Gamification… or is that exploitification?

Ian Bogost writes at length about how we – as members of the gaming community – might act against gamification, a marketing gimmick designed to allow agencies to create new billing streams by ticking some boxes, much like setting up their Facebook pages and twitter accounts did a couple of years ago.

For those not abreast of this development, gamification refers to the ways businesses and organisations can employ game-style mechanics to try to increase customer loyalty, engagement with a brand, or simply sell more stuff. Think about airmiles schemes, loyalty cards and the scratch-and-match cards that now seem to come along with your receipt at an increasing number of retail outlets. Gamification advocates would encourage brands to go further, introducing ever more badges and achievements for greater consumption. They all create additional ‘touch points’, in agency lingo – ways a brand might forge additional communications with its customers.

The gaming community is – by and large – appalled by this development. This is not what games are about, we squeal. Not least those people, like Bogost, who’ve spent decades devoted to the cause of ‘serious games’ as a way of transforming businesses and organisations, and as public education tools. Proper, full-scale games can be enormously and positively transformational. Check out Reality is Broken or Persuasive Games for examples.

Importantly, the gamification concept enormously reduces and simplifies what games are and do. Games – at their best – unlock the imagination, make us think faster and better, allow us to develop and practise all kinds of skills, make us dream, make us assess our lives, challenge our intellect, reflexes and assumptions. Giving people points and badges for consuming stuff isn’t remotely the same.

This isn’t obvious to the people who lead organisations and businesses, though. Bogost acknowledges the great rhetorical power of the word gamification. If you add –ification to a word, then it’s about augmenting and adding to its core values, not changing them: cf. magnification, beautification, clarification, purification. So the marketers and executives who never wanted anything to do with something so frivolous as games around their business, products and services can get on board with gamifying them. Heck, that’s just adding an extra layer of value, isn’t it?

Bogost suggests we adopt the term exploitationware to describe this phenomenon, though I am more attracted by the term pointsification coined by Margaret Robertson. Points are the least important part of a game; the bit that’s added to give the appearance of achievement when none is apparent through the gameplay. They’re extraneous and ultimately without meaning.

I’ll leave the last words to him, though, on gamification:

…to the crass marketers and spineless consultants who embrace it, I leave it to you to defend your villainous reign of abuse against customers, employees, and the general public. Thankfully, for those of us concerned about the growing threat of expoitationware, games offer a positive alternative.

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