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ABSTRACT
For many researchers, medical professionals, and politicians, the gamification of mental health treatment is a possibly innovative and efficient means to utilise the popularity of gaming in order to help combat the ever-growing global rates of mental illness. Despite this optimism, critics of gamification point to this trend as an extension of neoliberal governance, warning that gamification only encourages the further quantification and control of life under metrics of utility, productivity, and competitiveness. Accordingly, this article critically examines the politics of gamifying mental healthcare, and the broader question of the link between play and mental health. By engaging with the works of Donald W. Winnicott, and a host of contemporary critical and cultural theorists, this article attempts to open up a space for considering the value of play and games for sufferers of mental illness, that resist the strictures of the neoliberal governance of play.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. This is not to suggest that there are no significant differences between Csíkszentmihályi’s theoretical work and McGonigal’s. One of the clearest differences between the two can be located in terms of their respective approaches to biological or naturalistic explanations of phenomena. Csíkszentmihályi states that ‘scientific explanations in the natural sciences are always of the as-if kind. They do not presume to stand for the reality explained’ (Csíkszentmihályi, Citation1975, p. 9). Unlike Csíkszentmihályi, McGonigal does not appear to have such qualms about conflating naturalistic models with reality tout court, insofar as she frequently refers to biochemical models of human happiness as if they are synonymous with happiness itself. For an example see (McGonigal, Citation2011, p. 47).
2. Ocean Howell’s analysis of skating culture in the United States provides us with an example of how neoliberal subjectivities are reinforced through cultural activity. For Howell, skateboarding has been championed in the US because the sport has proven amenable to the promotion of self-responsibility, individualism, entrepreneurialism, and a willingness to take risks (Howell, Citation2008, p. 482–483). While Howell is quick to clarify that there is nothing inherently neoliberal about skateboarding, he nevertheless argues that, ‘among the so-called extreme sports, skateboarding has been singled out as an incubator for entrepreneurialism’ (ibid, p. 482). Within both private and public advocacy for the construction of skateparks and the promotion of skating, Howell locates an interest in the low levels of litigation amongst skaters who injure themselves, the promotion of risk-taking behaviour among skaters, and the openness skaters have to corporate sponsorship, as key factors in the desire to promote this particular play practice (ibid, p. 482–483).
3. In 2018, school teachers in Kentucky went on strike after being told that their health insurance premiums would be connected to their physical performance, which was to be measured via Fitbit metrics. As Tithi Bhattacharya notes, writing in The Guardian, the teachers ‘had to wear Fitbits and enter data about every bodily measurement and function, including sexual activity’ (Bhattacharya, Citation2018, n.p.)
4. In this way, Winnicott’s work is potentially quite close to that of Roger Caillois, insofar as Caillois warned, in his landmark text Man, Play and Games, that when play loses its autonomy from the ‘laws of daily life’ there is the risk that it will become corrupted (Caillois, Citation2001, p. 43–44). As he writes, without such autonomy, ‘what used to be a pleasure becomes an obsession. What was an escape becomes an obligation, and what was a pastime is now a passion, compulsion, and source of anxiety’ (ibid, p. 44). Caillois uses the examples of professional boxers, cyclists, and actors – individuals who engage play-like activities, but in such as way that these activities take on all of the stress and monotony of work (ibid, p. 45). Rather than being liberated from the ‘everyday’ demands of utility and productivity, play becomes transformed into simply another facet of such a demand.
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Notes on contributors
Francis Russell
Francis Russell is the course coordinator of the humanities Honours program at Curtin University. He has a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Curtin University, and researches the political and philosophical implications of mental illness, alongside conducting broader research into neo-liberal culture. He has published in Cultural Studies Review, Deleuze Studies, Space and Culture, Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy and has published criticism with numerous contemporary art publications