Читать книгу The Gamification of Society - Группа авторов - Страница 13

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 would not be a question of making people play, but of motivating them to do something by giving the feeling that they are playing in the very controlled frame of a game, or rather a device that takes up aspects of the game itself.