the two.
This is all the more true since the definition of gamification (Deterding et al. 2011) refers to game design, i.e. design with a view to the use that is related to playing. Designing a game is indeed aiming for a playful