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The most widely shared definition of gamification presents this process as the transposition of game elements into non-game contexts (Deterding et al. 2011). This definition, derived from “gameful studies”, is based on two streams of research: game theories produced by the humanities and social sciences (HSS) on the one hand, and applied design research on the other. The latter is mainly fueled by video games and establishes the structure of games as operational in terms of involvement, progress and creativity.

If the first current feeds the reflections of the second, the HSS still explores, criticizes and analyzes far too little the practices related to gamification. However, the fields of application in regard to gamification are multiple and wide-ranging. Work¹, education, health, the media, citizenship, emotional relations and the quantification of the individual are all concerned by gamified practices. As for the research conducted on gamification, it most often concerns technical objects or processes (digital or not) and does not address gamification as logic – whether it is a matter of “empowerment” or a manifestation of the “new spirit of capitalism”. Consequently, gamification as a “model” (structure) and “referent” (charged with social value) needs to be considered beyond its objects of application.

Within the public space, initiatives in the areas of education through games, learning through games, raising public awareness through games, advanced computing for the benefit of science through games, managing one’s lifestyle through games and other initiatives based on the principle of playing games are rarely questioned. Any commentator who is a bit curious but also questioning, as are – ideally – social scientists, runs the risk of being seen as a sad character. However, this book proposes to bring together various studies (on early childhood, political action, quantified self, etc.) that question what games and their “mechanics” do to the social world. The contributions gathered here question the social meaning given to games and the mechanisms that have enabled them to become legitimate resources for action. More specifically, some of them show how, through gamification, several organizations try, and sometimes succeed, in transforming individuals and producing lasting effects on them – in terms of skills, capacities, understanding of their environment, etc.

The positive attributes spontaneously lent to play (pleasure, social connection, relaxation, emulation, etc.) present it as a clever solution to make many of our not very playful activities more engaging. Driven by design, the challenge here is “broke reality” (McGonigal 2011), that is, to use play as a prism or mediation that, whatever the activity considered, would be capable of “making people feel the quality” of it, and would be able “to prevent suffering, and to create real, widespread happiness” (McGonigal 2011). Gamefully designed, this activity can be transferred to the game field which then extends far beyond its primary spheres of relaxation and leisure. That is how we become homo ludens (to twist Huizinga’s (1951) terminology somewhat), in the literal sense of a kind of homo who occurs or exists through play, even when he works, votes, eats, walks, etc. (McGonigal 2011).

We are not, however, faced here with an extensive definition of play that exhausts its outlines. Playing games, here, is closer with the idea of the underlying structure of games than with the creativity of play. It coincides with the distinction that was made by Caillois (2001) between paidia and ludus, and it induces concrete effects on gamified actions and objects. As Deterding et al. point out:

Whereas paidia (or “playing”) denotes a more freeform, expressive, improvisational, even “tumultuous” recombination of behaviors and meanings, ludus (or “gaming”) captures playing structured by rules and competitive strife toward goals. (2014, p. 6)

This definition of a game has similarities with that favored by other central authors in the gamification literature, for whom “a game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Salen and Zimmermann 2004, p. 93). This gamegamification connection will be remembered for the centrality of the aspects of structure, rules, goals and competition/conflict, as well as the centrality of objectification, as opposed to a more “subjective” play:

The game is distinguished from play as the external of the internal, the objective of the subjective, the structure of the idea, the consequence of the principle, the thing of the act, the object of the mental attitude …. (Triclot 2011, p. 12, author’s translation)

Moreover, following Belin (2001) or Brougère (2005, 2012; and in the present work), we will underline the permeability of the two aspects in the sense that:

This matter of the game refers, more broadly, to the organization of the game space, which itself corresponds to the setting up of the framework of the experience [potential space]. (Belin 2001, p. 104, author’s translation)

We can therefore understand this game/play semantic distinction as an intentional marker of the centrality or priority given to aspects of, on the one hand, structure for the game and, on the other hand, “playful attitude” with regard to play, to use Henriot’s terminology (1989).

This tension between regulation – into a competitive backdrop – and the expression of the subject is obviously not insignificant today. Individual freedom with no limits other than those set by the individual himself is indeed posed as a fundamental value, even as an impassable mantra of the “consultants of happiness” (Cabanas and Illouz 2018, author’s translation) and other followers of “personal development” (Stevens 2011; Marquis 2016). Even though gamified devices are the results of complex social and economic processes that take place over a long period of time, most of their promoters – designers or users – emphasize the individualized use they make possible. While play is a modality of action in which individual and collective practices are intimately intertwined (Hamayon 2012; Le Lay 2020), gamification tends to erase the social traces of play in order to promote solipsistic aspects, for example through the aspect of the exaltation of competition or individual performance. This is particularly true in the case of quantified self devices (see Chapter 5 of the book, written by Éric Dagiral) where the progression of individual scoring connects with the intimate sphere. Other examples could easily be found in the economic field, where companies have long since articulated individualized performance evaluation (Dejours 2003) with gamified devices (Rolo and Le Lay 2015; Savignac 2017a).

Such a distortion of playing games leads to the exploration of several avenues of research, which can be linked to the more general question of the constituents of the neoliberal program (Foucault 2008), particularly in its “late” Austro-American form (Brennetot 2013). According to this philosophical, economic and political conception of the world (Mirowski 2018), individuals must be understood as biological² worlds that are inherently failing and that evolve within a market considered essential to social functioning, in its capacity as a processor of information (Davies 2018). But however deficient they may be, individuals must nevertheless be put in a position to improve themselves in order to reach the state of “human capital”, that is to say, to become an agent who is an “active economic subject” (Foucault 2008) – not the passive object that classical liberalism wanted to see in them.

With their model of the individual as a bearer of individual “skills”, the proponents of neoliberalism have turned labor force into “capital-competence” to be exploited and made to bear fruit in the course of his socio-professional trajectory. This is supposed to comply with constantly updated arbitrations in the domestic, educational and professional spheres in the aim of determining the best possible use of “scarce resources”, whether innate or acquired. The classic figure of the “free individual” and its subjectivity succeeds that of the “entrepreneur of the self” (Foucault 2008, pp. 231–232), ready to confront other “entrepreneurial individuals” on the market.

Within this framework, anything that can contribute to absolute and relative self-improvement is welcome. Discovering one’s potential, increasing one’s performance and adapting to market requirements require the same use of tools, techniques and theories that are supposed to facilitate the constant renewal of the learning, necessary to distinguish oneself positively from one’s competitors. Gamified devices are part of these tools and are all the more powerful because gamification (ab)uses mechanisms that are specific to play – such as the pleasure of launching and immersing oneself in the game, perfectly aligned with neoliberal pre-suppositions: free and open competition, the search for superior performance compared to competitors in order to ensure victory or immediate profit.

It seems then necessary to question precisely what is said about the gamified technical media that aim to measure in real-time physical constants during the effort, progress during learning, comparative scores of improvement of one’s performance in any field. Do they boil down to the simple technological translation of monitoring health or learning that is compatible with the necessities inherent in social relationships (at work, in leisure, etc.)? Or do they work, by encapsulating them in gamified forms, to the production of relational and behavioral norms acting in the definition of what physical, cognitive and social capital should be? And what about scoring and self-tracking tools that are supposed to “capture” the intensity and quality of an individual’s insertion into a professional or friendly network? Do they constitute the digital shaping of less visible, but nevertheless active, old practices in terms of social and symbolic capital? Can it be said that these different ways of counting, accumulating and appearing in the eyes of others are related to the transformation of subjectivities that some authors currently perceive? In this, it would be possible to return to the question of self-management, relative to an individual who has become a “project” (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; Pharabod et al. 2013). Tools and practices thus lead us to question what “values” are attached to these quantifications and measurements: economic value, performance, involvement, etc.

As we can see, the discussions are rich in potentialities, and a single book will not be enough to survey even superficially the research avenues that have been sketched out. However, the contributions gathered here, due in particular to their disciplinary diversity (sociology, anthropology, political science, education sciences, etc.), are intended to demonstrate the relevance of a controlled use of the notion of gamification. To this end, the approach can be divided into several lines of thought, making up the four parts of this book.

First of all, the book aims to provide a critical framework for the term “gamification”, through its theoretical discussion (Chapter 1, Gilles Brougère) and empirical examination, from perspectives defended by gameful designers (Chapter 2, Emmanuelle Savignac). From there, three main topics will then be deployed.

The first will deal with socialization through play, with two contributions: the importance and long-standing construction of the legitimacy of play, from a historical perspective, particularly in the educational practices of children, but also those dedicated to the elite (Chapter 3, Elisabeth Belmas); the study of a gamified system of toilet training by young children and the questions that this raises with regard to what is learning, how the body is considered and a certain vision of childhood and parenthood (Chapter 4, Victoria Chantseva).

The second axis not only discusses the developments in the use of gamified devices, but also in the field of gambling and what they produce in regard to individuals. Both bodies and subjectivities are invested in by gamification mechanisms that borrow various sociotechnical devices such as applications and connected objects (Chapter 5, Éric Dagiral). We are talking here about the “gamification” of self-quantification processes (data, objectives, attention, etc.) and about the production of involvement of the users of these programs. A second contribution investigates the influence of gambling in the social space. It questions the effects of the “gamblification” of society through the dual prism of expanding gambling law and gambling addiction (Chapter 6, Aymeric Brody). Both of these texts analyze involvement and its levers, as well as the resistance or, to a lesser extent, the accommodations that individuals put up against it.

Finally, in the last axis of the book, the political and social extensions of play will be investigated through two contributions: the progressive gamification – which the author re-historicizes – of political campaigns underlines the development of a new relationship with political speech and action (Chapter 7, Éric Treille); then the study of the question of crowdsourcing through data games. The chapter not only questions the system of promises linked to the sharing of “benefits” but also the redistribution that proceeds together (Chapter 8, Julian Alvarez). Both these texts are about the public’s willingness to practice the action in a gamified manner: for one, militant – sometimes in its most narrow interpretation, and for the other, contributory – because of a crowdsourcing process. Campaigning and collective work are here not only geared toward gain (success or capitalization) but also contribute to the trivialization of the “game shape” and its extension in the public space.

While the controlled use of the notion of gamification makes it necessary not to mobilize it on all sides, its capacity to shed new light on a wide spectrum of social spaces and phenomena, subject to intense sociotechnical reconfigurations, is no longer in doubt. This book aims to demonstrate this.

1 1 We will refer here to the previous work of various authors and contributors to this book in the context of the analysis of the “work of gamification” (Savignac et al. 2017).

2 2 The neoliberal individual is above all a biologizing “machine”. The subjective dimension – the body affected and worked by sexuality – is not taken into account in its depth, because this would mean having to develop a theory of the body, a theory of social relations and a theory of work that is too complex to model in mathematical form, and to reduce it to the sole “informational” aspect.

Introduction written by Stéphane LE LAY, Emmanuelle SAVIGNAC, Jean FRANCES and Pierre LÉNEL.