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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.