This paper aims at proposing an alternative take on gamification, based on bottom up approaches and critical design. In the first part of the paper, several issues concerning gamification are reviewed: the claim that it is exploitative, the problematic definition of game elements as well as gamification's connections to power and discipline and the utopian stance on games that is generally adopted. The second part of the paper is dedicated to overcoming these issues by situating gamification in the larger context of play and to trace its roots in the ludicisation of culture. The last part of the paper proposes the institution of a punk gamification, as an ideological alternative to mainstream gamification that focuses on freedom more than rules, is bottom up, critical and, sometimes, unpleasant.
If we contextualise it, Bogost’s criticism can be read as a defensive reaction towards the increasing attention around digital games in the last decade: games were becoming mainstream, and people that were involved in them for a long time wanted to protect their specificity1. Nevertheless, these criticisms should not be dismissed or ignored. Because it is indeed true that many early forms of and approaches to gamification were little more than scam, using games as a purely cosmetic layer and often theorized and implemented by people with very limited knowledge and understating of games and game culture altogether. Often, barely-scientific and extremely exploitative techniques such as “dopamine loops” (based on creating addiction to biochemical rewards) were advertised as good design solutions or simplistic strategies (the infamous “PBL triad”, composed by points, badges and leaderboards) applied blindly.
It is also true, however, that – although these poor attempts of gamification still exist – in the last years gamification scholars worked relentlessly to outline a framework for studying, designing and implementing gamification in a way that is much more scientifically sound and much less ethically shady. If some gamification is indeed “bullshit”, however, not all gamification is. Several approaches to gamification have been proposed over the years, many of them based on honest and rigorous academic work and with the genuine objective to use the potential of gamification to do something else then try and exploit customers. This does not mean, however, that these approaches do not have issues. 2
Since its beginnings as a marketing tool, gamification has been applied more and
more often in a rather diverse set of contexts such as education [
Despite overcoming the nature of “exploitationware” that gamification might have had in its beginnings, most of these approaches remain significantly flawed and one of their biggest issues rises from the definition of gamification itself.
One of the most common definitions of gamification [
First, the “elements” generally indicated as examples are of very different nature and
scale. They range from progress bars and badges to themes and narrative [
Second, it has been observed that these “game-design elements” are neither strictly
unique to games nor automatically give rise to “gameful experiences” [
Many of these elements, furthermore, have originated in non-game contexts and several of them have been included in games fairly recently. Some have come very far: game badges are an imitation of those given by the Boys Scouts of America to reward their members, which in turn are inspired by military medals and decorations which are probably heirs of prehistoric hunt and war trophies. Other elements are more recent, such as loading bars which are inspired by thermometers and mechanical displays measuring pressure and similar. Even storytelling, which is as ancient as spoken language, only recently become an important element in many games.
The picture, then, appears reversed. It have been game designers that, in the past, have introduced non-game elements into their games to make them more interesting and engaging! Gamification, from this perspective, would actually mean reverse engineering the work of such designers in identifying motivational techniques or interesting semiotic devices – not to make anything more “game-like”.
The biggest issue about the whole idea of “game elements” however, is that
underlined by Bonenfant and Genvo [
This misconception is rooted in a common misunderstanding of Caillois’s concepts of ludus and paidia. These are often imagined as juxtaposed and fundamentally interchangeable with the concepts of “game” and “play”. This (as we will see better in section 4) entails the idea that games are essentially systems of rules and, therefore, that the rules are the game, ignoring or downplaying the necessity of a playful behaviour in order to play the game.
There is, nevertheless, an approach to gamification that focuses precisely on the
experiential component of games: that proposed by Huotari and Hamari [
Huotari and Hamari’s definition, then, state that “gamification refers to a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences in order to support users’ overall value creation” [11, p. 25]. This definition of gamification is centred on giving rise to “favourable” motivations and psychological states using affordances and, therefore, underscores the importance of the psychological outcomes rather than specifics of design.
The virtues of this definition are that gamification is imagined as non-coercive and that games are not approached in an essentialist way. In fact, the authors prefer to avoid a complex confrontation with the detailed definition of what is a game and what are game elements and prefer to rely on previous literature and on the general trend of defining games as something that features both a systemic and an experiential component.
Nevertheless, the fact that the experiential component is identified with “gamefulness” (instead of playfulness) and that the systemic component is associated with things such as rules, conflict and measurable and uncertain outcomes seem rooted in the rather successful idea (at least within game studies) that games are essentially enjoyable systems of constrictions, pleasurable grammars. While there is some truth in it, this concept is not unproblematic, and it relates to another of the big issues of gamification as we know it: its relationship with power. 3
It is fairly common, in gamification literature, to read a sentence along the lines of: “gamification aims at influencing behaviour”. Some approaches to gamification aim at outlining “functional compounds of design features and user dispositions that give rise to particular desirable experiences and behaviours” [14, p. 109]. Others claim explicitly that the goal of gamification is “to understand how to best influence human behavior, attitudes, and other states with designed interventions derived from games.” [15, p. 318] and that “gamification is intended to change specific outcomes in specific ways; designers want to use lessons from game science to change human behavior.” [15, p. 331].
This approach – often marked by clear positivistic undertones2 - implicitly describes
gamification as a form of power. The Oxford English Dictionary describes power as
“The capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of
2 Landers and his co-authors [
It must be noted, that this is a different issue from that pointed out by Bogost. Power does not equal exploitation and it is not something bad per se: many gamification efforts focus on “good causes” such as learning, health, job performance, or civic engagement, while others, even if they aim at increasing revenues, try to do it by making the services they offer more enjoyable, not by “tricking” their users into spending more time or money on them.
These efforts – along with those of adjacent techniques such as serious games, games for health and game-based learning – attempt to exercise a form of soft power in order to encourage users to “do the right thing”. However, it is from this point onwards that issues start to arise, because: who chooses what is the “right thing”? Why would designers, institutions, companies be entitled to decide on their own what is best for their users? And if such a thing as the “right thing” exists, why would it need an extrinsic motivation to be done? Are users too silly, too childish or too weak to make their own choices and to carry them out?
Gamification aiming at behavioural changes, be it for a good cause, end up being
rather paternalistic, patronising and definitely top-down. It is the main point of “games
against health” [
Some approaches to gamification try to avoid this problem. Huotari and Hamari [
Nonetheless, the aim of making a service easier and smoother is not exempt from
possible criticism. Several of the points raised by Virilio [
The problematic relationship between gamification and power becomes far more
dangerous when gamification makes use of the many data that are made available by
current information and communication technologies. Metrics and geo-localisation
transform gamified apps in what Foucault [
A world where discipline through gamification has been achieved has been hyperbolically described in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World. In this dystopia hedonistic playfulness and games are used to build an inescapably strict society which remains unquestioned and unchallenged by its inhabitants exactly because every action is designed to feel natural and to be enjoyable. This example obviously brings to the extreme consequences some principles that much later have become part of the paradigm of gamification, and I do not wish to claim that gamification will eventually be used to create such a dystopia. Allegories, however, with their ability to deform reality into a grotesque but accurate description, give us the chance to realise the very ideological grounds upon which gamification is built.
At this point, seeing the criticisms advanced to the different approaches to
gamification and the ideological issues that they are related to, it may seem that the aim of this
argumentation is to prove that gamification is a bad enterprise and that it should be
abandoned altogether. In fact, the objective of this argumentation is the opposite: as
gamification appears to have a real effect and efficacy [
The theorisation of a punk gamification emerges from a word that is insufficiently
used in gamification: “play”. Play and playfulness have often been relegated outside
gamification, confined to the domains of “playful design” [
I have mentioned that this misconception is based on a confusion of the concepts of “play” and “game” to that of the two polarities of play proposed by Caillois: ludus and paidia. On the one hand, we must remember that Caillois is very firm in stating that he is not drawing a typology but highlighting two tensions that permeate every form of play. Even in the most structured and institutionalised game session there is always the temptation of changing the rules, bending them, even cheat. On the other hand, even the most wild and free play activity will end up instituting some custom, tracing some 3 Not to be confused with the Chinese fidelity programme “sesame credit”, a private credit scoring application by Alibaba Group patterns, creating some rules. Seeing ludus and paidia as alternatives to each other, then, would be incorrect.
On the other hand, these two concepts are in no way assimilable to “play” and “game” which aren’t two polarities for the simple fact that games are “played”. Play is a larger (and much older) thing than games, and games are one out of several ways of playing. Certainly, one of the most interesting ones for a number of reasons, but still a sub-set of play.
This point might seem irrelevant, but it is fundamental to explain our understanding of games. As a matter of prestige, games have always been much more readily accepted, both as an element of our cultures and as deserving academic enquiry, than play. After the wave of moral panic that digital games encountered in the 1980s and 1990s4 both pop culture and academia where more than willing to embrace this new cultural phenomenon – the same cannot be said about play. Play is often surrounded by stigma. Adult-play is scary. Adult toy-play has been accused of being a form of regression and it is generally ignored5. On the other hand, play is accepted as a part of childhood, but in that case the attempts to control it and to direct it, to use it for teaching or for therapy, become the norm. In other words, play is a silly thing and, with the freedom and weirdness that it entails, it is sometimes considered almost anti-social.
Play is also difficult to define (or impossible, as famously claimed by Wittgenstein) so that game studies – already fighting for establishing themselves as a proper discipline – often preferred to ignore it or to describe it as something different from games. Gamification studies has generally followed that direction.
There have been efforts to bring back playfulness into gamification, but they have
often been masked (Werbach and Hunter’s [
Defining “play” as a set of things, would be problematic: as Wittgenstein claimed,
it is impossible to find a common characteristic to all the activities that we describe as
play6. We can, however, try to describe a playful behaviour (sometimes also called
paratelic attitude [
Playfulness, then, is the experiential condition necessary to games described by
Huotari and Hamari [
If the experiential component – playfulness – is common both to games and to other
forms of play, then the specificity of games will lie in their systemic component. Here
it is important to avoid another rather common mistake: that of imagining games as
being regulated and other forms of play as being free. The conventional behaviour
typical of play is never completely random. While in games it takes the shape of a system
of abstract rules to be implemented, in other forms of play it will be determined by a
thematic system. During toy play, for example, a toy tiger will be able to do what it is
expected from a tiger (roar, fight) or a magic animal (talk, fly), but not things that are
completely unrelated to its thematic role (the tiger won’t probably be able to program
in python). Similarly, if during roleplay, one player decides to be Captain America
another will probably embody another Avenger, in order to fight together against
imaginary enemies. The thematic system, then, will follow the narrative scripts [
These two polarities are different from those of ludus and paidia: they deal with what kind of rules (explicit systemic or implicit thematic) are followed, and not how strictly structured they are. Therefore we can imagine games with an higher degree of paidia (such as Calvinball, the game in the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, in which rules are made up and changed by the players while playing) or an higher degree of ludus (board games such as Go), as well as thematic play more oriented to paidia (as in some particularly chaotic session of child toy-play) or to ludus (role-play close to improv theatre).
What has all this to do with gamification? This argument is to point out that the focus on rules by game and gamification studies (probably influenced by game theory) risk to be misplaced. If rules might seem “serious” enough for rehabilitating games from their playful nature, focusing on them distracts us from the fundamental freedom that is experienced in games. It would be like studying poetry by focusing mainly on rhyme structures and metrics and ignoring their content. The structural part is certainly important, but it should not distract us completely from what the poem tries to communicate.
Focusing on rules, objective, goals, rewards and strategy had a bad influence on gamification theories, and part of the problematic relationship with power and discipline we described above is due precisely to this focus. What this paper aims to do, then, is to propose a gamification based on freedom.
One might wonder if what is here proposed would still be “gamification” and not
something else. For typology’s sake it would be possible to further articulate
gamification in gamification proper, playfication and toyfication [
The practical reason is that “gamification” is a well-established field, and it would be counterproductive to attempt to reform it by moving outside it.
The theoretical reason is that if gamification today is possible and (sometimes)
effective, it is because of games. I am referring to the so called ludicisation of culture
[
The ludicisation of culture is a trend that can be described as a steady increase of the
modelling ability of games. In Lotman’s theory [
The fact that gamification is rooted in the ludicisation of culture and the latter is due
to the increased prestige of games dismiss also every positivistic and essentialist
approach to gamification. Gamifications does not work because games are intrinsically
better at motivating people thanks to how they are designed, gamification works
because it taps on a cultural obsession [
This obsession is indeed a resource, but one that we should not use to exploit users in a capitalistic way, nor to gain power over them for the “greater good”. 5
Punk gamification is based on two principles: 1) gamification should be more about freedom and less about rules and 2) play is not always as fun and pleasurable as we describe it. The fact that games are as much about freedom than about rules, and that the latter have influenced negatively gamification has been already discussed at length above. So, let’s focus on the ideas that games and play are enjoyable. Deterding and his co-authors claim that “play is the paragon of enjoyable, intrinsically motivated activity, associated with a wide range of positive effects on experience, motivation, social interaction, learning, and wellbeing.” [14, p. 101]. This utopian7 view of play is rooted in a discourse that sees play as something idyllic but does not have much to do with the reality of playing. Play may be enjoyable, but it can also be greatly frustrating and 7 The opposite also exists: a variety of novels and films, for example, propose a dystopian take on play in which people are routinely killed or hurt during violent games. enraging, it can jeopardise friendships over competitions, provoke “rage quits” or transform people in “sore losers”. Play can also be tedious and boring, and players may endure it in a dull way in order to see what comes next. Play can be extremely serious and tiring, as in a game of chess. Games can make us feel bad with their narratives as anyone who has played This War of Mine (11 bit studios, 2014) or similar games knows very well.
The utopian take on games having only “positive effects” is unjustified – and that is
a good thing. Bad feelings are important, and we certainly don’t want to suppress them.
In fact, gamification could be used to propound this sort of playfulness, we could
gamify to make things harder or frustrating. User-unfriendliness can be a powerful tool to
create a distance between the user and the service, a distance that might be needed to
look critically at the activity undertaken [
From these two main claims – play should be about freedom and play can be unpleasant – we can outline two main directions for punk gamification.
First, punk gamification should be bottom-up. This includes all forms of
gamification that are provided by the users themselves (11, p. 27), who design their own
gamification that answers to their own needs. It is the case of practices such as parkour or
free running a playful acrobatic way of moving through the city and reclaim public
areas practiced in the suburbs of Paris [
Second, punk gamification should be critical, i.e. instead of reinforcing the status
quo it should challenge it [
It might seem strange that the premises of this paper – investigating the problematic aspects of the current gamification approaches and situating gamification in the context of play and ludicisation – take most of the space, leaving only few lines to describe what punk gamification is. But, as the name suggests, punk gamification is defined as much by its features as by what it is up against. Punk gamification exists in opposition to mainstream gamification. It is not meant to delegitimise all the other approaches to gamification, but to criticize their problematic aspects, to propose alternatives and to point out their hidden ideological roots. The purpose of the “critical” side of punk gamification is not only to challenge the status quo of the gamified activities, but also to challenge the status quo of gamification itself.
Presented here are only the first steps in establishing a punk gamification – much work still needs to be done, and I do hope it might become a collective effort – nonetheless describing a form of gamification that is bottom up and free, critical and notalways-pleasant should be able to open up the field of gamification studies to new perspectives. To introduce the idea that gamification doesn’t have to be an instrument of control but can become a tool of resistance. 6
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 793835.