Rethinking Gamification within a Genealogy of Governmental Discourses

1.1 Gamification at First Look

To briefly define gamification, we can say that it designates the extraction of elements from game activities in order to import them into activities that are external to their sphere (marketing, labor, education, etc.). And so we can see gamification as a project of hybridization of mechanisms that are identified to be consubstantial to games into activities that aren’t games. If we can see through the gamification a hybridization of games and other activities, it has to be distinguished from a simple pervasive extension of games in daily life. Maude Bonnenfant and Thibault Philipette have proposed to distinguish between “gamification” and “ludification.”^[1] In this distinction, “ludification” designates a “sociocultural tendancy” that, indeed, implies gamification as the use of game elements in other activities, but also phenomena that follow a wider movement. For instance, we can consider as part of ludification the “pervasive extension of some games.” Thus, the implantation in video games of what game designers called “return hook,” which designates mechanisms that are specifically designed to make the player re-engaged on a regular basis. Things like daily quests or an amount of “lifes” to solving puzzles that reset every day can be taken as an example of this “pervasive extension of some games.” These phenomena can be understood as a part of ludification but cannot be called gamification because it doesn’t implement game elements in activities external to the game.

So, in the wilder landscape of ludification tendencies, gamification can specifically appear to be funded or at least to have the project of being funded by a specific method. We can say that this specificity lies in the belief that game elements can be identified and extracted from their context to be applied to others. This belief can lead us to think that gamification promotes a vision of games as structures over definitions that would promote a focus on “play,” that is to say, definitions that would make games remain on subjective attitudes of players. Therefore, gamification’s method has in its horizon a mastery of games as structures. This approach of games had been defined in the most concise terms by a formula of Von Neumann taken up by Claude Levi-Strauss: “[Every game consist] in the set of rules that describe it.”^[2] This approach can be and has been opposed to play focus approaches. That is why, for example, the philosopher Mathieu Triclot, who made a call for play studies, highlighted the French philosopher Jacques Henriot, who has, by studying the French verb “jouer” (to play) as a substantive noun, made a focus on the specific subjective attitude on which games rely.^[3] If certain quotes of Henriot can appear to reductionist such as “game is nothing but what player is doing when he is playing,”^[4] it is a solid touchstone to offer a “symmetrical effect” between a play-focus position and approaches that were dominant in game studies^[5] tending towards a different form of reductionism by only focusing on games as devices. The strongest representative work of this other reductionist pass could be the article of Jasper Juul and Staffan Björk, “Zero-Player Games,”^[6] that suggests the possibility of studying games by eliminating the player figure.

On the one hand, as we say it, gamification seems to promote a game-focused approach of game; on the other hand, we cannot say that this focus tends to occult the player figure, as does the radical approach of Juul and Björk. On the contrary, the search for the creation of a subjective player’s attitude is orienting all gamification projects. Indeed, processes of gamification always have an aim of subjective production, such as the production of “the satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning.”^[7] These productions are nothing less than a player’s attitude. But projects of gamification postulate that the player’s attitude comes as a result of game situations. As Emanuelle Savignac underlines in her gamification’s entry of the Dictionary of Game Sciences (2024) “Gamification thus supports a dual promise: to grasp and master the structure of the game, and then to trigger hoped-for events based on it.”^[8] We can add that these “events” hoped by gamification aren’t mechanical events produced by the autonomous operations of a device but imply the attitude of players. That’s why for example Jane McGonigal can expose her project of a global gamification to “fix” reality as a need and search of gamers^[9] themselves for feelings that they know in game practices:

Gamers want to know: Where, in the real world, is that gamer sense of being fully alive, focused, and engaged in every moment? … The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom to make us happy. And so, there is a growing perception in the gaming community: Reality, compared to games, is broken.^[10]

Despite the interest of gamification in a study of games as structure, it’s important to keep in mind the final aim of these processes, which is the attitude of the consumer, student, worker, etc. The goal is to produce a subject who is “engaged in every moment” of its activity.

1.2 Gamification Confronted with “Separatist” Definitions of Game

This interest in the player’s attitude allows some bridges between gamification and some of the classical definitions of game, such as the one we have already quoted from Henriot. But we can also think of the definition of Roger Caillois or Johan Huizinga. These definitions proposed during the twentieth century are now references that are massively quoted to be defended or criticized. In fact, Jane McGonigal, despite the clear mistrust expressed by Huizinga for processes of confusion between seriousness and game^[11] (and so we can think about gamification), continues to refer to this author as “The great twentieth-century Dutch philosopher of human play.”^[12] In fact, these classical definitions of game have put in their core the player’s attitude. As Mathieu Triclot has shown it, these definitions elaborate what we could see as “fun theories.”^[13] In other words, these definitions at first are looking to give sine qua non conditions to locate a ludic attitude (fun). In the words of Triclot, these definitions make the game appear as “instrumented experiences.” Devices of games through which we can access this ludic attitude aren’t totally evacuated, but the experience prevails to define games. For example in the famous Huizinga’s definition of game as “a free action, felt to be fictitious and situated outside of everyday life, yet capable of totally absorbing the player; an action stripped of all material interest and utility; which is accomplished in an expressly circumscribed time and space, and takes place in an organized way according to given rules […],”^[14] the reference to “feelings” of the player shows quite well the importance of a ludic attitude.

But of course, we also have to see the other part of the definition that insists on game separations with “daily life.” This requirement of a separation is also common to Henriot or Caillois and can lead to opposing those definitions of gamification as “separatist.” And indeed some authors have underlined this contradiction such as Tony Fortin and Laurent Trémel who declare in their short essay Mythology of video games (2009): “At a societal level, we are now seeing the implementation of devices that are, in a way, halfway between the “traditional” game as defined by Huizinga and Caillois in particular, and everyday life.”^[15] Yet in reality, we can see that the attitude of a lot of gamification theory doesn’t totally deny this separation aspect of game but redirects its conception to an exclusively, or at least mainly, psychological description to avoid other aspects of the separation in traditional definitions, such as separation of the activity in a particular space or time. This orientation makes sense of the appetite of gamification projects for psychological theory of engagement and explains easily, for example, the success known by the theory of “flow” promoted by the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi since the 1970s. Through this theory, Csikszentmihalyi described a psychological state of enjoyment that occurs at a point of equilibrium between the challenges of an activity and a person’s skill level. If, according to Csikszentmihalyi, this state could potentially occur in any activity, he had also underlined that “Games are obvious flow activities, and play is the flow experience par excellence.”^[16] And indeed, the idea of a challenge-based state of psychological enjoyment seems to fit particularly well with the kind of pleasure that games are intended to produce. In order to introduce his searches to the public, Csikszentmihalyi a utilisé in the example of a game that his dog named Hussar was playing with him and describes how Hussar was managing to induce flow within him. To do so, Hussar was adjusting the speed and the circumference of his circle around Csikszentmihalyi in a game of “escape and pursuit” in order to make the current skills of his master match with the game’s challenge. Within this theory, flow emerges as its psychological subset. In fact, this theory has become so influential in game design theory and game studies that it has become almost unavoidable when it comes to talking about play. To borrow a comparison made by Braxton Soderman in the introduction of his book Against the flow, talking about play and even more so about gamification without talking about flow today is like talking about painting without talking about color. We can do it, and do it well, but we are lacking something crucial.

The flow’s state of mind can be interpreted as the product of the game’s situations. Therefore, the interest of gamification for its study seems logical. In addition, it offers a description of the state of separation of the game activity as exclusively psychological. As it has already been said, the psychological state of flow is challenge-based and is meant to appear “when psychic energy or attention is invested in realistic objectives and when capacities correspond to opportunities for action”^[17] and when this equilibrium is reached within an activity it is intended to create “the absence of an analytical or “external” view of the actor’s conduct: an absence of self-awareness.”^[18] This sort of psychological separation from the “outside,” which is part of the flow definition, has been regularly and clearly aimed as a goal of gamification processes, as the ludic attitude that is wanted to be imported into activities. Moreover, the idea of flow can be seen as an alternative to gamification since these processes are at first trying to create these kinds of psychological states which are not consubstantial to game situations. In addition, it is in fact possible to observe opposed states of mind during game sessions such as boredom.^[19] However, the use made of the idea of flow by gamification projects as an aimed ludic attitude shows us the particular orientation given by these movements to the idea of separation already present in traditional definitions. What the appropriation by gamification’s movements of flow’s theory shows us is the intrinsic tendency of gamification discourses to reorient separation exclusively towards its psychological aspect. It has to be noted that this aspect can already be found in traditional separatist definitions of the twentieth century. It appears exemplary in Roger Caillois’s description of the fictional dimension of game: “[game is] accompanied by a specific awareness of a second reality or frank unreality in relation to everyday life.”^[20] In this quote, it appears in a way particularly clear that it is a reference to the player’s psychology, to his “consciousness,” that is meant to understand the game’s phenomenon. By searching for formal conditions that allow us to name an activity as a game, these definitions are at first searching for formal conditions that permit a ludic state of mind of the subject.

In the end, if gamification can appear at first look distinct from traditional definitions because of a denial of separation features of game, a much closer look shows that this feature is still present in gamification discourses but is totally re-oriented towards a psychological understanding. This psychological understanding of the separate features of the game has led to investment particularly in the notion of engagement. Games appear as paradigmatic activities where the engagement of the subject has particular specifications that make it desirable to reproduce in order to lead people to determined goals.

1.3 Limits of Separation within the Traditional Definition

So, the idea of a psychological state of separation can already appear in traditional definitions as a component that helps to specify an activity as a game. In addition, the emphasis put by authors like Tony Fortin and Laurent Trémel on separation as distinction between traditional definitions of game and approach carry by the ludification tendency, such as gamification, tends to minimize the fact that confusion between games and other activities is already thought by what I have quickly named “separatist” definitions. In fact, for an author like Huizinga, the confusion between game and seriousness can be considered as the very starting point of his essay Homo Ludens. Indeed, for this historian of culture, the different elements of human culture before their autonomization were simply indissociable from the game. Because of this original confusion, a large part of Huizinga’s essay is dedicated to identifying “ludic factors” in several areas of human culture. In these areas of human culture that aren’t game, it is possible, according to Huizinga, to spot “ludic factors.” Let’s take, for example, the field of law, which makes the core of the chapter “Game and jurisdiction.” Laws and institutions exist since individuals do not simply assert their interests directly in everyday life, whereas it is possible to imagine a process that leads to punishment or vengeance of society without a penal code. But societies where a cultural area of jurisdiction exists are characterized by the construction of an autonomous sphere where a ludic factor of competition can be deployed through legal disputes, etc. This is the analysis that allows us to separate “ludic factors” from all human activities. In fact, the combination of seriousness and ludic factors and the exigence of separation in Huizinga’s definition of game can appear as a contradiction. At least this is this tension that Henriot have already underlined in his essay as a strong difficulty that can be opposed to the approach of the Dutch philosopher: “How can we reconcile Huizinga’s metaphysics of generalized play, which is identified with existence itself, with his restrictive definition of game as a type of activity “situated outside everyday life”? … The contradiction probably lies in the fact that we find ourselves at an impasse when we start by extending the concept of play too far.”^[21] However, a close reading of Homo Ludens shows us that in fact, Huzinga has carved out a spiritualist pass to be in a capacity to respond to that kind of criticism.^[22] Indeed, his tour de force consists of putting games as a response to “spiritual needs” that are opposed to material needs. He writes:

But to recognize the game is, like it or not, to recognize the spirit. For whatever its essence is, the game is not matter. Already in the animal world, it transcends the boundaries of physical life. From the point of view of a deterministic conception of a world governed by simple influences of forces, it is in the full sense of the word superabundans, superfluous. Only the breath of spirit that eliminates absolute determinism makes the presence of play possible, conceivable, comprehensible. The existence of play permanently affirms, in the highest sense, the supralogical character of our situation in the cosmos. Animals can play: they are already more than mechanisms.^[23]

From putting game on the side of spirit against a mechanical representation of materiality allows Huzinga not to identify a universality of game, since game doesn’t concern material determinations of culture, but to separate in different cultural activities into ludic factors. Not everything is a game, but every cultural activity is composed with ludic factors intended to satisfy spiritual needs that go beyond material existence. Finally, it seems that in the traditional definition of Huizinga, the clear affirmation of a dualism that separates material and spiritual dimensions of existence is, at last resort, what guarantees the separation as a feature of the game. But for an author like Huizinga who identifies the entry into civilization as the spiritual act of separation between game and seriousness, the path that leads to recombining what has been separated by the spiritual progress of humanity appears as a regression. This regression in Huizinga’s thought can take the name of “puerilism.” This distrust towards modern forms of hybridization between seriousness and game makes it easy to oppose Huizinga to gamification and all sorts of ludicization like it is done by T.Fortin and L.Trémel. But, on the other hand, his foundation of the separation feature of the game on a dualistic stance also allows us to bring this stance closer to gamification’s axioms. Indeed, if the notion of flow encounters such a success among gamification discourses, it is probably because it enables us to disengage the ludic attitude from a global situation and makes it based on a strict and separate psychological causality. The flow experience is indeed not intended to depend so much on external factors than in the way of living various situations. This psychological state is bound to an “autotelic” state of motivation, that is to say that has no link with motivations that are external to the player’s mind.

If we now take a quick look at Caillois’s game theory, we will see that the combination of games and other fields of life is thought of as “corruption” but also that this corruption is thought of as a psychological phenomenon. Indeed, in the chapter “The corruption of game,” corruption is not mainly described as an alteration of formal features of game repair by Caillois’s game definition, namely that game is a free activity, uncertain in its results, unproductive, regulated, and fictitious. For Caillois, the corruption of the game is the fact of a “drift from the four primary pulses”^[24] which preside over games. In other words, it’s the flow of psycho-ludic attitudes out of the area of play that first characterizes its corruption. Without entering into details, for Caillois, these primary impulses are agôn which is linked to the competitive aspect of games, alea linked to the idea of a resignation of willpower in favor of anxious, passive waiting for fate decree, mimicry to their imitative aspect, and ilinx to the search for vertigo. For each of these fundamental pulses, a particular perversion exists. For example, when the agonistic impulse goes outside of the game into “reality,” what remains is only an avidity for success “and triumph justifies all dirty tricks.” The approach of the game by authors like Huizinga or Caillois allows us to consider the game as a phenomenon fundamentally psychological, and its corruption too.

Before the idea of confusion between the game area and other regions of existence, we can see two positions facing each other. The first one, which can be found in gamification’s discourses, is enthusiastic and sees in the game a tool to make a more pleasant organization of human societies. The second one is more negative about this phenomenon and sees it as a corruption of the game in its very principle. For this position, what is at stake is to “save” the game and values carried by it through a clear distinction with things it risks being confused with. Despite this opposition, the confrontation of what we have called “traditional” definitions of game and gamification’s discourses shows us a possible common foundation for the two positions. This foundation can be identified by putting the player’s subjectivity as the core of what game is. From this subjective nature of the game, gamification’s supporters can argue that as long as the player’s psychological attitude is preserved, there is no change in nature. And so there is no reason why work or other activities can’t become play.^[25] In the opposite position, the aim is to show that taking the game out of the particular space dedicated to it does indeed have the effect of corrupting the very nature of the game. However, as a last resort, this corruption can still be analyzed as a corruption of the player’s psychological attitude.

2.1 Historicization as a Response to Psychological Aporias

The confrontation of gamification’s discourses and traditional definitions allowed us to identify a problematic framework based on the idea of the psychological nature of the game (more specifically, spiritual in Huizinga’s case). This psychological search for a ludic attitude and its conditions is meant to make it easier to identify what a game is. That is the significance we can give to Henriot’s quote, “game is nothing but what the player is doing when he is playing.” But, quite surprisingly, despite this focus on play, Henriot has taken distance from a psychological approach to the game. In fact, the chapter of his essay dedicated to “the possibility of objectively determining play criteria” makes a strong criticism of this approach and its assumptions. It puts the emphasis on the fact that the psychologist, for explaining the game, is led to the presupposition that play unquestionably exists as an “objective form of conduct.” In this way, the psychologist can explain the game, identify its function on the basis of immediate evidence, but bypasses the question of the reality of this attitude, which he calls “playing.” And indeed this can be considered as the basis of the critics of gamification that substitute the idea of “flow” with a pure psychological definition of play: if the experience of flow can appear in other activities than play, then games can be considered devices among others that allow the state of flow to occur.^[26] If the idea of an “objective psychology of play” is still the starting point of Henriot’s essay, it leads him to underline the uncertainties of its results. In fact, these doubts are maybe more clearly exposed in the preface of the third edition of his essay. In it Henriot recognizes that “[it] is not certain that we can speak of play in general, as if the thing named had the same nature, the same essence […].”^[27] And so we should not be mistaken if he is referring to the game as a phenomenon of a “mental nature” that is not to say that it took its nature from human psychology. Has he underlined it: if the game is an idea, it is a social and historical idea. In other words, to prevent a reductionist and psychological drift, Henriot unties the idea of game from any “real” being in order to highlight it as a human and cultural construction. In that sense, this preface can be read as a call for a historicization of the game concept that would offer its full place to the problematic fluidity of the term. If the psychological path to identify the essence of the game is uncertain, on the other hand, it is possible to study its history through practices or discourses related to it.

From that perspective, gamification’s discourses shouldn’t be studied to determine if it matches or not to the “essence” of the game. Instead of focusing on what game is, it is possible to interrogate what gamification is doing with this notion and how it makes this discourse singular, and how it is reinscribed in a history of ideas. Indeed, if the opposition of “traditionals” definition can make gamification appear as an absolutely new process, in reality, its proclaimed objective of ludicizing activities in order to make them more pleasant opens a path to its reinscription in a wider history of ideas. By making a few steps in that path, the article of Elisabeth Belmas “The origins of gamification: the case of pre-industrial societies”^[28] makes clear that gamification can be inscribed in a genealogy of ludicization and gamification processes and discourses way before the use of the word. It appears that, in particular in the field of education and learning, the idea of creating the desire to learn within the pupil by bringing learning closer to a game goes back a long way and has been regularly expressed. It is, in fact, quite often considered that the ludicization of education came with the humanist movement during the Renaissance. For example, in its description of the good education that Poncrates is offering to the protagonist Gargantua in his eponymous novel, Rabelais writes: “[A] deck of cards was brought in, not to play with, but to learn a thousand new games and inventions, all stemming from arithmetic. In this way, he acquired a taste for the science of numbers, and every day, after dinner and supper, he spent as much time with it as he usually did with dice or cards.”^[29]

In fact, the history of game uses within education would deserve a complete study that goes far beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless I would like to add the example of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who seems to have understand pretty well the interest of a gamification when he was writing “In all games where [children] are well persuaded that it’s only a game, they suffer without complaining, and even laughing, what they would never otherwise suffer without shedding torrents of tears.”^[30] The example is particularly interesting because here the gamification of education clearly appears as a means not only to increase the pleasure of the pupil but to make him do things that he has reasons not to want to do. In other terms, gamification appears clearly as a means of government. But if the gamification of education can be seen by Rousseau as a good way to govern his pupil, he was forced to admit: “it’s not for every master to know how to prepare this stew.”^[31] Contemporary gamification has set itself the goal of proposing a recipe for this stew, drawing on the scientific knowledge recently built up around games and play.

2.2 The Game and the Government

In her article, Belmas shows that “pre-industrials society have known a process of gamification”^[32] and is able to repair key sectors of this process, such as introduction of games mechanism in education, influence of games in the process of “civilization of manners”^[33] and the increasing interest of mathematicians for games of chance as a tool of thought-rationalization. However, it can appear that by focusing maybe too exclusively on the proclaimed goal of gamification to increase pleasure, the article of Belmas runs the risk of undermining the political importance of these discourses in renewing the governmental point of view on games and the game as a concept. Indeed, as we have already said, the aim of gamification is not about indiscriminately increasing pleasure. It relies on a selection of activities in which game elements should be implemented since gamification is subordinate to the goal of making people more engaged in activities expected of them. In other words, the promotion of games through gamification is a promotion as a tool of good government. We can consider that the problem of gamification is, in the first place, to drive people’s behaviour through the creation of an engagement state in an activity. A game designer’s position is particularly convenient to describe the deployment of governmental strategy. This convenience has, for example, led Nick Dyer-Witherford and Greig de Peuter in their book Games of empire to expose deployment of biopower strategies by describing the management of the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) World of Warcraft.^[34]

The Foucauldian concept of biopower can be understood as a form of power that works against the power of sovereignty in that it distributes power to delimited institutions and opposes the centralization of power in the person of the sovereign. Within this form of power two poles of governmental strategies can be distinguished: a disciplinary pole that focusses on acting on the human being insofar as it is a body (as evidenced by Foucault’s description of the establishment of places of confinement) and a second pole that we can associate with the notion of “biopolitical” which acts on humans as a species by setting up demographic and epidemiological surveys and management, etc. If, as we have seen it, we can find signs of gamification way before the emergence of the word, thinkers like Joost Raessens in his article “The ludification of culture,” and even Huizinga in his time, have linked the pervasive deployment of play in our societies with the proliferation of technological tools. The example taken by Dyer-Witherford and Peuter of an MMORPG’s management makes the game designer’s position appear as a position of government and in the same time underlines how digital structures invites massive operation of measures that allow the deployment of governmental strategy through game situations. Indeed, in that situation, it is intended that the game developer’s role is to use measures in order to offer to players the “game experience” that is intended, to invite players to move around this virtual world in a certain way. In that case, in a way that can increasingly extend the playing time during which players can consume, i.e. fulfill the main objective that a company seeking profitability through an MMORPG can set. In one word, to try to establish a governmentality of players’ actions through the design of game mechanics. At a microlevel, we could see gamification as a series of “nudges”^[35] set in place by referring to a certain definition of game in various situations from a power position in order to influence behaviour. It is true that the notion of gamification shares with the concept of “nudges” the soil of the marketing field. However, gamification isn’t a matter of adding up tactics, since the term has a broader and undoubtedly more radical ambition: to draw from the notion of game the general means to dominate situations. As Dyer-Witherford and Peuter’s example suggests, the set-up of a governmentality within a game can be seen not only as nudges example that influences players’ behaviour, but more radically, the game situation itself can appear as the ideal and paradigmatic condition for the deployment of neoliberal biopower, a thesis to which I will return in the last part of this article. This instability, highlighted by many authors of the gamification concept’s scope,^[36] is also what permits us to study gamification not only as a technical tool but as a profound attempt of governmental thinking to appropriate notions of game and play. Maude Bonenfant and Sebastien Genvo in their article “Une approche située et critique du concept de gamification” (“A situated and critical approach to the concept of gamification”) show that this extension of the notion’s scope has led some scholars to redefine the foundations of the concept in order to allow an approach that goes beyond economy and marketing and consider games and play experiences as essential components of our contemporary societies.

What Dyer-Witherford and Peuter’s example shows us, at least, is that the way that games are contemporarily created and managed has close ties with a certain idea of governmentality. The astonishing aspect of the existence of these links has to be recalled. Indeed, for a long tradition of thought, games were at first an obstacle to the government's deployment. Games were and are still seen in large areas of our societies as sources of disorder and disorganization for daily tasks. In most classrooms, games are largely forbidden because they endanger children’s work and are reserved for recess time, carefully separated. In fact, it is quite current within the story of the idea of game to identify a bifurcation between an Aristotelian tradition which continues in the tradition of moral theology, and a modern thought on games. This bifurcation is taken over by Elisabeth Belmas in her article as she is writing,

At the same time [of an increasing diversification of games], the conceptual status of play has changed. Until then, play had been regarded as a simple form of recreation, as Aristotle’s eutrapelia, invented to “recreate the mind weary of serious things”. … It was from the 15th and 16th centuries onwards that the conceptual status of play was reassessed, first under the influence of the humanists …, then thanks to the writers and philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries … and finally through the work of modern mathematicians. Each saw it as a fruitful activity for the human spirit … Game could now emerge from the eutrapelia state in which it had been confined to become the model, support and tool for other human activities.^[37]

I am largely sharing this historical thesis of a “a paradigm shift” around the game idea that occurs in western modernity in rupture with an aristotelian inspired approach of game. However, it could seem historian that had begun to work on this thesis, such as Elisabeth Belmas or Colas Duflo^[38] have undermined in their studies the consequences of these changes on views on government. We can’t enter here in a long exam of every drift that historically occurred all along the reevaluation of the game concept. However, it is still possible to schematically expose the highlights of this reevaluation.

It is possible to say that the aristotelian-inspired vision of the game is at first founded on the description of its ontological value . This ontology attributed to the game is the ontological statue of an “unreal” thing, a reflection of real activity (that is to say, serious activity). The devaluation of the game on an ethical plan goes hand in hand with a metaphysical structure that puts the game at the bottom of the ladder of beings. From this point of view, to play is equivalent to a disengagement from the seriousness of life and its duty (whether it is the duty of the Greek free man to pursue his ergon, or the duty of the good Christian within the frame of moral theology). And so an apology for the serious activity is opposed to the attitude of the player. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle declares: “And we affirm, at the same time, that serious things are morally superior to those that make us laugh or are accompanied by amusement, and that serious activity is always that of the better part of ourselves, or that of the man of higher morality. Consequently, the activity of that which is better is even superior and more apt to procure happiness.”^[39] Despite all of this, play isn’t devoid of all positive qualities. It responds to a need for rest that human finitude demands, and is therefore bound up with human nature. With this generic conception of the Aristotelian discourse on game in mind, we can see that the conceptual paradigm shift which occurs during a period that goes from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century is conceptually based on a reversal of the approach of the subjectivity in game as an engaged subjectivity “fruitful for the human spirit.” We’ll come back to this. But first, it has to be underlined that such a reversal totally changed the way a government thinks can be related to the problem of the game. Indeed, when a game is seen as a disengagement towards a seriousness considered as ontologically superior, the problem of government towards game will occur in terms of what we can label “recreation thought.” In other words, a thought of the area where a human exhausted by real activity can re-create his forces. Then it goes without saying that to think about recreation is also to think about its limits. Thus, good governance, firstly of the self and secondly of the people for whom the game represents a danger of misguidance, requires the strict delimitation of a game sphere. The free man must therefore respect a certain temperance towards the game. Throughout history, the question of how to delimit game activities in space and time, and for different categories of the population (kids, women, and slaves), has incessantly been at the heart of the problems faced by rulers when confronting game. On the other hand, to think the game from the side of the player’s engagement in it makes the question about the game increasingly shift from the idea of recreation, which seeks to delimit play to the appropriate places and times, to a questioning of the player’s proper involvement in the game. The game is no longer a bad thing per se (in itself), but can be the result of a good commitment. Debates around games of chance and gambling will become particularly a theatre where a new problem can be posed in relation to the game. It can be summed up as follows: under what circumstances can the player’s involvement in the game be made good? The task for political power ( solicited by moralists) is to create the conditions for a “good game” (opposed to a “bad game”) in which the player’s commitment is free and reasoned, but also directed towards reasonable ends.

2.3 Games as Engagement in Classical Contractualist Theory

The conceptual shift that occurred around the game concept within modernity establishes a strong link between the game and the idea of engagement. In fact, we can say that the image of playing has become in certain discourses a key image to represent voluntary engagement. This image is, for example, explicitly mobilized by Thomas Hobbes in his famous Leviathan to describe the engagement of citizens within a state. He writes, “It is in the laws of a Commonwealth, as in the laws of gaming: whatsoever the gamesters all agree on is injustice to none of them.”^[40] From this quote, could we interpret the contractualist Hobbesian theory as a gamification of the (very) serious activity of establishing the State and building the sovereign power? Of course, comparing states’ laws to the game’s rules seems to face several problems. There is a huge difference between the rules of a game and the laws that regulate citizens' actions within a state: the first regulates a space and time outside everyday life, while the second regulates the course of it. However, it is characteristic of contractualist theories that the constitution of civil society is hypothetically based on a contract that logically precedes civil life. The contract in question cannot, therefore, be thought of as taking place in the course of everyday life, since its purpose is precisely to found institutions that can guarantee it. It is probably this aporia that leads some social contract theorists to describe entry into civil society as entry into a game. If we try to answer our anachronistic and strange question to know if Hobbes’s contractualist theory is a gamification of state creation, then, in accordance with the definition of gamification, we need to identify the elements that Hobbes has isolated as game devices to transpose into the “serious” activity of the political constitution of a state. No BLAP^[41] here, it is obvious that what Hobbes wants to extract from his analogy isn’t a mechanism that occurs within the course of the game but the fundamental mechanism that allows one to qualify the engagement in an activity as “play.” Through the image of a game, Hobbes clearly intends to make the idea of a contractualist engagement tangible. The game appears to be an image of the rational engagement made by citizens in the hypothetical moment of the contract. And so the conceptual interest towards game here doesn’t lie in game activity but in the moment that found the activity as a game described as an agreement. In contrast to the idea of a psychological engagement, here the model of engagement is the juridical mode of literal pledging. Citizens enter into a Commonwealth state pledging a part of their liberty and the moment when a player withdraws his stake is nothing less than a declaration of civil war.

The philosophical tools of contractualist theories can be analyzed as offering game theorists a model to think about the engagement of players.^[42] The lawyer who has probably gone furthest in this direction is Jean Barbeyrac, the French translator of Samuel Von Pufendorf, within his Treatise on the game of 1709. In this treatise, the goal of Barbeyrac is to make games, and particularly games of chance, appear innocent in themselves. In it, the author denounces the general maxims of moral theology on gambling, which render themselves incapable of discerning use from abuse by reasoning “as if we were dealing with Angels, and not with Men,” and comes to “despise[er], or [neglect] the laws which natural light alone discovers for us.”^[43] Here, the reference to “natural light” in assessing the legality of games may come as a surprise when compared with the discourse on games in previous centuries. Indeed, games were generally considered to be the result of human passions. As a necessary evil that had to be regulated because of the disengagement into which it plunged subjects with regard to their moral and religious duties, their duties to their family and to society. The call to natural light, therefore, aims to rationalize an activity that in many texts appears to be on the margins of rational activities. This rationalization involves rationalizing not the activity itself, but the player’s involvement in the game. But it should not be thought that this establishment of contracts, rules, etc., is aimed at a defense of play that would seek to reduce legal prohibitions. Despite the fact that Barbeyrac makes games of chance appear as innocent as games of skills (in which chance always plays a role, however slight it is), in his preface, he is also calling for “those who have in their hands more effective means of stopping the course of bad fashions will think of employing them.”^[44] While the game is innocent in itself, it can nonetheless be turned in vicious ways, and efforts must be made to divert its subjects as far as possible from abuses. Barbeyrac worries that “the abuse [of games] is spreading to all ages and all conditions: it is increasing day by day.”^[45] No gamification project here, far from proposing to educate through play, as it is already common in humanist literature, Barbeyrac proposes to discourage young people from playing through education. For Barbeyrac, reason is in a position to evaluate the moral value of an action and determine the appropriate conduct, making it possible to clearly distinguish the abuse of play from its rational use. The player’s engagement in a game can’t be wrong in itself, even on the basis of pure chance. If that were the case, Barbeyrac underlines that the commitment of insurance for a merchant ship (which you never know will arrive safely at its destination) should be condemned! If Jean Barbeyrac’s treatise cannot be approached as a precursor to gamification’s discourse, it nevertheless offers us an important work of reconceptualization of the game through the form of a contract. This contractualist theory then sets out the conditions required for a game contract to be valid, and for the activity to be considered as such. These conditions ensure “consent,” that is to say, the voluntary commitment of each player. Thus, to be valid, the game agreement must be mutually beneficial, based on mutual freedom, equality, and fidelity in the performance. It’s striking that here we find some of the same criteria that Caillois and Huizinga would use to define the formal qualities of a game. We find the same preoccupation with the player’s freedom to validate his commitment to the ludic sphere. The equality clause, for its part, corresponds to the uncertain dimension of the game that Caillois emphasizes: “the course [of the game] cannot be determined by the result acquired beforehand, a certain latitude in the need to invent being necessarily left to the player’s initiative.”^[46] Nevertheless, in Barbeyrac’s case, this uncertainty is also guaranteed by the consideration given to the equality of the players’ conditions, an offside game reference. Thus, it is impossible for an adult to play properly with a child: “A child has neither enough enlightenment to know what he is doing and to foresee to a fair extent the consequences of such an engagement, nor enough conduct to spare his blows.”^[47]

We can see, then, that the image of contractual commitment gives rise to notions of freedoms and uncertainties that can be linked to the formal characterization of play found in what we called “traditional definitions” of play in our first part. Yet, contact with the twentieth century’s definitions makes the idea of engagement in play become de-institutionalized. The reference to others at the moment of engagement becomes tacit. Commitment becomes, above all, an individual characterization of the player’s attitude. Indeed, in Roger Caillois’s Games and men, engagement is never presented as a party-to-party agreement, but as a mental attitude that each player will adopt individually. By involving a relationship with others, the game is conceptualized on a collective basis. For Barbeyrac, this collective feature of the game takes the form of the necessary presence of two parties to establish the contract. The theoretical creation of this pre-game moment, which is in fact its foundation, enables us to theorize engagement in play in a more positive way than a simple disengagement from everyday life. Although play as a time of rest appears now not quite equivalent to sleep. No contractualist theorist has yet theorized sleep as the result of a contract. It’s a natural activity that needs no convention to establish itself. Of course, we could also observe that the way we sleep depends on a certain number of social conventions: the hours of sleep we allow ourselves depend on our social obligations, the establishment of public holidays, and so on. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine a contract that would guarantee the status of sleep, since its necessity makes it impossible to construct or reconstruct in any hypothetical, artificial way. The analogy found in many texts comparing sleep as a rest for the body to play as a rest for the mind finds its limits here. Unlike sleep, play, conceived as a contractual engagement, needs an artificial foundation to acquire its status.

3.1 Gamification within the Foucauldian Problem of Governmentality

If we consider gamification as discourses which arise from their own genealogy, the first node that would be the most convenient for switching from branch to branch is maybe not the nature of its proclaimed object: the game, but how, through which conceptual operations, different discourses are trying to seize the notion. From this point of view, there is no doubt that the government’s discourses have made their moves to do it. In fact, if as we have seen, the strong Aristotelian influence in western philosophy had made the game appear for a long time the game as a threat for the government to manage and so the modern bifurcation searching for a good engagement within the game can be read to the attempt to transform it into a tool of a good government. This bifurcation seems to take place, or at least accelerate at a moment that the Foucauldian analysis identifies around the sixteenth century while the term “government” had for its main meaning “to get people to take a road,” to move forward or even to move forward oneself. During this period, the term “to govern” took on the strictly political meaning we know today, thanks to the development of what Foucault calls the “arts of governing.”^[48] In his lesson at the collège de France Safety, Territory, Population, he shows that these arts of governing are opposed to a certain type of exercise of power centralized in the person of the Prince. Therefore, the genealogical problem of governmentality is to analyze by what means governmental rationality is inscribed and imposed in the techniques and discourses of government. First, Foucault points out that the seventeenth-century update of the social contract will serve as a “theoretical matrix from which to attempt to reach the general principles of an art of governing.” This model presents the construction of politics as the construction of peace. One of the images of good government to emerge was that of the bumblebee, capable of governing without a sting.^[49] The contractualist approach of the game that we had commented on through the example of the attempt of Jean Barbeyrac to define the game as a contract can be replaced by this historical tendency. But drawing on the thread of a governmental genealogy not only enables us to identify the pre-industrial premises of contemporary gamification discourse but also shows conceptual operations that they are carrying out and enables us to understand problems that these operations are intended to answer.

We show, for example, that psychological approaches to the game are founded on a notion of engagement that is elaborated in a different way than this same notion could be understood by the contractualist approach to the game. Moreover, we can consider this psychological point of view that, in the words of Csikszentmihalyi, separates the player from “analytical or ‘external’ view of his conduct,” from his “self-awareness” is quite opposed to the juridical point of view where a rational assessment of the stake is expected from the player. These conceptual operations have consequences in the way the exercise of government is thought. Indeed, if a thinker as Thomas Hobbes advances the game image to illustrate what a free engagement into a contractualist process, how can one understand this freedom from an idea of engagement that deprives the player of “self-awareness”? We can already see that the answer of contemporary discourses of gamification to the question of the player’s adherence to the rule has to be constructed on a different model than the model of a contractualist adherence.

3.2 Gamification and the Neoliberal Conception of the Rule

When a link is made between gamification and government, gamification is regularly presented as a realization of a “neoliberal program.” What is legitimately pointed out is the scoring models that tend to extend the quantification of performance, skills, etc., of individuals. These models, inspired by games and particularly vidéo games, are supposed to constitute a subject entrepreneur of himself that is searching to valorize his “competence capital.” Within these analyses, the lesson of Michel Foucault The birth of bipolitics is often mobilized as a reference. A logical mobilization, since in this course, Foucault is describing “the multiplication of the ‘corporate’ form within the social body,” its constitution as an “informing power of society” as “the stake of neoliberal politics.”^[50] But to fully understand the link between this “neoliberal program” of corporate demultiplication and gamification discourses, it is important to underline that this project involves a particular understanding of the rule enunciated by the State.^[51] Indeed, in his lesson, Foucault presented the neoliberal state as a “provider of game rules.”^[52] A quick reading of the way this idea is stated in Foucault’s lecture could pose it as equivalent to Hobbes’s analogy, already quoted, according to which: “It is in the laws of a Commonwealth, as in the laws of gaming: whatsoever the gamesters all agree on is injustice to none of them.” Yet the use of the “game rule” concept is quite different because it is an answer to different governmental problems. Indeed, within Hobbesian philosophy, the rules of the state are meant to limit the freedom of citizens. Within this philosophy, “freedom” is understood as a freedom of movement and so rules are made to limit citizens’ movements that are possible. As we have underlined it through the example of Jean Barbeyrac, the contractualist approach of the game is more focused on the freedom before the game as a condition of a reasonable engagement than on the freedom within a game. The contractualist ludic analogy is meant to give an answer to the problem of government foundation, but not to a problem of regulation over time, what really matters in this connection is the moment of “agreement” for the players or citizens. On the contrary, we can say that the understanding of the effect of a game rule for a neoliberal doctrine is much closer to a creation of what the philosopher Cola Duflo has called a “legaliberty” than a pure limitation of movement.

In his essay, Playing and philosophizing, Cola Duflos defends that it is possible to distinguish a specificity of ludic legality. This specificity is found in the entire analysis of the game proposed by Duflo and is concisely stated as follows: “The game is the invention of freedom through legality.” The definition of the game’s rules folded into this statement can appear as opposed to the idea of the Hobbesian civil law. The legality is here not as a limit for freedom but as an invention of freedom. But what does it mean? In this analysis, it is still possible to understand “freedom” in the same way as the Hobbesian freedom, that is to say, as a freedom of movement. The thing will appear obvious as soon as we take an example: We can say that before the rule of the chess game, nobody had the freedom to do a castling move. This particular movement that a player can do within the legality of chess didn’t exist before that legality. It was invented by it. On the other hand, while there is no rule that forbids entering a house to take what you want, this movement is totally thoughtable. The rule called “law” that forbids theft just gives this movement the status of an offence. The specificity of the game’s rule analysis by Duflo enables us to distinguish games from other rule-based activities. And, as we will see, it also enables us to understand the difference between the Hobbesian recourse to the image of a game and what it is to think economic rules provided by a neoliberal state as “game’s rules.”

Indeed, even if Foucault in his lesson explicitly justifies his comparison to games by referring to the observation of “ruled activity,” his description of the neoliberal state behavior towards legislation brings it to the understanding of the rule as an invention of “legaliberty.” Ultimately, the only rule properly understood in its restrictive sense in this legislative exercise is the “rule of law,” which must formalize not only the action of individuals, but also that of the State. Otherwise, the government has to create an “economic game,” a framework within which each individual can make a certain number of moves defined by the strategic field of the economy. Just as the rules of chess must create the freedom to castle, here the laws must create for each individual the freedoms of economic movements associated with the capitalist market: freedom to invest, acquire, sell, lay off, and employ, which would not exist as such without “fixed rules” guaranteed by the State. Indeed, if the state were able to intervene to modify the economic rules set, depending on a particular objective (the end of unemployment, poverty, etc.), then this could rightly be seen as an infringement of the freedom created by the fixed economic framework of the market. So, just as in a game, the outcome of economic processes must remain uncertain: “It’s a set of rules that determines how everyone should play a game, the outcome of which ultimately nobody knows.”^[53] Of course, we can’t ignore the fact that this is a description of neoliberal theory. Neoliberalism is therefore considered from what David Harvey, in his Brief History of Neoliberalism, calls its “utopian” angle, the way in which the theory envisages a reorganization of international capital. But it is possible to oppose neoliberalism as a “policy designed to re-establish the conditions of capital accumulation and restore the power of economic elites.”^[54] If, as David Harvey argues, it is indeed the second objective that has dominated the neoliberalization processes observed, then of course the outcome of the economic game seems far less uncertain than the theory promises. The fact remains that “the theoretical utopianism of the neoliberal project has [at least] functioned as a system for justifying and legitimizing everything necessary to achieve [the political objective].”^[55] This conception of the function of the rule of the game shows us that the outcome of government by the game, when it is understood as an individual psychological engagement, is not so much an “absence of self-consciousness” as a consciousness that “makes the rule the form of its action.”^[56]

This is undoubtedly the meaning of the strange formulas that appear throughout Foucault’s course, such as “individuals, or let’s say, if you like, companies.” Since the enterprise appears as the specific player in capitalism rehabilitated by the neoliberal path, it’s easy to understand why Foucault described in the lesson of February 14, 1979 “the multiplication of the ‘enterprise’ form within the social body,” its constitution as “the informing power of society” as “the stake of neoliberal politics.” Here, the term “enterprise” is not to be understood only in the classical sense of an organization producing commercial goods or services. The company is used to describe the subjective configuration made possible by its model. Much more than a simple description of a formal institution called a company, it’s a way of designating the “anima of the company,” in other words, the subjective setting in motion (animation) demanded by an individual company. It’s a question of conceiving the enterprise as the form of subjectivity that produces a perception appropriate to a particular strategic field: the economy. Neoliberal thinking’s assumption of the notion of the “rule of the game” no longer responds, as in Hobbes’ case, to a problem of the foundation of government, but to what Foucault might properly call a problem of “governmentality,” i.e. a problem of the direction of conduct. The understanding of game carries by game gamification’s discourses inscribes their reflection in this global governmental problem of the good direction of conduct through the creation of adapted subjectivity.