Playing work, or gamification as stultification

ABSTRACT

The contrast between work and play as activities collapses if play is seen, following anthropologist Thomas Malaby, as a disposition towards the indeterminate. Once play is positioned as a state of mind, activities that constitute work need not be disjunct from playful behavior. Yet for most workers, work is rarely if ever playful, and attempts to import play behavior into the workplace (‘gamification’) do not result in greater playfulness. Part of this problem results from specific aesthetic values for games having dominated both work and play. As Roger Caillois warned half a century ago, sport-like values have increasingly saturated the culture of the overdeveloped world. Meanwhile, gamification processes have only been able to export task-focussed reward structures from the domain of play – practices that descend from Dungeons & Dragons, but that have been denuded of their playful qualities. In parallel to the gamification of work has been the gamification of games, namely an increasing emphasis on tasks to structure video game play (e.g., achievements), and thus make them more compelling yet less playful. In so much as this entails forcing particular patterns of understanding onto both players and workers, this makes gamification a parallel to Jacques Rancière's stultification in education: a binding of wills instead of an emancipation. If we want a world where work could be more playful, we must begin by breaking the cultural dominance of sport-like and task-like aesthetics of play, and endeavour to overcome the underlying fears that prevent work from being played.

KEYWORDS:

• Play
• games
• digital games
• gamification
• stultification
• Huizinga
• Caillois
• Rancière
• cybervirtue

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Award-winning game designer and philosopher Dr Chris Bateman was the first person in the world to attain a doctorate in the aesthetics of play and games, and has worked on nearly fifty published games. His ‘imaginative investigations’ trilogy won praise from Mary Midgley, Kendall Walton, Allen Wood and Michael Moorcock. The first book, Imaginary Games (2011) examines imagination in games and art, asking if games can be art or whether all art is a kind of game. The Mythology of Evolution (2012), explores the role of imagination in the sciences, asking if it possible to present the story of life without distorting it. Finally, Chaos Ethics (2014), considers the role of imagination in morality, and defends a concept of moral chaos. His latest book is The Virtuous Cyborg, which asks what the good life might be for humans who are as intimately enmeshed with technology as we all have become [[email protected]].