“Gamification is Bullshit” is Bullshit

Bogost leads with an attention-grabbing headline that doesn’t say much and proceeds to write an entire article that doesn’t say much. Where I differ from Bogost is that I will actually craft an argument complete with examples to support my title and opening sentences. Let’s start with this:

“Gamification is bullshit. I'm not being flip or glib or provocative. I'm speaking philosophically.”

Bullshit– he knows he’s being both glib and provocative; just because he quotes a philosopher doesn’t change that. (Note: I don’t think being glib and provocative is necessarily bad.) For the next few paragraphs he wanders through a poetic (did he really need to reference aioli and Viagra?) skewering of the marketing industry. He only really offers one sentence in the whole article that actually provides an insight into what exactly is so bad about gamification, when he says that marketers have mistaken “points and levels” for “primary features like interactions with behavioral complexity”. I know he’s writing for a general audience, but it’s hard to take an article about gamification seriously when it really only mentions anything about methods of gamification once. Then there’s the twist ending where he says that if one were to successfully use the logic of play to subvert current corporate practices, the business world would love you, call you a “leader”. I don’t know exactly what he meant by this; maybe he’s hoping for a righteous start-up to commodify gamification the “right” way.

On the other hand, Reality is Broken offers at least a glimpse into how gamification can work (or not) and provokes a conversation where Bogost really just wanted to vent about marketing. In McGonigal’s account, Chore Wars, though she never admits it, illustrates where gamification goes astray, while her game SuperBetter points to a possibility for gamifying whatever we struggle with in our day-to-day lives.

As Bogost hints, if the gamification is to be “not bullshit”, it should borrow more than just the superficial coating of games like points and levels; it should borrow the procedures, the logic of play. How can Chore Wars work if the mechanics (doing your chores) are completely divorced from the rewards (virtual points)? The procedural logic of games has been lost in translation. Its affective benefits, which McGonigal calls “wholehearted participation”, don’t appear in the chores because they’re completely divorced from the game itself. Underneath the gold and points, the chores still have to get done– breaking McGonigal’s subsequent rule that play must be optional. Just because the surface-level mechanics of Chore Wars are optional, the core gameplay (doing chores) is not.

SuperBetter gamifies with procedure rather than narrative. The real-world things that McGonigal was doing don’t seem inherently playful. Reaching out to friends and family for support, making lists of triggers for symptoms, and setting clear goals all seem like obvious steps in a recovery program, but before they were part of a game, she couldn't accomplish them. From her story, it seems like it was actually planning/listing out all of the different “missions” that helped her, not their arbitrary significance to her “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” roleplay– the act of designing the game did as much for her as playing it. Whatever “true” gamification she performed lies in the creation of procedures and plans to help her recover, not the narrative coating she applied to them. Though the steps seem like mundane tasks a therapist might tell one to do, perhaps that does not rob them of their game-ish-ness, but underscores the power of procedural mechanics in altering our behavior. It makes me wonder what other parts of everyday life are similarly game-ish in ways we might overlook, or what further possibilities there are for bringing playful, procedural thinking into the day-to-day.