There is still one dimension that is not taken into account and which seems essential to me. More than a reality of the world, play is a category for thinking about the world, or rather the experience one has of it. It refers rather to play or playing, but let us not forget that the game is, at least in part, a reified play experience.
Play is not an objective reality of the world that we can agree on (as a tree or a chair is), but a way of designating objects, activities according to the idea (Henriot 1969) or the experience we have of them. Play refers to the meaning (the frame) of the activity and not directly to its content, as Reynold’s quotation above suggests; it cannot therefore be attributed effects or effectiveness, other than that of the frame or modalization, to use Goffman’s terms (1974).
While play is part of an experiential frame, a modality marked by the possibility of making decisions in a non-literal world (Brougère 2005), the questions to be asked are:
– for whom is it a playful frame (the actors, all of them, some of them only, observers including the researcher)?
– can we consider that the playful frame has effects beyond the minimization of consequences or frivolity (which precisely leads to the reduction of potential effects)?
We need to ask the question, who says “play”, who experiences “play”, and to consider that it is a reality dependent of these conditions of perception. Martin (2017) shows that the same training, based on the simulation of a fictitious reality for the participants (another field than their own, although very real), is experienced by one (a rather confident man with a broad play culture) as a game and by the other (a less confident and less playful woman) as an exercise which she fears that it will have an impact on her career. Independently of whether the device is rather a serious simulation with an educational objective (which seems to me to be the case from the outside) or a game, the actors can relate to it as a game or rather live an experience that corresponds to what they understand, from their playful culture, by the game.
Behind the question of gamification lies the question of knowing what is perceived and experienced: for whom is the use of the gamified object a game and why? For whom it is not? This takes into account their positions: designer, organizer (if the case arises), actor, observer, researcher. There is no gamification in the absolute, but always a situated gamification, in the sense that the device’s design, which consists of taking up supposed elements of play, can be experienced more or less as a game.
1.8. Counter-example of flow or optimal experience
To think differently about these questions, I propose a detour through the question of optimal experience, a concept far more solid than gamification. Csikszentmihalyi constructed the notion (flow, optimal experience) from the game, from an analysis of its characteristics (Csikszentmihalyi and Bennett 1971). For Csikszentmihalyi the game appears as:
A socially or individually structured form to constitute the experience of the flow. It is a framework, a device through which you can have this experience that is voluntary, self-directed and detached from “real life”. (Csikszentmihalyi 1979, p. 268)
He thus considers that the game allows for a particular experience, that of flow (see Brougère 2005 for a more in-depth presentation of the concept), which is not true for all games and all players. In fact, he discovers in the game an experience that he will investigate its existence in other human activities. He is careful not to find play everywhere, but rather a type of experience that can be developed elsewhere, in leisure (which has points in common with play) and in work (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 2002). Transforming an activity so that it can become an optimal experience and carrying out analyzes in this sense have two advantages over the process of gamification, which sometimes refers to the same questions: to distinguish play from the experience it can generate or, more broadly, not to consider that what can produce this type of experience is necessarily play, not to see play everywhere; to approach the question in terms of experience, since devices are of interest only in so far as they generate an experience. The problem of gamification is to believe that play is in all the game elements (and of video games in particular) and to limit the question to that of devices without taking into account the experiences produced (beyond the question of motivation). Are there players in a so-called “gamified” world?
1.9. Play and frame issues
It seems to me that, far from being a development of thinking linked to play, the issue of gamification most often refers to confusion about what play is. Can we leave it at that? It is not, however, a question of enhancing the term serious game, which Bogost (2015) does, which poses problems of a different nature, but which we must deal with here because the notion of gamification extends, as we mentioned above, to a serious game. We speak of an oxymoron to evoke this notion, stressing that adding serious to game means saying both “it is a game” and “it is not quite a game”. We could, by taking up the Goffmanian concept, speak of modalization (which appears in the need to add the term serious which modalizes the game) because the game is already the result of modalization, of counter-modalization or over-modalization.
If we refer to the frame theory mentioned above, we can distinguish the primary frame of ordinary life from the modalized or secondary frame; the latter refers to the primary frame while modifying the meaning of the targeted action, such as a pretend fight and all forms of play. What then of a serious game, gamification, a pedagogical game, which seem to me to be the result of a new modality: play as now a primary frame is transformed to have effects. This produces a new frame that is no longer marked by the entertainment, or even frivolity, of the playful frame.
Is this modalization a return to the primary frame (a deludicization, degamification), a deconstruction of the game, of what constitutes play in the game? In fact, modalization would be a way to return to the primary frame or to produce a new primary frame. Is it a maintenance of the playful frame, a shift in meaning within the same frame? Is it a new frame by adding a new modalization that modifies the playful one without making it disappear, just as the secondary frame did in regard to the primary one? But let us recall that if the central aspect of this frame is the disappearance or reduction of the effects, this new modalization would re-introduce effects that are not those of the primary frame, while distancing itself from the playful frame. Serious games and gamified activity would then be neither a primary nor a secondary playful frame, but a new, tertiary frame, by modalizing the playful frame. The game would remain a reference but transformed by re-introducing effects. We may, however, wonder whether this new frame is not often the object of fabrication or falsification; we refer here to Goffman’s (1974) frame analysis of spies and espionage, which leads to the production of a secondary frame whose traces are erased so that it can be interpreted as a primary frame (the crook is a policeman, the American spy is a German). Here, does one not erase by the fact that it is no longer a game, that a new frame has been constructed but that in a logic of trickery that we will call efficiency, motivation, it is a question of making the actor believe that he or she is a player?
There is no answer other than a reflection on the frames of the experience nourished by empirical data, articulating observation (point of view of an external observer or participating observer) and the words of the actors to grasp the meaning they give to the experience in order to deduce the frame produced: a return to the primary frame, maintenance of a playful frame, creation of a new frame that is difficult to think about but interesting insofar as it would make it possible to highlight a complex reality that is both playful and not quite playful anymore.
Let us recall that one could be in the second frame without interpreting it as such, and thus find oneself in a primary frame (or believe it). If we take the tertiary frame of modalized play as something else (serious games, gamification), it is possible that one does not understand this modalization. Thus, depending on the situation, games may be used as a non-overmodalized secondary frame, or it may be used in the primary frame, or even in a complex tertiary frame; one is then both in the game and in a logic of effects, for example in terms of learning. We can also look at the content side