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What makes it difficult to think about this notion of gamification is that, as Seaborn and Fels (2015) point out, its meaning is not limited, even in academic articles, to the meaning given by Deterding et al. (2011):

Gamification has been used to describe two additional concepts: (1) the creation or use of a game for any non-entertainment context and/or goal, and (2) the transformation of an existing system into a game […] In education, the term “gamification” has been used to refer to digital-based learning (DGBL) and serious games generally. (Seaborn and Fels 2015, pp. 17–18)

The success of the term means that it refers to various realities: beyond the devices themselves, some evoke situations that are meant to be gamified or rather playified, ludified. But the success of the term gamification can lead to erasing these differences. The creation of a serious game becomes gamification and soon we will talk about the gamified life of children to mean that they play! It seems to me that the use of the term is free of any rigor and that is why it can be an object of research – on the condition that its use is analyzed – in no way a concept; or if it is a notion, only the approach of Deterding et al. (2011) allows us to establish a minimum consensus for this.

Thus, in this delirium on the words game and play, freed from any relation to a reflection on what it is, we can find the idea of gamifying a game². I will stop here to say that at this level it is no longer possible to intervene; perhaps it is a fake language in the era of fake news (which would be the equivalent of gamification, the gamification of information and politics).

It seems to me that the complexity of the situation points to the underlying idea that it is not play and yet it is play. A parallel can be drawn with the use of the term ludique in French, meaning playful (Brougère 2015). Indeed, for a long time, the term ludique remained the academic term it was when it was first coined, with the aim of compensating for the absence of an adjective linked to jeu. Its meaning was “relative to play”, i.e. play in adjectival form. It was by passing gradually into ordinary language that its meaning evolved in a curious way to mean two contradictory things. The term often evokes a situation that would be close to play without actually meaning the term itself. C’est ludique (it is playful) being understood as not quite playful, but sounding like it, c’est un exercice ludique (it is a playful exercise). One would like to say it is gamified. This use of the term playful is very close to gamification: making an activity playful without it becoming a game. But what makes the use of the term today more complex is that, when faced with serious or educational games, the adjective ludique is used to reinforce the dimension of “properly playful” as opposed to games that are not quite playful; we can find this surprising expression of jeu ludique (e.g. in De Grandmont 1999), jeu jeu (a play game) could be said to be playful, as if a game could not be playful. But beyond the criticism that can be made of it, does not this reflect such a wide use of play, playfulness (and gamification) that we no longer know what these terms mean? Is it a question of transforming into a game, of resembling the game, of being fun (or amusing). A plurality of meanings appears under a notion that therefore tells us nothing. As playful which means, depending on the context, to be really a game or not to be a game at all, the term gamification today refers to producing games in fields other than pure entertainment or producing devices that borrow elements from the game without really being games. It is a term that should be used with care without assuming a priori that under the supposedly gamified object there is the game.