Games as Attunement

What is gamification, exactly? I open with this question not merely to promise some clarification of the slippery term at the center of my essay, but also to establish a central claim: that a concept so much in dispute is also necessarily a moody one. In the first “academic attempt” to shed the “negative connotations” of its industry jargon, Sebastian Deterding, Rilla Khaled, Lennart E. Nacke, and Dan Dixon narrow gamification to mean “the use of game mechanics in traditionally nongame activities.” Discussing its centrality to the history of skepticism and the eighteenth century’s ludic assays upon the certainty of knowledge, Sarah Kareem enlarges it to encompass taking any “nongame activity as if it were a game.” Jane McGonigal exalts gamification for “teaching and inspiring and engaging us” by “providing rewards in ways that reality [does] not.” Ian Bogost denigrates it as “marketing bullshit, invented by consultants” to “domesticate” videogames for service to “the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business.” In sum, in terms of its temperament, value, and scope, gamification is an emotive subject, a referendum on gaming aesthetics, individual choice, social optimization and the meaning of fun. Less often debated, though, is its moment of origin. By common accord, it “is a comparatively new phenomenon.” Deterding et al. make it just under a decade old; Woodcock and Johnson tie it to the late-developing “economic relations of neoliberal capitalism,” and their signature melding of “affective life” with “processes of commodification.”