Bogost Response

While I appreciated Bogost's article on corporate attempts to use games and the nature of the word "gamification," I feel like the article is missing a few key points on the matter. For one, Bogost doesn't seem to go too deep into what gameification actually is beyond saying that it is "marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames..." I do agree with Bogost on this but he doesn't seem to go into how corporations use the buzz word and what damage it actually does to games. He goes on to talk about how gamification is a word thrown around by analysts and corporate executives but there isn't much of an explanation of the damage caused by this. My initial impression of this article is that corporate executives will bullshit their way through anything and while this is certainly true I don't understand why the corporate games industry would be anything different. Bogost seems to come to some sort of conclusion when he says that gamification is just a method for corporations to make extra profit on specific trends before moving on to the next but again, there doesn't seem to be any criticism unique to the video game industry. I think that Bogost's article would be stronger if he included examples of corporate bullshit from the time, however, some of the examples we often speak about didn't begin to occur until later in the decade. Even so there were still many good examples to draw on at the time, the Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed franchises adopting a yearly release schedule, the first few signs of mandatory dlcs, and whatever Duke Nukem Forever was... I agree with Bogost on most points in his article but I feel like a lot of what he says can be easily taken for granted in the year 2018.