Gamification and other forms of play

Boundary 2

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 113-144

  Jagoda, Patrick ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84883012374     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: 15272141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-2151821     Document Type: Review

References (80)

1. see The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 10.
2. Robert Hunter, The Gamification Handbook: Everything You Need to Know about Gamification (Brisbane, QLD: Emereo, 2011).
3. Also see Byron Reeves and J. L. Read, Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009)
4. Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder, Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010)
5. and Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham, Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, 2011).
6. Lee Sheldon, The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game (Boston: Course Technology/Cengage Learning, 2012), 6 and 26.
7. Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin, 2011), 311.
8. Ian Bogost, "Gamification Is Bullshit," Atlantic, August 9, 2011, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/gamification-is-bullshit/ 243338/.
9. As he explains, the rhetorical power of the term gamification derives "from the '- ification' rather than from the 'game.' - ification involves simple, repeatable, proven techniques or devices: you can purify, beautify, falsify, terrify, and so forth. - ification is always easy and repeatable, and it's usually bullshit." I largely agree with Bogost's critique. Nevertheless, I include and analyze the term gamification throughout this essay precisely because of its widespread usage.
10. Gamification in many ways blurs the virtual space of the game and the physical world. In this way, it shares certain similarities with Jean Baudrillard's concept of "simulation." Gamification, however, suggests something other than a model that precedes the real. Like simulation, gamification disrupts any clear-cut distinction between the real and the virtual. Unlike simulation, which for Baudrillard has no ultimate relation to reality, gamification suggests a mediation of reality that operates through a transparent layering of protocols, interfaces, platforms, software, and hardware. For more on simulation
11. see Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
12. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12. Debord actively resisted the term media, especially in his later Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), as a popular replacement of the more politically charged spectacle. Media, for Debord, describes a unilateral strategy of propaganda used to communicate orders. Drawing from more recent media studies, I treat media in a more multilateral, archaeological, and epistemological fashion in this essay. For this sense of the term
13. see W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
14. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 19-20.
15. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
16. The status of videogames as a cultural dominant is linked in large part to their economic success. Taking into account the combined growth of console, PC, portable, and online games, estimates suggest that games were a $56 billion business in 2010. In late 2010, a single game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, earned approximately $360 million in a single day, breaking the all-time record for one-day sales across all entertainment media. For more
17. see "All the World's a Game," special report, Economist, December 10, 2011, www.economist.com/node/21541164.
18. As McKenzie Wark puts it in Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), "Games are our contemporaries, the form in which the present can be felt and, in being felt, thought through. From this vantage point, the whole of cultural history can be rethought" (225).
19. Also see Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
20. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)
21. and Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
22. To insist on differences between the earlier moment of radio, film, and broadcast television and the era of videogames is not to claim that the latter are absolutely new or that they wholly replace the earlier obsolescent forms. In fact, it remains a critical and ongoing task to problematize the "newness" of so-called new media-a quality that too often goes assumed, fetishized, or celebrated without adequate attention to the precise continuities and discontinuities suggested by the digital.
23. As Debord explains, "There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle all activity is banned-a corollary of the fact that all real activity has been forcibly channeled into the global construction of the spectacle" (The Society of the Spectacle, 21-22).
24. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, 2.
25. David Golumbia, "Games without Play," New Literary History 40, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 179.
26. The data about usage time differs across surveys and studies but falls in the range of twenty to thirty hours a week. The top player of the expansion WoW: Cataclysm reportedly played 149 hours in the first week of its release in 2010.
27. see Hilde Corneliussen and Jill W. Rettberg, Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A "World of Warcraft™" Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). In particular, Rettberg's essay, "Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft," explores this blurring of work and play.
28. Also see Alexander Galloway, "The Unworkable Interface," New Literary History 39, no. 4 (Autumn 2008): 931-55.
29. While I agree with the substance of these critiques of WoW, I also believe that virtual world spaces are open-ended enough to enable meaningful play and sociality that are not absolutely recuperated by the capitalist logics that structure their core game designs. In my experience, only once a player has proven him- or herself by acquiring enough experience and property can he or she engage in the more creative and complex aspects of gameplay. Of course, this model of development and progress is itself a feature of contemporary capitalism. Nevertheless, I would suggest that in a game space that includes millions of players and their creative energies, this structure is not totalizing.
30. see the writing of game designer Tony Ventrice, especially "Gamification: Framing the Discussion," Gamasutra, November 2, 2011, www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6530/gamification-framing-the-.php.
31. Golumbia contends that games such as WoW reveal "a somatic pleasure at the heart of capitalism" ("Games without Play," 193). Indeed, as the games that I discuss in this essay suggest, critical play and pleasure are not mutually dependent terms.
32. One of the few texts to offer a detailed analysis of games that are beginning to innovate at the level of their mechanics is Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter's Games of Empire. In the context of the military-industrial- entertainment complex, they explore games such as Escape from Woomera, OUT, and The French Democracy.
33. Jacques Derrida offers an important reflection on complicity in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
34. He observes that "even if all forms of complicity are not equivalent, they are irreducible. The question of knowing which is the least grave of these forms of complicity is always there-its urgency and its seriousness could not be overstressed-but it will never dissolve the irreducibility of this fact" (40). In the context of this essay, games that seek to complicate or resist transnational capitalism can never escape complicity with it. And yet not all forms of complicity are equivalent, and the work of adjudicating among them constitutes critical intellectual work. For more on the relationship between intellectual responsibility and complicity
35. see Gayatri C. Spivak, "Responsibility," boundary 2 21, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 19-64.
36. My advocacy in favor of games here is not unlike Galloway's argument in favor of harnessing what he calls "protocol" against a control society that is itself founded on protocol. As he puts it, "I am not suggesting that one should learn to love the various apparatuses of control, but rather that, for all its faults, protocological control is still an improvement over other modes of social control. I hope to show in this book that it is through protocol that one must guide one's efforts, not against it" (17). For more
37. see Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
38. Eric Zimmerman, "Gaming Literacy: Game Design as a Model for Literacy in the Twenty-First Century," in The Video Game Theory Reader 2, ed. Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2009), 23-28.
39. The precise nature of that role is not yet clear. Twitter and Facebook have, of course, already suggested political affordances in revolutionary situations (e.g., Moldova in 2009 and Egypt in 2011), though their effects are surely both overstated and often put in the service of a decades-long American campaign of democracy promotion. Even as social media allow political organization and network formation to take place at an unprecedentedly rapid speed, they are not always productive of the types of strong ties necessary for sustained engagement. For critiques of the overstatement regarding the political effects of social media
40. see Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: Public Affairs, 2011)
41. and Malcolm Gladwell, "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted," New Yorker, October 4, 2010, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/ 04/101004fa-fact-gladwell.
42. see Walter Holland, Henry Jenkins, and Kurt Squire, "Theory by Design," in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003)
43. and James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Regarding the capacities of games to foster empathy
44. see, especially, Jonathan Belman and Mary Flanagan, "Designing Games to Foster Empathy," Cognitive Technology 14, no. 2 (2010): 5-15.
45. see Douglas A. Gentile et al., "The Effects of Prosocial Video Games on Prosocial Behaviors: International Evidence from Correlational, Longitudinal, and Experimental Studies," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35, no. 6 (June 2009): 752-63.
46. The Serious Games Initiative was founded by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and originally codirected by David Rejeski and Ben Sawyer. If taken broadly, "serious games" also have a longer history that dates back to Cold War simulations as well as the "educational" games of the 1990s.
47. It is worth noting that players reportedly fail at videogame tasks about 80 percent of the time. Nicole Lazzaro, an expert on game emotions, has made the counterintuitive suggestion that gamers frequently enjoy failing at games. Lazzaro and researchers at the M.I.N.D. Lab in Helsinki, Finland, tested heart rate, skin conductivity, and electrical activation of facial muscles during gameplay and found that "players exhibited the most potent combination of positive emotions when they made a mistake." Animations following failure often served as "a vivid demonstration of the players' agency in the game" (McGonigal, Reality Is Broken, 66). In other words, a fair chance of success made failure acceptable, and a demonstration of agency (through loss) yielded optimism. While this finding, tested on commercial games, is noteworthy, the games that I explore in this essay convey more substantive experiences of loss. My selected games do indeed yield forms of flexible optimism, but not merely in the limited sense of encouraging players to complete or win the particular game at hand.
48. McKinney, SPENT, playspent.org/.
49. Lisa Brown, Urban Ministries of Durham, email interview with the author, April 2012. These numbers include replays, but, as of December 2011, the game was likely accessed by around 1.4 million unique players. Also
50. see the earlier press release from Urban Ministries of Durham, "Spent Game Reaches One Million Plays," August 31, 2011, www.umdurham.org/news-and-events/press-releases/spent-game-reaches-one-million- plays.html.
51. At other times, player decisions are forced, depending on the remaining balance. For example, if the player's bank balance drops below fifty dollars, the player is charged a five-dollar overdraft fee. The script that follows explains, "Bank fees and overdraft charges overwhelmingly impact low-income groups, which is why many skip the bank altogether in favor of check-cashing services."
52. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 192.
53. SPENT is not the only game to explore empathy through role-playing. For an extended exploration of two other serious games that generate empathy-Darfur Is Dying and Hush-see Ian Bogost's chapter on "Empathy," in How to Do Things with Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 18-23.
54. Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 9.
55. I am gesturing here to a substantial tradition in modern literary criticism that goes back to texts such as Erich Auerbach's classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953). Auerbach's transhistorical study analyzes "the interpretation of reality through literary representation or 'imitation'" (554). He demonstrates the shift, through writers such as Stendhal and Balzac, to the representation of daily life that makes up modern realism. Building on Auerbach's earlier thesis, I would stress that videogames-even those AAA games that boast the most photorealistic graphics-are not somehow more realistic than novels or films. It is instead the case that each era has a favored series of methods for representing reality or channeling everyday experience. Gamification suggests, among other things, a contemporary version of realism.
56. Game theory emerged as a major field of study in the 1940s, particularly after the release of the 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, a collaboration between mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern. For a fuller history
57. see E. Roy Weintraub, ed., Toward a History of Game Theory, annual supplement to History of Political Economy, vol. 24 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).
58. The fascination with winning a game shares certain parallels with the reader's desire for closure and the privileged status of endings in literature identified by Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). In emphasizing failure and blurring the line between digital games and everyday life, SPENT and the other games that I discuss make total closure, even at the moment of alleged victory, impossible for the player.
59. The concept of the "magic circle" derives from Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (New York: Roy, 1950).
60. This term's meaning is expanded considerably by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
61. Since its release, players have donated $50,000 (Lisa Brown, Urban Ministries of Durham, email interview with the author, April 2012).
62. Frederik Hermund et al., Third World Farmer, http://www.3rdworldfarmer. com/.
63. As Holland, Squire, and Jenkins note, "Games model not only principles but processes, particularly the dynamics of complex systems" ("Theory by Design," 29).
64. Wark, Gamer Theory, 169. As he puts it, "The gamer coupled with the game is a strange animal."
65. In some ways, the distinction between the "diegetic" and "nondiegetic," which has been so critical in narratology and cinema studies, is not quite as useful in game studies. A key formal feature of most videogames is that they enable us to experience worlds as systems. For this reason, a clear-cut differentiation between the immersive and diegetic world, on the one hand, and the hypermediated and nondiegetic game overlay, on the other, does not adequately describe a player's experience of the game. When a postmodern novel or an experimental film calls attention to its formal features in a self-reflexive manner, the reader or viewer frequently experiences a tension between the diegetic and nondiegetic layers of the work. Oftentimes, breaking the fourth wall also entails a loss of immersion. In most videogames, on the other hand, these layers seamlessly intermingle, especially for experienced players who are familiar with the game mechanics and have internalized the interface features.
66. The types of "serious games" that I discuss in this essay have a complicated relationship to "fun." Such games frequently seek to engage players through clever design without overdetermining pleasure. Some scholars, such as Salen and Zimmerman, set up an either- or between commercial and serious games, as when they note, "If enough people believe that games are meant to be mindless fun, then this is what they will become. If enough people believe that games are capable of greater things, then they will inevitably evolve and advance" (Rules of Play, xi). Of course, critical play can include pleasure, through intellectual challenge and social interaction, without relying on "mindless fun."
67. Hermund et al., Third World Farmer, www.3rdworldfarmer.com/About.html.
68. see Jesper Juul, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
69. Jörg Lukas Matthaei, Thresholdland: An Expatriation in Ten Days (Schwellenland), www.matthaei-und-konsorten.de/en/projekte/schwellenland/.
70. Digital media were used for numerous purposes in Thresholdland, including rule setting, narrative exposition, communication among players, and progression through the game. Players, for instance, had to send digital photographs proving completion of certain tasks in order to receive permission to move on to subsequent levels.
71. see Sean Stewart, "Alternate Reality Games," www.seanstewart.org/interactive/args/.
72. Also see Jeffrey Kim, Elan Lee, Timothy Thomas, and Caroline Dombrowski, "Storytelling in New Media: The Case of Alternate Reality Gaming, 2001-2009," First Monday 14, no. 6 (June 1, 2009), www.firstmonday.org/ htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2484. For an extensive study of this form of gaming in its first decade
73. see Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Wærn, Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009).
74. Johannes Birringer, "Interactive Environments and Digital Perception," in A Performance Cosmology, ed. Richard Gough, Judie Christie, and Daniel P. Watt [London: Routledge, 2005], 87).
75. see Steve Dixon and Barry Smith, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
76. Still other activities included a dating game that explored myths surrounding falsified marriages and a frightening simulation of the process of trafficking undocumented immigrants across borders.
77. These numbers are based on the people who signed up for the game on the first day as well as unique hits counted on the primary Thresholdland website (author interview with Matthaei).
78. Caroline Pelletier, "Games and Learning: What's the Connection?," International Journal of Learning and Media 1, no. 1 (2009): 89.
79. see Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
80. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality [London: Routledge, 2005], 47