The Gamification of Games and Inhibited Play

1 Gamification in the Literature

The idea of gamification, as a concept which sparks the imagination of a range of people with power and influence but whose real-world impacts remain contested, is perhaps best introduced by reference to the romantic call-to-action issued by game designer Jane McGonigal:

Why would we want to waste the power of games on escapist entertainment? …What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality? What if we started to live our real lives like games, lead our real businesses and communities like game designers, and think about solving real-world problems like computer and video-game theorists?^[1]

This is the dream of the gamification optimist, who sees in the prominent features of games an opportunity to change the world. And it is easy to find such optimists making enthusiastic pronouncements such as that gamification is a “business disruptor” and that “by 2018, the global gamification market will reach $5.5 billion.”^[2]

As a term “gamification” is relatively new, with the OED’s earliest citation for “gamify” in 2003^[3] and for “gamification” in 2006,^[4] and it has also been subject to growing interest – Google search data shows that from 2008 to 2024 both terms saw a consistent rise in searches.^[5] The idea of making an aspect of life better by making it more game-like has a powerful draw, both for individuals seeking opportunities to avoid drudgery and gain enjoyment and for companies, governments, and other organisations seeking opportunities to improve outcomes and satisfaction.

A sketch of gamification is easy to give based on the optimist’s vision: we take an activity that is typically thought of as work-like, or with aspects that make motivation challenging, and we “make a game of it.” The dream is that we might take a dull activity like filing tax returns and make it fun, so that we want to do it – furthermore, the same outcome (perhaps even a better one) is achieved without the boredom, or stress, or likelihood of premature abandonment.

The range of applications of this idea is already vast in practice^[6] and is in theory even greater. Language-learning is gamified through apps like Duolingo. Work is gamified through “chase the leader” type games used by Amazon and other companies that have followed their lead.^[7] Formal education is gamified through the use of applications like ClassDojo in schools.^[8] Social media is gamified through the use of algorithms to drive engagement by instrumentalising “likes”.^[9] These instances of gamification raise a number of philosophical problems. Thi Nguyen has argued that there is problematic value capture in the gamified environment of social media.^[10] It has been asked whether gamification in work environments should be understood as coercive,^[11] and whether there are political problems associated with gamifying political participation;^[12] the list goes on. In this article, we will be raising another such problem, though some tidying of the landscape is necessary first.

First, it will help to go beyond the intuitive sketch of gamification and consider how gamification has been defined. There are many definitions in the literature, though many serve primarily as indicators of aspiration and fail quite obviously when taken as true definitions. For instance, in a text on gamification in higher education, it is defined as

using games and game elements or mechanics in order to motivate students to become actively involved in the learning process, applying knowledge to current circular learning as a way to solve authentic problems and overcomes challenges, either collaboratively or individually, and, ultimately, increasing competence and self-confidence, improved communication skills, and achieving goals.^[13]

Taken literally this definition would simply preclude any instance of gamification outside the education sector and is so ambitious that it would likely go unfulfilled in any real-life setting. The only way to interpret the authors so as to avoid this is to interpret them as expressing their hopes for gamification rather than genuinely trying to define it.

One more promising account of gamification defines it as “an intentional process of transforming any activity … into one which affords positive experiences, skills and practices similar to those afforded by games.”^[14] One serious concern about this is the lack of clarity represented by “positive” here. It is unclear whether this should be interpreted as value-laden, and therefore meaning something like “enjoyable” or “fulfilling,” or as relatively value-free, and therefore meaning something like part of the intended design, or one of the main things that designers intend one to experience. If value-laden, we have a less extreme version of the previous worry that the definition is skewed toward “good” cases and might rule out by fiat a case of gamification that is dominated by negative experiences. However, this definition captures the idea of transformation as a central feature.

Another straightforward definition is given by Deterding et al.,^[15] who define it as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (10). This rather simple definition might seem equal to the task, but it has its own disadvantages, most obviously that “game design elements” is too wide a category since game design is continuous with other media. Both video games and films typically feature sound designers – this does not mean that all films are gamified! Nevertheless, their definition has been taken up by others often enough to be referred to as a key development^[16] or even as the dominant version,^[17] and one might plausibly claim that we can apply a straightforward fix by being more specific and/or restrictive in specifying the game design elements in question.

For a definition from a philosophical standpoint, we can look to Thi Nguyen, who gives a two-part definition that aims to recognise the gap between the individual features and the transformation of the activity:

Let us call the designed technology which offers points and scores ‘design for gamification.’ And let us use ‘gamification’ to refer to those cases when a player interacts with design for gamification and actually adopts those points and scores as primary motivators during the activity – when the activity actually does become something like a game for them.^[18]

For Nguyen, “design for gamification” furnishes the object-level features, we might look out for – for instance, the assigning of points and scores to activities – but key is the change that these features are angled toward. Nguyen notably does not define design for gamification as consisting in just these design features, but leaves this open, since other features of games could be picked up by gamifiers and used to the same effect. That effect is key to Nguyen’s notion of gamification, which sits at the level of the user – if a user interacts with design for gamification, but is unresponsive to that feature, then the activity is not gamified for them. What is required is that the user’s motivations be altered so that these features like points and scores figure in significant ways. This captures something important about gamification – that gamification aims, through altering motivations, to alter behaviours. An attempt at gamification would clearly be unsuccessful if it made no users act any differently, and applying the label in that situation would be of limited value, if any.

While there are likely other variations on the themes established by the above definitions, we will rest with this brief survey since it is representative of gamification’s treatment in the literature, and as we will see below, it allows the demonstration of an apparent problem with the concept as currently understood.

2 The Very Possibility of a Gamified Game

In the above survey of accounts of gamification, the definitions on offer look as though they might have different extensions – this at the very least means that there is some disagreement to be resolved. Now we will jump into a prima facie strange question: can a game be gamified? At this point, we will think about this primarily in the context of video games.^[19] We will first look at what the three prominent definitions given above would have to say, which will reveal a problem that cuts across them all.

Hamari’s definition of gamification seems to make the notion of a gamified video game either trivial or very close to it. Generally speaking, any game at least aims at affording the positive experiences afforded by games, since at least part of the goal of any game will generally be for gameplay to be rewarding for reasons relevant to its game status. There are intentional exceptions such as “transgressive game design,”^[20] but these appear to exploit their exceptional status to subvert expectations so are dependent on typical game experiences to achieve their aims; there are also unintentional exceptions, since some games are very poor examples of the craft and therefore fail to afford many positive experiences. However, these form at most a very small class of subversive or utterly failed games, and even this is not especially credible – subversive games are unlikely to eschew all positive game experiences, and even the worst game has its fans. On this definition, therefore, the gamification of games is functionally trivial.^[21]

On Deterding et al.’s definition, on the other hand, the notion of a gamified video game is straightforwardly impossible. After all, it requires that elements of game design be used in non-game contexts, but all contexts in a game would appear to be game contexts. This once again requires minor provisos – arguably a very small number of non-game contexts arise in games, as, for instance, when one sets the screen resolution or enters payment details, but these are very minor practical offshoots of the game activity. All aspects of a game to which we attend when engaging in gameplay are clearly game contexts, therefore there can be no application of game design elements to non-game contexts that are relevant to things that are already games. On this definition, therefore, the gamification of games is functionally impossible.

How about Nguyen’s definition? His focus on points and scores does seem to avoid gamification being entirely trivial, since games can lack explicit points or scores. This is quite rare, since even if there is not a prominent scoreboard or counter, the inclusion of goals and measurement of progress toward them is enough for there to be implicit scoring, but examples might be found at the extreme end of the “cosy game” genre, such as Townscaper. However note that points and scores are only indicative forms of gamification for Nguyen, so there are in fact many more features that would have to be absent. Nguyen might also aim to escape triviality by appealing to players’ motivations, since an activity will not be gamified for me while I am not motivated by achieving the points/scores it encourages me to achieve. However for a player to not be motivated by these features is likely to represent significant disengagement from the game, as might be the case if I am using a game simply to keep myself awake. Once again, on this definition, the gamification of video games is functionally trivial.

Thus, on a range of definitions of gamification in circulation, there is no significant sense in which a particular game might be gamified, since such gamification is functionally either trivial or impossible. This may seem intuitive for anyone still moved by the initial sketch, since if we think of gamification as simply being motivated in a game-like way then this is straightforwardly what games are aimed at, whereas if we think of it as essentially involving the transformation of an activity into a game then it looks like no such transformation can take place. However, I think that there are good reasons to hold that games can be nontrivially gamified (indeed, that some actual games are). I will first explain why we should think so, before providing a definition of gamification that accommodates this.

To begin with, the game designer Adrian Hon strongly suggests that the gamification of games is possible, with this even featuring as a chapter title in his book-length treatment of gamification.^[22] He acknowledges the puzzle that this presents:

Why would games need to gamify themselves? The question seems absurd. Generic gamification borrowed concepts like scores, achievements, experience points, and missions from video games in hope of becoming fun itself, but video games are already fun. These systems were originally created by games not to be entertaining in and of themselves, but to recognise players’ progress and help them set goals.^[23]

Hon points out, though, that the video games industry has a simple incentive to exploit gamification: “to make as much money as possible,”^[24] and picks out certain features of games as obvious and problematic examples of gamification: loot box or “gacha” mechanics,^[25] for instance, provide the kind of “compulsion loop” that acts as a hook to maintain or intensify engagement over a longer period than would otherwise be feasible, and this plausibly has the potential to lead to financial exploitation and problem gaming.^[26] However, he also indicates that achievements and certain other game features can be seen in a similar way. Achievements or trophies are a familiar phenomenon to many gamers: a host of conditions, from those quite clearly associated with the game’s central goals (“complete the game on hard mode”, to be found in most games that feature difficulty levels) to those that are highly arbitrary or silly (jumping over a skipping rope 1,000 times in Final Fantasy IX during a mostly irrelevant early mini-game^[27] or exiting the game immediately after the opening scene in horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent). This feature is built in to the gaming platforms of Microsoft’s Xbox consoles and Sony’s Playstation consoles, and is widespread even on PCs thanks to its featuring in the highly popular Steam software client.

It is important at this point to note that achievements and trophies, like other now-ubiquitous elements of game design, were an innovation that emerged at a particular point in video game history. Early video games likely did not have the processing power to spare on their platforms to easily accommodate such a feature, but as that issue gradually receded, it still took several steps to establish the trend that is now so dominant. Many late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century games featured internal mechanisms that were either explicitly presented as or more loosely analogous to collectable achievements, but the currently dominant model was established around 2005 with the release of the Xbox 360, which was followed in 2008 by its competitor, the Playstation 3, adding trophies.^[28] Furthermore as Hon notes,^[29] this trend is not entirely ubiquitous, as Nintendo has by and large resisted (at time of writing) the inclusion of achievements on their consoles.

Another notable aspect of the contingency of this game design feature is that it influences an already existing trend in video games. Prior to the emergence of trophies and achievements, there were numerous locations where informal communities set and recorded challenges relating to gameplay. These might relate to completing games or levels in the fastest possible time (speedrunning) or to setting arbitrary limits on oneself such as being limited to using only one player character or never upgrading equipment. We can see this by perusing the website www.gamefaqs.com, which turns up guides written for a range of challenges with specified rules. For example, one can find a “Final Fantasy VII: no materia walkthrough” which gives tips about how to complete the game in question without ever using one of its key mechanics; this walkthrough was published in 2002, before the advent of the modern achievement.^[30] If the examples we have been examining count as gamification then these ought to count as well, though this is a quite different manifestation of the phenomenon. We will return to this in Section 4.

We have focused here on achievements and trophies because their presence and influence on play is easy to isolate, both conceptually and historically, but importantly I do not intend to imply that these are the only ways that games can be gamified. For reasons that we will return to shortly, an exhaustive list of interventions taken to count as gamification will not be given here, and the discussion of the introduction of achievements demonstrates that an aspect of gamification can be introduced or removed from a game context, and that it can be present to greater or lesser degrees.

How then are we to properly accommodate the fact that gamification does appear to affect video games but only in some cases – in other words that games are neither trivially gamified nor impossible to gamify? The most reasonable step is to attempt to construct a definition of gamification that accommodates these cases. To do so, we ought to recognise the promising aspects of the existing definitions, for instance, that gamification effects a kind of transformation and that it is aimed at changing how someone engages in an activity specifically with respect to their motivations. However, crucial in our definition will be a recognition of the partial nature of the transformation; starting with some hypothetical cases will help us to make this clearer as well as motivating the view separately from the context of the gamification of games.

Idle Manager A hands-off manager of a shop has the habit of monitoring their workers via CCTV and, during a particularly slow week, starts assigning them scores based on things they observe, as though they are characters in a game. However, they eventually start to get bored (or perhaps guilty) of doing this, and they stop doing so, moving onto other tasks without having done anything beyond this self-contained activity, not even having informed the workers of the short-lived scoring that had been going on.^[31]

In this case, we might attempt to locate gamification in two locations – in the workers’ or in the manager’s activities – but we should instead say that the activity is gamified for no one. For the workers, it is more obvious: despite the assignment of points scores, the workers don’t behave any differently and are not motivated differently since they’re not aware of the scores. As for the manager, while their behaviours and motivations change during their new activity, they don’t go about an existing activity differently but rather take part in a new self-contained activity; they are better understood as creating and playing a private game. The aspects of transformation and motivation change are absent for the workers, and transformation is also missing for the manager.

However, another case helps to show why the transformation should only be partial:

Friendly Kickabout I am kicking a ball against a wall idly, with nothing particular in mind; my friend joins me and stands by the wall, proposing that I try to get the ball past them. After some informal negotiations, in short order we’re playing a kind of penalty shoot-out game (we’re likely to end up agreeing to typical rules such as that if my friend catches the ball, I have to swap with them and act as goalkeeper).

Is this gamified kicking-a-ball-against-the-wall? My behaviour has been modified in a game-like way, but I want to say that the clear answer is “No” – I wasn’t playing a game, and now I’m playing a game. The two activities have some superficial similarities, but this shouldn’t make us think there is a connection that goes far beyond the first forming the inspiration to begin the second.

Given that the two cases have shown that we need to capture a partial transformation, we might therefore offer the following account:

Gamification df An activity ϕ is gamified just when ϕ (i) is modified by the assignment of features that are widely recognised as game-like, where these features (ii) modify ϕ ers’ motivations in at least some cases so that they aim at goals which depend on those features, but (iii) maintain ϕ ’s status as the kind of activity it would have been without the modifications.

Let us briefly test this definition against some test cases, both positive and negative.

First, consider the Idle Manager case. The activity of shop-work has been modified by the assignment of game-like features, and the shop-work remains shop-work, but no shop-workers have their motivations altered by the activity at all, let alone in a way that corresponds to the game-like features. This satisfies (i) and (iii) but not (ii) and is a negative test-case success since it is intuitively a clear case of non-gamification.

Second, consider the Friendly Kickabout case. The activity of kicking a ball against a wall has been modified by the assignment of game-like features, and my motivations are altered so that I am now motivated to defeat my friend rather than to simply pass the time, but the activity has changed from a non-game into a game. This satisfies (i) and (ii) but not (iii) – another negative test-case success.

Third, consider a fitness app like Freeletics. This takes the activity of high-intensity interval training, and adds to it game-like features such as a leaderboard and experience points earned by completing set workouts. These features at least sometimes modify HIITers’ motivations so that they perform workouts in order to maintain their position in a leaderboard or to get the feeling of fulfilment that comes from gaining experience. However, the features do not turn the activities from HIIT workouts into something altogether different – it is still appropriate to give them the same basic description. This satisfies (i), (ii), and (iii) and is a positive test-case success, since Freeletics is intuitively a clear instance of gamification.

Fourth, consider a slight modification of the Friendly Kickabout case. Suppose that when my friend arrived, I was playing keepy-uppies (i.e., I was competing against myself to see how long I could keep the ball in the air through only football-legal touches) – otherwise, the same process unfolds. Now I can no longer say that I wasn’t involved in an activity of gameplay before. However, I think this still gets appropriately counted by the definition as not an instance of gamification. Why? Because we are now simply playing a different game. Thus it satisfies (i) and (ii), but not (iii). This fourth case is worth lingering on though, because it brings up a potential challenge for the definition – how are we to determine what counts as continuing the same basic activity and what counts as a change of basic activity?

I think the most reasonable response is to acknowledge that there is vagueness here, but not in a way that is significantly more troubling than the many other contexts in which vagueness arises, and the clear cases should inspire confidence that the distinction is genuine. We can note features that look important in the judgement that we have changed games, such as the fact that the activity is initially 1-player and then 2-player, that its success conditions completely change (notably, the first activity doesn’t even seem to have win conditions), that new props are required for the second activity. Each of these alone might reasonably be judged not to constitute a change of game (think of a second player joining the game of keepy-uppies, the “next goal wins” intervention beloved in the football games of schoolchildren, or playing with jumpers for goalposts because the original goal has collapsed), but the collective weight makes it a safe judgement that a complete change of game has taken place. We can take this further and apply it to change from, e.g. non-game to game activities and vice versa: my being partly motivated by points allocations in my professional life does not turn me into the player of a game, but add to that my trash-talking other employees, my explicitly professing that “none of this matters in the end” and my judging myself to have “won” at a certain point in the day and leaving mid-shift, could change that judgement (with the possible exception of the last one, none of these on its own would be sufficient for the change either).

Finally, let’s consider a version of the motivating case, made as simple as possible for our purposes:

Trophy Remake A developer is remaking a beloved game from the 1990s which involves, let’s say, running and jumping between platforms, avoiding spike traps, etc. However they decide that, as it’s now being hosted on platforms that have the capability, they will feature a wide range of trophies for, e.g., completing certain levels with no deaths, reaching 1,000 double-jumps, completing a certain number of minutes of gameplay without using powerups…the list goes on.

Now we have an activity (play of this game) that has been modified by the addition of new game-like features, where these features sometimes modify game-players’ motivations to include the pursuit and acquisition of trophies, but the activity has not fundamentally changed into a different game. The overall goals and structure of gameplay are recognisably continuous with the original game, but the means of gameplay has changed – I think except on a highly restrictive conception of what counts as a game, this should count as a modified game rather than a new game.^[32] This can be seen to satisfy (i), (ii), and (iii), once more presenting us with a positive test case.

Before moving on, a brief clarification on a minor feature of the definition given above: that the features should be “widely recognised as game-like.” This feature does two things: it makes the list of features that can be used to gamify an activity open-ended, and it places the responsibility for determining membership in that list within the community as a whole. The first is important because a fixed list would be too restrictive: since gamification takes inspiration from games, any innovation in games has the potential to offer new ways to gamify. The second is important because gamification is a cultural phenomenon, and public perception matters for how a design feature is received – if a feature is only seen as game-like by a few individuals, it will not get the necessary uptake to routinely affect motivations.

We could continue to expand on our list of test cases indefinitely, but having demonstrated several successes which are illustrative of the account’s merits, we can now move on to another point which will later equip us with the means to comment critically on the form of gamification whose possibility we have established.

3 Achievement Play, Striving Play, and Beyond

We now have a promising definition of gamification that allows us to accurately describe the gamification of games as neither impossible nor trivial but possible – indeed, as actual. However, this does not yet give insight into the impact of such cases. What are the likely outcomes of gamifying a game, and is it desirable (or at least unobjectionable) for this to become more widespread, or should we be wary of it? These questions invite answers that are too simplistic, but ultimately we want not just to feel satisfied about a technically correct definition but to be able to take an evaluative stance on the gamification of games. To articulate the key issue that will enable such an evaluation, though, we need to take a detour through a careful examination of kinds of play.

This issue has a connection to Nguyen’s treatment of gamification, which is in part driven by his insistence on a distinction between kinds of gameplay. His attempt to account for the distinctive aesthetic value of games relies on their ability to overturn our typical motivational structures, and this is then applied to the effect of gamification on our behaviour.^[33] His achievement play/striving play distinction plays a role in showing how this motivational inversion is possible and is thus a good starting point for exploring kinds of play.

How, then, might we play according to Nguyen? First, I might play a game like StarCraft because I am engaged in an actual, material contest of some sort – there are professional competitions in this game where competitors might be aiming to win prize money. Equally, I might be engaged in a less obviously material contest where money is not at stake, but pride, bragging rights, etc. are. In either case, I am primarily engaged in what Nguyen calls achievement play, which is gameplay in which the attempt to achieve the win conditions is made to gain some benefit that achieving them is expected to bring, whether this is a separate benefit attached by a decision of the playing group or a governing body (such as money, or a medal) or a benefit that is generated by the performance (such as pride in one’s physical or mental prowess). This is fairly standard goal-directed behaviour, albeit mediated by rules – I desire, e.g. money or kudos, and gameplay is a means to achieve my end(s), which explains why I engage in gameplay.

However, this is not the only form of gameplay that can take place. There is also what Nguyen calls striving play,^[34] in which the activity is practised not primarily because the agent wants to achieve the outcome, but because the experience of trying to achieve the outcome is itself rewarding. I might be competing in StarCraft with limited interest in the actual outcome, let’s say because no material reward is at stake and any sense of pride I do achieve means little for my self-confidence, yet I relish the opportunity to take part in an activity that taxes me in distinctive ways, an activity which is impossible without genuinely attempting to win this game. Nguyen points to a number of persuasive examples to establish that this kind of play must be genuine, with a particularly convincing class being the so-called “stupid games” like drinking games or Twister, where the point is clearly not to win since (i) we likely prefer to fail (typically the plan is for drinking-game participants to get drunk, and falling over is the funny part of Twister), and (ii) our ability to play successfully is highly unreliable (drinking games tend to feature a large element of chance, and sometimes the poses required by Twister are utterly unrealistic), yet our ability to engage in the desired activity is contingent on our trying to achieve the goal, since those activities wouldn’t be enjoyable if we just directly tried to do them. Striving play is not limited to these games, though, and helps to explain why there is such variety in the games we choose:

If we were all only achievement players, then we might have a hard time explaining why we would choose the limitations of one game over the limitations of another. Either that choice would be entirely arbitrary or the choice would have to track the development of human excellences that are valuable outside the game. But that is not at all like how so many players talk. Their choices are soaked in talk of interestingness, fun, fascination, beauty, and other experiential qualities of play.^[35]

While Nguyen’s distinction brings out something important about gameplay, and I have no intention of undermining it, I also think there are good reasons to deny that it is exhaustive – that is, to endorse further divisions in gameplay. Nguyen does not himself claim that the distinction is exhaustive of kinds of play (or gameplay) and I know of no reason why the additional distinctions to be made here cannot be seen as an extension of Nguyen’s account. There are independent reasons for recognising these further kinds of play which I will briefly mention in the process, but our main purpose is to set up the conditions for further insight on our overarching topic of the gamification of games.

The first form of play that is not accommodated by Nguyen’s treatment is roleplay: this is intended to broadly reflect our colloquial use of that term, but for more clarity we can say it is to be understood as the form of play in which the activity is practised because the experience of taking on a role is rewarding. To further see what is meant by this, let us first consider a hypothetical player of Grand Theft Auto III.^[36] As the player proceeds, they engage in certain behaviours that look puzzling to a watching friend, who observes that they seem to be repeatedly using the game’s cheaper, worse-performing cars and in fact make a point of destroying sports cars wherever they come across them, even when this requires them to waste their limited ammunition. When their friend asks them what they’re doing, they reply “He’s an avatar of the exploited working classes – he’s not going to play by their rules, and that means leveling the playing field wherever he can.”

Or consider another hypothetical player who is playing Super Smash Bros Ultimate with friends: we will say that the character they’re using in this encounter is Luigi, from the Mario franchise. Another player is using the character Daisy – typically in the Mario games Luigi and Daisy are portrayed as romantically involved. Though the two players are competing against one another as well as the other players, at one point, Daisy is due to get hit by a devastating attack by another player but the player controlling Luigi, yelling “Daisy, no!” intervenes in a foolhardy attempt to intercept the attack. In so doing, they lose a life. When, later, another player tells them that without that foolish action they might have won the overall match, they reply “But at what cost? I couldn’t have lived with myself.”^[37]

I would contend that both of these cases are far from unusual in the context of gameplay, and both present behaviour that is clearly recognisable as play, but which isn’t adequately represented either by achievement play or by striving play. The case against achievement play is straightforward – both players substantially obstruct their own chances of winning, so the behaviour would come across as simple silly from that perspective. One might contend that this behaviour can be accommodated as striving play since they are still able to try to win despite the constraints they’ve set for themselves, but this still seems implausible not least because neither case is easy to square with a genuine attempt to win. The characters’ actions can be viewed as genuinely goal-driven if seen from the character’s perspective, but from this perspective, they do not seem play-like; only from the player’s perspective does the play-like quality emerge, but this play is guided neither by the attempt to win nor by the desire to struggle. The gameplay is guided by the desire to do as the character would – to roleplay.

There is one objection that I anticipate as likely to occur to the reader here – that roleplay is not a genuine form of play, but rather is a form of performance, better understood as akin to acting. My response to this worry is twofold. First, I think that there are some clear differences between roleplay as a form of play and acting performance – while one could engage in a successful acting performance by merely creating the impression of having certain motivations and feeling certain emotions, one does not successfully engage in roleplay by giving others these impressions but by in a qualified sense taking on those motivations and making-believe that one feels those emotions. Roleplay is evidently a very successful way to deliver an acting performance as suggested by the popular fascination with so-called “method acting,” but it is not a strict requirement that the actor make-believe the attitudes that they portray. Second, we might question the assumption that roleplay as acting performance is not playful – there are good reasons to think that many who are doing this are actually in part playing, since acting is not done strictly in aid of artistic performances but is also for many recreational.^[38] My own view is that acting performance without any element of roleplay in my sense is possible but rare, and unlikely to result in a successful performance, but the defence does not hang on this claim, and it would take us too far afield to deal with this in detail, so we can move on having established that roleplay, at least as it takes place in game settings, is a form of play.^[39]

However, we can go further: there is another form of play that escapes Nguyen’s treatment but is also, I think, not captured by roleplay. This form of play does not come with a ready-made moniker, but might be aptly named authorial play. Once again we will introduce this through cases.

Consider a hypothetical player of Civilization VI: this game tasks players with taking charge of a society and moving it from humble Neolithic beginnings, through many stages, toward one of several available game-winning conditions (such as military conquest or scientific dominance). Let’s say they are progressing through the game in the expected manner and have mostly been pursuing the scientific win condition, building up their universities, etc., while engaging in conflict only when compelled to do so. However, at one point, after a disastrous event interferes with their plan – they lose some precious resources to a hostile attack from another nation, and are then struck by a serious natural disaster – they suddenly declare war on every other civilisation at once, embarking on a campaign that is doomed from the start and scuppering their chances. When asked about why they acted as they did, they respond “Things were getting out of control, so I just embraced the chaos.”

Or consider a hypothetical player of an open-world sandbox-type game like Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The player proceeds along the standard storyline as well as completing side-quests, broadly displaying the profile of a character who sees themselves as following a “Robin Hood” archetype, willing to break rules in support of their view of justice (here is another case where the ordinary course of gameplay looks like it has a roleplay element). At one point, they are in a hall full of guards, conversing with an NPC who is due to give them a quest, when all of a sudden they attack that NPC. A huge fight ensues, with many other NPCs attacking them in retribution for their inexplicable act of violence, resulting in the player-character’s death. When asked why they started this foolish fight, they respond “I just wanted to see what would happen.”

These two examples, I contend, are best accounted for as what I will call authorial play, to be understood as the form of play in which the activity is practised because exploring one’s ability to make things happen is rewarding. This form of play might be seen as similar to so-called “free play,” often used in development psychology to denote forms of unstructured play in which children participate,^[40] but at least in this context authorial play is to be understood as the player is exploring their powers (and the limits thereof) as defined by a game’s structure, so the “free” aspect seems to be missing. Within philosophy, this form of play has been under-theorised, though there is at least some resemblance in Miguel Sicart’s understanding of the “carnivalesque” aspect of play, which “takes control of the world and gives it to the players for them to explore, challenge, or subvert.”^[41] The idea certainly comes under discussion elsewhere; I think this is what David Graeber has in mind when he says that play is

potentially terrifying…Because this open-ended creativity is also what allows it to be randomly destructive. Cats play with mice. Pulling the wings off flies is also a form of play. Playful gods are rarely ones any sane person would want to encounter.^[42]

Can we safely say that this form of play isn’t adequately represented by any of the three forms we’ve discussed so far? I think so. Again, the case against achievement play seems straightforward since the players are engaging in activity that is clearly detrimental to their chances of winning. Nor do they appear to be engaged in striving play except in a derivative sense – they may value the acts they undertake in trying in vain to survive an unwinnable war in the first case, or to triumph in an unwinnable fight in the second, but these are importantly different from core cases of striving play not least because the obstacles they are striving to overcome are principally created by themselves and only secondarily by the game rules. Finally, I would see these cases as not accommodated by roleplay because their actions are actually rather difficult to interpret as those of a coherent character. This is especially clear if we consider games that appear to provide a strong steer regarding roleplay but which nevertheless see this sort of play – for instance, a player of Batman: Arkham Asylum has, by the lights of the game’s core fiction, strong encouragement to roleplay the character of Batman, but it would not be unusual to see a player performing a wide range of moves that are flashy, clownish, and otherwise inconsistent with the character’s exhaustively documented canonical status as a serious and efficient fighter. Since none of the three already proposed forms of play can accommodate these cases, and these actions are clearly a form of play, we have a compelling reason to acknowledge authorial play as a separate form of gameplay.

We have now established that there are at least four types of gameplay: achievement play, striving play, roleplay, and authorial play. As previously mentioned, I do not think that Nguyen would have any particular reason to resist these further subdivisions of gameplay, and further to this, I do not intend to claim that these four types are exhaustive. Roleplay and authorial play are in need of further theorising, but recognising these forms of play as far as we have here is enough to achieve an important result: as we will see in the final section, recognising these forms of play allows us to explain why the gamification of games is a cause for concern.

4 From Gamified Games to Inhibited Play

We have already shown how to explicate gamification so that the gamification of games is possible, which vindicates the thought that, for instance, the presence of trophies and achievements in video games is an example of this phenomenon. What impact, though, might we expect this to have on games? This question is especially urgent since as Hon mentions, there are clear industry incentives driving us toward the gamification of games as a default:

The gamification of video games can make them more fun, but more often than not, it introduces unwelcome grind and compulsive behaviour. The games industry posts record revenues every year, but the manipulation continues because it can never have enough money.^[43]

We will use the earlier discussion of kinds of play to approach the question.

To start with the simple impact, adding gamified goals to video games has the potential to encourage new forms of achievement play – for many such goals, it is plausible that they provide opportunities for a player to feel that they have achieved something they could take pride in. Consider a trophy that rewards a flawless run through a platformer game, never losing a life. For any plausible example this would be very hard to do and might be seen as fundamentally a serious test of skill. Especially when gamers can make their trophies visible to others in the community, a feature that’s generally available on the main gaming platforms, this provides new ways to generate kudos.

These interventions also plausibly encourage new forms of striving play. Many players are motivated primarily by being provided with artificial obstacles against which to struggle, and gamification provides the opportunity to create a large number of additional obstacles – as well as trying to achieve the overall goal dictated by the main game and the many intermediary goals that this requires, players may try to collect a complete set of certain items, or scale the highest building in the area, or travel over 500 in-game miles, or…the list goes on.

So far, so unproblematic. There is no obvious gulf between the more central drive to achievement/striving play in the core features of a game, and these additions – they look like elaborations on an existing theme rather than the kind of directional change that might induce worries of losing sight of gameplay’s intended purposes. However, it’s not all upside. The two already covered forms of play are distinguished by being, in most cases, closely tied to the rules set by game designers. Typically, game design teams determine what counts as success in a game, fixing the conditions for what counts as achievement and therefore broadly determining what achievement play will be like, and this in combination with the rest of the game structure will shape what kinds of struggle characterise the players’ experience of gameplay, thus broadly determining what striving play will be like. The same cannot be said for either roleplay or authorial play, for different but related reasons.

Roleplay can to some extent be shaped in a top-down fashion – I can instruct someone to play the role of Batman, or I can even be more specific and instruct them to play the role of an extremely wealthy but tortured genius who tries to walk a line between violent vigilantism and a sense of upstanding fairness. In a video game setting, I am likely to do this less explicitly, by fixing certain events in the plot through cut scenes and/or by controlling some things about the in-game affordances available to the player, but these are still strong top-down guides. However, by its nature, such play requires the player to decide much of what counts as success – if the exact steps were laid out for what counted as successful roleplay, it would cease to be roleplay since the player would be aiming simply to perform the mandated actions rather than to take up the role. Authorial play requires this bottom-up feature to an even greater extent – one cannot explore or test one’s powers by having it directly dictated what one must do, but by experimenting, pushing boundaries, and testing rules. The player can be, and often is, guided by game designers’ interventions (for instance, if I am to see what happens if I try to destroy a building, I need to know that I have available to me certain actions like launching explosives or causing certain things to crash into the building), but the exploratory nature of authorial play dictates that it be at its core a bottom-up, player-directed, form of play.

This helps to reveal what is potentially problematic about the gamification of games. The encouragement of achievement and striving play produced by ever more widespread measurement of player success through points scores, trophies and achievements, leaderboards, and so on, at the same time has the potential to strongly discourage roleplay and authorial play. The more as a player I feel that my play experience is measured and evaluated, the less likely I am to ask questions like “How would this character respond?” or to take exploratory, boundary-testing actions of which I am the originator. Suppose that not only am I given the overall goals for gameplay, I am also provided with incentives to fight enemies in specific ways, to conduct dialogues in specific ways, to move around the open world in specific ways, each of which I am incentivised to do – I will then be pushed toward achievement and striving play and am less likely to engage in roleplay or authorial play.

This is not to say that gameplay always should, or even can, involve all of these play elements. In some cases, we fluidly shift the balance between all of these kinds of play at once, but some games might lack certain elements altogether – most obviously games where the player has either no avatar or the most abstract of avatars provide much less affordance for roleplay, but also games with simple, precise rules such as puzzle games may provide little to no opportunity for authorial play. However, even where the different kinds of play are all available, much gameplay is made possible only by the presence of limitations, and we might call those cases where we place limits on the kinds of gameplay that are sanctioned as play under constraints: we play under constraints where we suspend interest in other forms of play in order to achieve a certain effect.

To see first where play under constraints might be found, consider again speedrunning (though other forms of challenge would do). Players who attempt to speedrun levels, or whole games, place clear limitations on their gameplay, causing it to take on a very different character. Such players have little desire to engage with story-led portions of games, so depending on how the game’s mechanics handle such content, they may do things such as avoid all dialogue, skip through cut-scenes, or choose whatever path results in the least disruption to the run. Nor will there be interest in exploring their power to act and influence the game, except insofar as these might uncover as-yet-unnoticed ways to shave a small amount of time off their run; this might extend even to exploiting glitches that allow certain movements that don’t make sense within the gameworld, like jumping through walls. For the speedrunner, the game takes on some aspects of both a performance, as they may have to complete many rehearsed patterns of action at great speed and under pressure, and a puzzle, as there is the sense that some ideal combination of actions will produce the fastest possible run within the game's parameters. However, the “bottom up,” player-determined nature of speedrunning and the clarity of the difference in goals both contribute to making it unlikely that this instance of play under constraints will lead to inhibited play.^[44]

For another, more informal instance, I might be playing a beat-em-up video game casually with a friend, organically combining various forms of play, until one of us says “Let’s take one round seriously and really go for it – no messing around”; here, a plausible interpretation would be that achievement play temporarily dominates, while the other forms of play recede. Equally the cases we explored earlier of roleplay and authorial play are arguably instances of play under constraints, because they involved firmly putting aside achievement play and striving play. This is no accident: since the aim was to establish that these forms of play are distinctive, the examples were designed to exclude an explanation as a form of achievement or striving play. The majority of cases of gameplay involve a messy, shifting assortment of forms of play, but examples of play under constraints can reveal the diversity in our reasons for playing games.

However, if we find ourselves in a situation where we are systematically incentivised to pursue certain forms of play over others, our access to those other forms is limited, and we may simply be unable to enjoy gameplay in forms other than those that have been endorsed. In such a case, we are subject to inhibited play – play where the constraints no longer function as interesting devices to explore new ways of acting but just as limitations on what we can do. As Nguyen explains when exploring the respects in which the rule-governed nature of games can contribute to our freedom, “an agent can impose restrictions on themselves in the short-term as part of the long-term project of developing more freedom and autonomy,”^[45] for instance when practising yoga, during which “[s]trict, precise, demanding instruction helps to break you out of the trap of your own nature.”^[46] But one gains freedom through restrictions only if those restrictions can be put aside when no longer needed – to extend Nguyen’s example, you don’t gain the benefits of that yoga practice if you get locked in the studio!

While the context of the gamification of games has helped to uncover inhibited play, we might see it in other settings, like a professional athlete who has become so focused on winning that they are unable to take any pleasure in the striving aspect of their sport, and in this case too, we should see inhibited play as something to be avoided. In their case, the ability to engage in pure achievement play is crucial to the attempt to win tournaments and accolades, but even if it is possible to completely lose access to those noninstrumental gameplay motives and continue to excel, there are good reasons to think it undesirable.

It is also important to note at this point that this worry about inhibited play should not be seen as giving a reason to completely reject gamification, or even to completely reject the gamification of games. It is tempting to think that what has been shown here is that gamification relies on an understanding of what games are that is too restrictive and that the problem is that gamification always leads to an excessive focus on achievement and striving play. This conclusion would be similar to Adrian Hon’s conclusions about “generic gamification,” which he contrasts to the more nuanced, story-driven version that occurs in the running game Zombies, Run!.^[47] In this game, players are not driven toward points scores, leaderboards, etc., but are incentivised to advance a narrative: in the terms introduced in this article, this looks like a form of gamification that encourages roleplay. But while this is in fact an exception to the dominant trend, one could imagine a situation where its success led to an explosion of uptake, with users of a vast range of apps then encouraged to follow stories, design player characters for themselves, etc. This possibility (admittedly a distant one because this sort of gamification looks like it is less portable across contexts) would also be problematic, because it would still lead to an impoverished play environment: players would still likely be subject to inhibited play.

What this result should encourage reflection on, though, is the potential goods of “bottom-up” as opposed to “top-down” gamification. Speedrunners and other challenge communities that are generated by playful engagement with a game are liable to generate more ways of playing and an enriched play environment; these are instances of gamification^[48] for which it is harder to envisage a route to inhibited play. Intervention to gamify an activity from a designer’s perspective, on the other hand, is at risk of creating a homogeneous, impoverished play environment; here, it is easy to see how either an individual or a wider community might become subject to inhibited play.

5 Conclusion

We have now reached the end-point of a complex journey: our overarching goal was to make sense of the phenomenon of the gamification of games as a potential threat to what we value about gameplay.

To do this, we first had to reconsider the definition of gamification, to accommodate the intuition that it was possible yet not trivial for a game to be gamified. We found ourselves providing a three-part definition that saw gamification where certain game-like features are added to an activity and these alter participants’ motivations, but do not change it to a different kind of activity altogether.

We then had to think carefully about the different kinds of play that might form part of the overall activity of gameplay in order to understand how gamifying a game might affect this. We found reason to build on Nguyen’s achievement play (playing to get a reward) and striving play (playing to struggle with a challenge) by adding roleplay (playing to take on and navigate a role) and authorial play (playing to explore one’s powers and their limits).

Finally, we were able to say something significant about the impact of the gamification of games. In individual instances, this creates play under constraints, wherein we restrict ourselves to some forms of play to the exclusion of others. Such activity is typically temporary and flexible, but should it become dominant we may find ourselves stuck with inhibited play, where we are compelled to limit ourselves to certain forms of play and thereby become unable to enjoy the full range of ways to engage with games. In this sense, the fear we should take seriously about the gamification of games is that, if taken up as a repeatable technology that can always be exported to more settings, it might make our play less playful.