Gamification Is Exploitation
The trend of gamification — applying elements of game play to other areas of life — is the apex of the neoliberal fantasy, rendering both work and our leisure time outside of it into a series of games that we supposedly enjoy playing for their own sake.
Gamification is interested far less in affirming our ludic capacities than it is in exploiting the habit-forming and addictive mechanisms of our minds.(Gabby Jones / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
One of neoliberalism’s promises was that it could create a world of creative and fulfilling work, where workers were no longer extensions of factory machinery as they had been under Taylorism. Workers were imagined as artists, and these benefits would no doubt trickle down into everyone’s personal lives as well. The trend of gamification might just be the apex of the neoliberal fantasy rendering work — and everything else — into a series of games that we supposedly enjoy playing for their own sake.
But gamification is a hollow scheme — offered up by managers, behavioral economists, industrial psychologists, and consultants, none of whom have our best interests in mind — that distracts us from the drudgery of work and endless self-improvement while constraining the human capacities it pretends to develop.
The Gamification of Work
When defining gamification, most academic papers use the same definition: the use of game design features in nongame contexts. But what does this actually look like when put into practice? Everywhere it has been implemented, gamification is more or less the same: a constellation of avatars, usernames, badges, incremental rewards, progress bars, and leaderboards where people are ranked against their peers. Often included is a degree of interactivity. People can progress by pushing buttons, moving levers, connecting dots, pulling up to refresh, or any other fine motor movements suitable for touch screens. Not all these features have to be in place for gamification to make itself known, but they often come together.
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