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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.