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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 and evoke the hybrid notion.