This week I was particularly intrigued by Ian Bogost’s “Gamification is Bullshit” piece in The Atlantic. In his polemical essay, Bogost outlines an anti-gamification argument on the grounds of its popular use as a recent marketing gimmick. Bogost even re-labels gamification as “exploitationware” created by marketing consultants with the sole purpose of deception and profit, or as Bogost describes, “to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.” It seems, then, that Bogost is not only incensed by gamification itself but also (and perhaps more centrally) “gamification” as a concept? In light of Patrick Jagoda’s discussion of the analogy between games and concepts, I was wondering how gamification circulates as a concept that also generates concepts (in Bogost’s writing and more generally). If “games themselves can also directly generate concepts,” as Jagoda writes in “Conceptual Games, or the Language of Video Games,” then I wonder if this is also true for gamification—a (new?) concept that might itself also generate concepts. What concepts might gamification generate (or exploit)? Can gamification ever generate concepts that fall outside the logics of “exploitationware” or is it always bound to the assemblages of “marketing bullshit”? This reminded me of our discussion of Bandersnatch and the gamification of television and Netflix viewing. The gamification of Netflix viewing was so much so a marketing gimmick that the company was itself inserted as a presence into the show’s various narrative arcs. In this sense, the conceptual capacities of Bandersnatch seem to be limited to Bogost’s understanding of gamification as exploitationware.
I wonder, then, if there are instances that gamification is not as exploitative as Bogost implies? It seems like the most obvious counterexample to Bogost’s exploitationware argument would be the gamification within education and the possibilities it affords to a new and innovative pedagogy. Yet is the possibility of using gamification to improve students’ performance with and engagement in the classroom (as well as our gamified learning outside of the classroom in our everyday lives) still inevitably implicated in Bogost’s view of gamification as capitalist “exploitationware”? Put simply, what are the perils of recuperating gamification in education? We can think of the app Duolingo, for instance, and its gamification of language learning. Like Duolingo, I imagine that the gamification of learning would always require the use of progress mechanics and rewards such as points, badges, streaks, achievements, power-ups, leaderboards, etc. (all of which are already incorporated into the design of an app like Duolingo). What happens when the gamification of learning is centrally dependent upon and driven by these extrinsic motivators? What happens to pedagogical practices that rely on such progress and reward mechanics? Are such extrinsic motivators and progress/reward mechanics not already at work in a typical classroom anyways? We might then consider a difference in gamification as a useful technology, a concept uncritically recuperated from marketing logics, and gamification as a praxis of critical un/making, unraveling its ties to exploitation and mobilizing instead a counter-politics of the conceptual capacities of games.
Politics of Media 