1.2. Gamification as a deconstruction of the play
But if we follow the proposed definition (Deterding et al. 2011), then another paradox of the term gamification appears. It is a question of integrating elements from games (game and game-design) into devices that have an objective other than play and entertainment. Gamification is not about making a game – if so what would we need the term for? Making a game, even a serious one, is not gamification – it is about bringing game elements to a different reality, and this at the device side. That is probably the entire problem: what is the point of bringing game elements without making a game? It smacks of the trickery that Erasmus practiced and stated about games to teach children, especially Latin, for it was difficult to “motivate” them, we would say today (Brougère 1995). It was a question of giving the “finery” or “appearance of the game” (Erasmus 1529), of giving the impression of a game, but above all not playing a game, especially since the term at the time evoked gambling and could not therefore be valued in education. Erasmus did not talk about motivation, but it is the most common term used to justify gamification, as Seaborn and Fels (2015) show, while at the same time emphasizing a rather loose use of motivational theories, which leads me to think that behind this modern notion lies a strategy of trickery or attractiveness to capture the user (Cochoy 2004).
The paradox is that gamification is in fact a degamification: it is a question of using a game (a video game at the origin of the concept), of taking elements and characteristics to implant them in an activity whose aims do not refer to leisure or entertainment games. If there is indeed deconstruction, it is the deconstruction that gamification operates in regard to the game, broken down into elements that are considered to have a play value in themselves, independently of the set to which they belong. It is therefore very clear that it is a question of degamifying a game. It 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