Research, Innovative Theory and Methods in Social Sciences and Humanities Set

coordinated by

Albert Piette and Emmanuelle Savignac

Volume 2

Edited by

Stéphane Le Lay

Emmanuelle Savignac

Pierre Lénel

Jean Frances

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.

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

Writing about gamification is a paradox which is not only related to the term but also to considering that such a term can be used as if it was a concept; the uses of the term are in no way stabilized. The question is intensified for me by the fact that, in French (my mother tongue), the term gamification has imposed itself without being translated, and none of the proposed translations having met with great success¹.

We may wonder about its rapid revival by the academic world. Is it a fear of missing out on the en vogue concept? The academic world has been criticized for its reaction time in the face of new phenomena, as was the case with video games, and one wonders if this is not going too fast now. Admittedly, this revival can be critical and, in accordance with ambient fashions, it is often a matter of deconstructing the notion of gamification; the problem is that this deconstruction took place even before the concept was constructed. Perhaps this is a beautiful metaphor for our (post)modernity, where one would have all the less stability of thought, the more destruction would precede construction.

Gamification is not, for me, a concept but a phenomenon, a practice (partly linguistic) to be studied and not to be deconstructed because the uses of the notion are very varied and there is nothing truly constructed that can be deconstructed. And one quickly arrives at a set of paradoxes that I will try to highlight before proposing alternatives for thinking about this question.

Let us begin with the definition often taken from Deterding et al. (2011): “Gamification is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts”. This seems to be the most frequently cited definition, as Seaborn and Fels (2015) attest in their meta-analysis of academic articles on gamification. I will try to draw the complex and paradoxical consequences for thinking about gamification using this definition before asking whether it captures all the uses of the term gamification today.

The term is in connection with the difference between game and play. It is said that it is unknown to the French who could not grasp it. This is not the case. Indeed, if French, alongside other languages, has only one term, jeu, to designate something that is distinguished in English, this does not mean that there is confusion, as language develops a polysemic logic, which means that from similarities, from family resemblance to speak like Wittgenstein ([1953] 2001) and from all kinds of associations, each term in the French language will designate different things without making the language unusable. This is how language works, which is more economical than multiplying new words ad infinitum. A certain principle of economy (which does not, however, overlap according to languages, since the economy is not located in the same place) organizes the use of a language. To take a slightly different example, in French like in English one plays the guitar and plays chess (jouer de la guitare and jouer aux échecs), while in Spanish it is tocar or jugar. But who would argue that in French or English the two actions are confused? It is the same for the word jeu as “object” or “system” (game) and jeu as “action” (play). In general, the context allows us to distinguish the two. Nonetheless, I claim that it is an advantage of the French language, as Henriot’s work (1969, 1989) shows, to have a single term; this makes it possible not to conceal the fact that behind the jeu (game) there is play in English as well as in French, but perhaps it can be forgotten in English. While game (and therefore gamification) is on the side of the device, it is indeed a device intended for play, a term which underlines that there can be playful activity without a specific device; but in the other direction, even if a game can remain on a shelf or if the mediocrity of its design results in that no one plays it, it has nevertheless been designed to play. In their text, Deterding et al. (2011) refer to the game as the ludus, as defined by Caillois: “ludus (or ‘gaming’) captures playing structuring by rules and competitive strife towards goals”. This is to emphasize that the game only makes sense in relation to play or playing, even if it is one extreme of play, the one that supposes rules and structuring – on the other hand, but we will not develop this here, or find the toy that refers to another extreme of play, the one that Caillois calls paidia. The game is not the opposite of play, it is a device that makes possible certain forms of play, those that require media to develop, from board games to video games, through games of skill or construction sets. We could consider that the game is original, seizing elements of nature to structure itself – we think of the traditional games known among others under the term awalé and which use seeds – before being reified in media, devices that are increasingly complex not only from a technical point of view but also in terms of their playful principles. If the game is not play, it is closely related to play, and this can be meant by the idea of the game itself (but this is also true of the toy) as reification of play. This should be understood as a historical and cultural process that leads to inserting traces of experiences (here, play) into objects (here, games). We cannot separate the game from play, there is only a game in relation to a play horizon, which is what the French says using one word jeu, that gives the advantage of avoiding separating the two.

This is all the more true since the definition of gamification (Deterding et al. 2011) refers to game design, i.e. design with a view to the use that is related to playing. Designing a game is indeed aiming for a playful use, otherwise it is not a game that must be designed, but a cartoon or a simulation (rather than a video game, if it is not about playing but about living a fiction or practicing). Neither cartoons nor simulation are games, but the game can use animated images and simulations. These are elements of game or game design. There are two implications when talking about games: we are aiming at play that requires a medium (and we do not deal with play without a medium), but the medium is there to make play possible (if not inevitable); we use the device to reach play, which can lead to focus on the object and its material characteristics, forgetting what is actually done with it. This sometimes gives the feeling that one is making games without really taking into account what they are playing for.

But if we follow the proposed definition (Deterding et al. 2011), then another paradox of the term gamification appears. It is a question of integrating elements from games (game and game-design) into devices that have an objective other than play and entertainment. Gamification is not about making a game – if so what would we need the term for? Making a game, even a serious one, is not gamification – it is about bringing game elements to a different reality, and this at the device side. That is probably the entire problem: what is the point of bringing game elements without making a game? It smacks of the trickery that Erasmus practiced and stated about games to teach children, especially Latin, for it was difficult to “motivate” them, we would say today (Brougère 1995). It was a question of giving the “finery” or “appearance of the game” (Erasmus 1529), of giving the impression of a game, but above all not playing a game, especially since the term at the time evoked gambling and could not therefore be valued in education. Erasmus did not talk about motivation, but it is the most common term used to justify gamification, as Seaborn and Fels (2015) show, while at the same time emphasizing a rather loose use of motivational theories, which leads me to think that behind this modern notion lies a strategy of trickery or attractiveness to capture the user (Cochoy 2004).

The paradox is that gamification is in fact a degamification: it is a question of using a game (a video game at the origin of the concept), of taking elements and characteristics to implant them in an activity whose aims do not refer to leisure or entertainment games. If there is indeed deconstruction, it is the deconstruction that gamification operates in regard to the game, broken down into elements that are considered to have a play value in themselves, independently of the set to which they belong. It is therefore very clear that it is a question of degamifying a game. It is to undo the game, to escape from the game and to somehow transform a game into something other than a game (not even into a serious game that falls under another logic, that of producing a game). It is therefore paradoxical that a degamification process is called gamification; that we make people believe that we are transforming work or any other aspect of society into a game when we are using elements for an activity that asserts itself as something other than play and that we think would allow the attractiveness that we find in it. If it is not a matter of getting people to play, but rather engaging in an activity (e.g. shopping) and motivating them to do so, elements that would be supposed to capture costumers (such as points or badges) may suffice. We find here the origin of the concept related to marketing (whose purpose is to attract and capture customers), which may refer to the intention to motivate for objectives other than purely commercial ones, for example educational.

Following Bogost (2015), we can also wonder about the question of the elements that are transferred from the game to the gamified device. Indeed, many of these elements (competition, teams, rankings by level, emblems or badges, real-time feedback, clearly defined objectives, etc.) are not specific to the game, but are found in many practices because the game takes on characteristics from the world outside it. By taking over elements of the game, we can therefore take over elements, from outside of the game, which feed into the content of the game, without making the activity play. Counting points is an activity that is very present in some games, but just as much in everyday life, starting with school.

To understand the error of this vision, we must come to the essential characteristics of the game. According to Reynold, quoted by Bruner:

The playfulness of an act does not pertain to what is done but to the way it is done (4-6) … Play possesses no instrumental activity of its own. It derives its behaviour patterns from other affective-behavioural systems. (12) In play, behaviour, while functioning normally, is uncoupled (and buffered) from its normal consequences … Therein lies both the flexibility of play and its frivolity. (7) (Reynolds 1972; quoted by Bruner 1975, p. 11)

What the game does is to make these characteristics possible, which can be considered, following Goffman (1974), as a transformation (a modalization, he writes, favoring a musical metaphor) of the frame of ordinary experience for a new frame that constitutes play, with reference to this primary activity, but without all its consequences. A game is a device that makes it possible to produce a playful experience without always succeeding in doing so. As for the elements of the game, they are both elements taken from the primary frame (and the points belong to this frame) and elements that allow the playful framing, such as the fictional elements that set up the “pretend”.

If you take elements of the game, you do not take play; play is not about the content, the elements, but about how you produce a frame. The game takes up the elements of the world; by taking up the elements of the game, we can only take up the elements of the world. Henriot (1969) evoked this to explain the success of the playful metaphor: since the game is a metaphor for the world, the world can in turn be interpreted as a game without the strictly playful dimension being present.

Gamifying is therefore neither producing a game (we are only limiting ourselves to elements and these elements do not constitute the game), nor necessarily producing a play experience that depends on the use that will be made of the device, on the meaning that will be given to it. Under these conditions, the gamified device may very well produce play, whether or not it is faithful to the expectations of its designer, but only the empirical analysis of games can show this. It is possible that the presence of elements that one has the habit of finding in the game is sufficient for some to produce a playful frame.

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.

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.

Is it a gamification of reality or language? They say it is a game, but is it enough to make games? Is the application of the idea of a game enough to define society or a company as playful, as gamified, all the more so since some people refer to gamification as the idea of a gamified society, of an omnipresence of play (or of what looks like it)?

In the 1980s, a rather similar feeling appeared in some authors’ work: the playful metaphor (La métaphore ludique) for Henriot (1989) and the playful society (La société ludique) for Cotta (1983) whose book is sub-titled The Life Invaded by Play (La vie envahie par le jeu). But using the game to speak about society, or to say that society would be playful in depth, is different. Cotta (1993) showed the growing economic importance of play, game and gambling, even if it means classifying heterogeneous activities under the play banner. There is always a tension between considering play to be ubiquitous (which would not be legitimate) and considering activities to become game or play (using a rather loose and vague notions of game and play).

This very cowardly vision of a gamification of society is the subject of a criticism that poses two problems: a notion that is not very explicit (gamification) and an absence of proof that is all the more difficult because we do not know whether we are talking about game, play, playful in a cowardly sense or something even vaguer. The more diluted the use of the notion of play becomes, the easier it is to find it everywhere. Refering to Henriot (1989), to say that everything is play is to say that nothing is play, because the notion is no longer useful. Panludism is the destruction of play. Nothing is more difficult than thinking of play as a frame for experience, without reifying the frame.

Therefore, let us not get the target wrong: let us not criticize the fact that we have made the world playful – it is not true – but let us criticize the fact that we make it seem playful, that we may say that black is white.

It is very difficult to prove under these conditions that the world would be more playful than it was. We can certainly note the importance of certain leisure activities linked to play (video games), but it is precisely this that has led to an increase or a new success of the playful metaphor, digital interaction being quickly baptized “game” or “play” because it resembles a game, whereas reality is the opposite: the game uses elements of the world, the possibilities of relationship with the digital machine to achieve its objectives. Is it a more playful world or a different kind of playful world, a world that resorts to trickery by putting play everywhere? But is it still play?

Is there really a “gameful world”? Do not we use the terms “game” and “playful” extensively (as the equivalent of fun or because of the presence of certain second characteristics of games)? In the absence of a real extension of the playful experience, it is the extension of the term(s) relating to game and play.

More than the development of the game, would not we be faced with the development of a rhetoric of the game, of the playful world? Deterding (2015) classifies these rhetorics, including those that are critical. Far from being a reality, the idea of the gamification of society, of the production of a playful world, would be pure discourse far from any testing, which is impossible because of the ambiguity of the notion – an ambiguity that Sutton-Smith (1997), from whom Deterding borrows the notion of rhetoric, had highlighted (see on this question Brougère 2005; Savignac 2017a). What characterizes these rhetorics, like Sutton-Smith’s, is that far from relying on a precise analysis of the phenomenon, it isolates a type of play or an aspect of it and then considers it to be omnipresent and significant of the development (positive or negative depending on the rhetoric) of our society. In the 18th Century, the importance of play and gambling, but also the development of calculus of chance (probabilities in our vocabulary), which emerged during the previous century from the analysis of games of chance and was applied to insurance (particularly maritime) or vaccination (or rather variolization), gave the feeling of a society where play was omnipresent. This feeling seemed to combine the development of new forms of play (nowadays video games), of which it is difficult to say whether they extended play or replaced other forms of it (and leisure), and the interpretation of reality from the idea of play (to take up Henriot’s analyzes of the playful metaphor). By retaining only one aspect of play, we end up seeing it everywhere and then developing a discourse of exaltation or criticism based on this feeling.

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:

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.

To think differently about these questions, I propose a detour through the question of optimal experience, a concept far more solid than gamification. Csikszentmihalyi constructed the notion (flow, optimal experience) from the game, from an analysis of its characteristics (Csikszentmihalyi and Bennett 1971). For Csikszentmihalyi the game appears as:

A socially or individually structured form to constitute the experience of the flow. It is a framework, a device through which you can have this experience that is voluntary, self-directed and detached from “real life”. (Csikszentmihalyi 1979, p. 268)

He thus considers that the game allows for a particular experience, that of flow (see Brougère 2005 for a more in-depth presentation of the concept), which is not true for all games and all players. In fact, he discovers in the game an experience that he will investigate its existence in other human activities. He is careful not to find play everywhere, but rather a type of experience that can be developed elsewhere, in leisure (which has points in common with play) and in work (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 2002). Transforming an activity so that it can become an optimal experience and carrying out analyzes in this sense have two advantages over the process of gamification, which sometimes refers to the same questions: to distinguish play from the experience it can generate or, more broadly, not to consider that what can produce this type of experience is necessarily play, not to see play everywhere; to approach the question in terms of experience, since devices are of interest only in so far as they generate an experience. The problem of gamification is to believe that play is in all the game elements (and of video games in particular) and to limit the question to that of devices without taking into account the experiences produced (beyond the question of motivation). Are there players in a so-called “gamified” world?

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.

Indeed, what characterizes these different devices (Alvarez and Djaouti 2010) or practices (serious gaming, serious playing, gamification) is that they combine aspects that come from play (and which in some cases remain, are experienced and perceived as such) with other elements that are not. It is probably necessary to accept that this is the production of hybrids, products or practices resulting from hybridizations between play and other dimensions. The main one is the one that refers to educational logics and devices; however, they have in common with play to resort, if not always, at least often, at the non-literality, to simulation, to exercise in the sense that to exercise is to do without really doing. One produces hybrids that will be experienced as games by some but not by others, and this, for many reasons, playful culture being one of the main reasons. If we define playful culture as the result of play experiences, it is indeed from this culture that a new experience will be perceived then eventually enjoyed. This playful experience does not always go in the same direction. Depending on the situation, it can allow one to appropriate a simulation as a game (Martin 2017) or, on the contrary, to perceive the distance to the game as one practices it in the context of a leisure activity (Lavigne 2016).

Hybrids combine elements that come from what is considered a game, and others that refer to realities (work, education) that can be thought of as antinomic to play. This produces objects or practices that are neither play nor non-play, that can be perceived as play or not, experienced by the actors as play or not. The criteria that I developed (Brougère 2005, 2012) allow us to understand the use of the terms “game” and “play” in the face of complex realities. They can allow us to see what, in these hybrids, tends toward play and/or limits this dimension. Is it still a matter of non-literality, of frivolity or consequence management? Who decides and under what conditions, without giving too much importance to the initial decision but taking into account the course of the game? What are the mechanisms that organize this decision? Are they related to play with the presence of rules or other processes that do not refer to it? Is uncertainty maintained or reduced? Ultimately, what is the level of hybridization of the game?

So the challenge seems to me not to deconstruct the term “gamification”, but rather to show that it has never been constructed, except through commercial opportunities, as a slogan. We should not take slogans for reality. The world is not gameful, or playful, and the reality of what is at stake leads us to think that it is likely to be less and less so if it ever was. A world in which perhaps we play more – we already find this idea in the 18th Century with the importance taken by gambling – is not a world that has become a game. A world in which some people claim that everything is play or a game, or that everything can, even must, become so, is not a world turned into a game if we show that the so-called gamification is not a transformation of the world into a game, at most a new trick using play and game as bait, in the words of Erasmus. The goal of motivation – to motivate people to do something rather than to invite them to play – is indeed very close to a logic of trickery. Play is not aimed for its own sake but for what it would achieve from a potential player.

Beyond this logic that can be questioned, related devices and practices are proposed and must be analyzed by avoiding considering them a priori as games or play (and the question would be for whom and why). We have proposed two avenues of analysis that are not mutually exclusive and that allow us to escape the unproductive dilemma “game/play or no game/play”, suggesting moreover that there is somewhere a created frontier, whereas frontiers are constructed through collective practices (especially language). On the one hand, it is a question of considering these objects as hybrids and grasping how different dimensions (playful or not) are combined and the effects they have on practice. There is no serious game; there are hybrids between a game and other reality (pedagogical device, for example). There is no gamification but a hybridization based on the implementation of elements from games, especially video games. On the other hand, if we think of play as a frame, we need to question the effects of the devices on the frame that this can produce. Are we still in the non-literality of the playful frame? Is it a return to the primary frame or the production of a new, tertiary frame that modulates the playful frame and that would need to be explored?

Chapter written by Gilles BROUGÈRE.