Gamification: Playing at work and vice versa
Scoring is a concept well known to gamers. This number, which we want to increase, is as old as video games themselves. As far back as the Magnavox Odyssey, arguably the first games console, this number appeared at the top of the screen. Anyone who has ever played on an arcade machine will remember the famous highscores that scroll across the screen as the machine waits for its coin. This table of the best players is actually older than the JV, as it already existed on pinball machines, for example. Obviously, this performance indicator is the perfect symbol of success that makes you want to give your all for first place, right at the top of the list. The aim is clear: to encourage players to restart a game, put back a coin and master their technique even more. Nothing new under the sun, you might say. In these few lines, there are two important concepts: ‘performance’ and ‘technique’. These are terms that are not very common in the vocabulary of players when they try to describe their games. On the other hand, they are regularly used in the lexicon of the workplace to assess the value of an employee. This brings me to my topic. Gaming has been spilling over into the world of work for some years now. Group activities are commonplace during the recruitment process at certain trendy firms. Training courses need to be fun to capture attention. This is what we call gamification, presented as an innovative, modern method that promotes teamwork and creativity. As an occasional trainer and gamer, I wondered about the origin of this desire to transpose (video) games into the world of work. Looking at some of the thoughts of sociologists changed my mind. Isn’t the world of work invading my video game? What role does the score play in these two not-so-distant worlds?
Gamification in the workplace before the game itself
First discovery: gamification is far from being a feature of the 21st century. It has been used since the dawn of humanity to transmit skills and confirm their acquisition. What could be better than learning to hunt via a role-playing game? In ancient Greece, politics and philosophy were associated with the word skholè, a root that later gave rise to ‘school’, which evoked leisure and free time. We leap forward to medieval times with the arrival of bards and other singers who, through songs and tales, taught historical or religious facts to those who let themselves be carried along by the rhythm. Illuminated manuscripts, reserved for those who knew how to read, captured the attention and clarified the message with the help of these illustrations, which are still admired centuries later. The idea was taken to the next level in the 1800s with the appearance of spelling and mathematics competitions to “motivate” pupils with tempting prizes. In this way, the competition of knowledge was officially established. The badge system, well known to the scouts, was introduced in 1907, and was probably the first reward system not linked to a game. In 1912, Cracker Jack, an American cereal brand, introduced toys in its packs, turning consumption into a game of chance. Eight years later, psychology professor Sidney Pressey invented the teaching machine. An automated device, perfected by B.F. Skinner (a psychologist), set up multiple-choice questionnaires that sent a score back to the student. This score either validates the acquisition of knowledge or not. In 1973, A. Coonradt published The Game Of Work, a book which highlighted the decline in productivity in the United States and proposed a solution based on play and pleasure at work. MUD1 (1978), an acronym for Multi-Users Dungeon, a text-based video game, is the forerunner of games that can be described as social. It laid the foundations for future MMORPGs and serious games.
The 1980s saw the emergence of a whole range of loyalty programmes in which consumers were rewarded for their consumption. The middle of the same decade saw the explosion of video games with the Nintendo NES and other consoles. In 1996, Richard Bartle, who had created MUD1, published Who Plays MUD1, which classified gamers according to their behaviour around his video game creation. The foundations of the various modern gamification strategies were thus laid and a plethora of theories can be found. The term “Gamification” comes from Nick Peeling, 2002, who set up serious games for the United States Army. Once the breach had been opened, all companies tried to jump in. Some to market gamification solutions, others to buy them and try to boost employees to get the most out of them by hiding the work behind playful rules, but also to classify people according to their performance in these pseudo-games. The growth curve of this sector has evolved exponentially to reach an estimated market value of 5.5 billion dollars in 2016.
If we were to sum up, we could say that the notion of gaming for non-gaming tasks is not new. Whether it’s learning, consuming or working, tedious tasks have been made more attractive through gameplay mechanics. While this can be beneficial, as with any tool, there is a risk of misuse which, in this case, can mask harmful intentions.
Work in video games and vice versa.
As we have seen, gamification has its roots well before video games, which were even a tool in the service of gamification. We’re not going to go into all the mechanics that could be linked to retention, as I’ve already dealt with this aspect through Monster Hunter Wilds (here), but rather on how gamification impacts our video games. By this I mean how a game designer can bring a playful aspect to repetitive or even boring tasks. Let’s face it, every gamer experiences moments of ‘no fun’, especially in content-rich titles. An infiltration phase, yet another fight, a dialogue, so many gameplay phases that provide little pleasure, but that we do anyway. As if video games weren’t just pure entertainment, as if we’d injected a bit of work into the gameplay. That’s the reasoning behind this paper. What if gamification, which is presented to us as the inclusion of games in the workplace, were a double-edged sword trying to make players work?
The most obvious example of a non-gambling activity being carried out through a video game is undoubtedly Pokemon Go. The game from Niantic (a former subsidiary of Google) released in France on 21 July 2016 has managed to combine capturing Nintendo’s little creatures with walking, exploring our urban centres. As a reminder, the screen on your smartphone takes the map and your location, to which it adds capture locations with creatures of varying rarity and Pokéstop, supply points for equipment (the latter are also a great way of attracting potential customers to specific locations). It’s up to you to move around and get what you want. This idea was so effective that certain zones had to be defined as white, with no content associated with the game, to avoid an influx of people into places that weren’t suitable, such as hospitals. This phenomenon took on a scale that would have been difficult to anticipate, at least for the uninitiated, to the point where non-gamers started hunting pikachu while making the headlines on TV. Where’s the tedious task in that, you may ask. It’s worth remembering that one of the first updates deployed in the game was a speed limit because people were using their cars while playing. We can see two reasons for this, the first being the obvious one of getting round the need to walk and thus navigate from point of interest to place of capture effortlessly. The second is to optimise performance. The game offers rewards according to the distance covered. But speed is also the key to completing the famous Pokédex, in other words capturing all the Pokémon available. Add to that the possibility of battling other players, on the fly or in tournaments, and you find yourself performing non-game actions with a ranking purpose under the guise of entertainment.Not convinced? Let’s take it up a gear. I recently set myself the goal of doing an overview of MMORPGs, starting with World of Warcraft (WoW). It’s clear that work is everywhere in Blizzard’s moneymaker. Beyond the classic quest system of online games, killing 15 rabbits to obtain 12 copper coins and a wooden shield, there is a whole laborious aspect with an entertaining purpose. To put things into context, and for those who have never played an MMORPG, the principle of this type of game is to progress your character to the maximum level, which gives you access to the high-level content or endgame. At this point, the aim is to take part in dungeons or raids, depending on the number of participants, to defeat bosses who can give you items, to improve your avatar’s characteristics so that you can take part in more difficult raids, with better loots, etc. To illustrate with WoW, at the time of writing the maximum level is set at 80. Once this has been reached, you need to improve your ilevel, or equipment level, to reach the score required to be accepted into a mythical raid, the most difficult in the game. This type of raid is available in twelve increasingly difficult levels. And with a high level of challenge comes preparation. To get the most out of their armour, players need to equip it with gems, enchantments and other enhancements, as well as a whole range of potions. This is where the notion of economy comes into the game. To show your credentials to the elite content of an MMORPG, you need to practise one or more professions, such as blacksmithing, alchemy and enchanting. Once again, there are two consequences. Firstly, to make the most interesting items you need to improve your skills, but you also need to have the necessary resources, either at the cost of many hours of harvesting, or for hard cash. Of course, some resources come from other professions. Secondly, the number of professions is limited, so it’s impossible to be autonomous. That’s where the markets and auction houses come in, where players auction off their finds and creations. It is also possible to pay for services such as enchantment. But to do that, you need money – lots of it. So players find themselves speculating and doing daily quests that can be repeated ad infinitum once a day. To sum up, in order to get the satisfaction of fighting the game’s most difficult bosses, without necessarily defeating them, players are forced to find an effective method of producing wealth in order to increase their score, the WoW ilevel. This is exactly what I call the double-edged sword of gamification with the inclusion of a scoring system
Speaking of score, what form does it take in video games? As we saw in the introduction, it’s a concept that’s been around since the early days. But today, titles that display a simple number at the top of the screen are rare. What we see more is the awarding of a grade linked to a specific action. Whether it’s the end of a fight in Devil May Cry or the creation of an item in the latest Fantasy Life, the player’s ability to carry out the task entrusted to them is assessed and is the condition for the quality of the reward. This will push the player to improve themselves and their character, or to find better tools to improve their score and thus be better rewarded, enabling them to improve again. The aim is to get a better score to increase personal satisfaction, but what have we done in the meantime? In Devil May Cry, the player reproduces a task in a loop, from a fight to the game itself. In Fantasy Life, they produce objects that are useless to them, but which they can fill a market with and generate money. The end result is always the same: to enhance our enjoyment of the game, we end up working.
The last type of game is simulations. I feel compelled to mention them, even if the parallel is quite clear. From Stardew Valley to Satisfactory, via SimCity, Powerwash and Trading Card Shop Simulator (choose the profession you like), these games make us play at work. With no real goal other than to become increasingly efficient and multiply our wealth. It’s become fun to do a virtual job that’s barely concealed behind a few game design rules. Players enjoy doing tasks that they would be reluctant to do in real life, all in the name of that good old score. The question is how this score can exist outside our virtual worlds and be implanted in the world of work to encourage everyone to do more with a smile on their face (or not).
Best employee of the month
As we have seen, the score is above all a ranking system, both directly in the game and between individuals. We’ve also seen that this ranking system can be used in two ways: it can be used to rank people in a silly and nasty way, but it can also be used as a threshold to reach in order to gain access to certain things. This is exactly what we find in our school system with the years to be validated, diplomas and competitions, especially in higher education. As well as an evaluation system, it’s a gradation of citizens. Why does a 9 guarantee that an individual will perform less well than an 11? In other words, what justifies the fact that one day ‘without’ can have a lifelong impact? And what if this problem had been insidiously extended to the workplace, and even to society as a whole? That’s the real question I’m asking myself.
Since the arrival of the industrial age, society has portrayed good and bad workers. What determines status is production capacity. If we dig deeper, we are closer to the hunter of strangers. There really is no objective criterion for assessing the quality of a job without reference to its context. The resources available, the management, the atmosphere, rest periods, personal stability and mental health are all notions that employers rarely take into account when assessing their employees. Yet they are capable of naming the best employee of the month, the best salesperson. I’m not sure that relying solely on the number of cars sold will give a good idea of the professional’s investment. The ‘human’ component is essential. And by ‘human’ I mean anything that can have an impact on a professional activity: a disability, a family situation, etc.
And what about the game? There’s an important distinction to be made between games and gamification. The difference between these two concepts is freedom. It is possible to introduce free play into a company without necessarily getting anything out of it. Just give employees the opportunity, over a given period of time, to play on their own or in a group. The results are undeniable in terms of mood at work, and therefore motivation. The only condition is that this recreational activity should not be a vector for integration into the company. Gamification, on the other hand, is linked to an obligation to play and achieve a result. This often leads to an opposite reaction, a feeling of manipulation behind crude game rules with the non-negotiable aim of improving the individual or the group. The game seems inauthentic and false. As I said earlier, gamification is also used in the recruitment process to assess the skills of applicants, and even to identify profiles for promotion to management positions. The results are then used to generate a ranking, thus creating competition, but also to stigmatise those who do not want to take part. In this context, we are a long way from the benevolent tool that is being sold as revolutionary, and which instead reveals itself as masked intentions, rarely made explicit to those primarily concerned. We’re always coming back to the same point: scoring and the ranking that goes with it means that the benefits of the game disappear.How can we talk about scoring without mentioning the famous episode of the futuristic series Black Mirror? The first episode of season 3, “Nosedive”, follows a woman living in a society based on a scoring system. Each interaction with another person gives rise to a rating, between zero and five stars. In the same way as a restaurant on Google Maps, the average is accessible to everyone and determines whether or not you are a good citizen, and determines your social standing. In this fiction, we witness the downfall of the protagonist at the mercy of this rating
In another example, Alain Damasio’s novel The Zone Outside describes a society in which the government issues an annual ranking of citizens. This ranking determines your whole life, from employment to access to shops and health. From one day to the next, you can go from marginal to elite and vice versa. This system has led to the creation of a popular resistance that goes as far as terrorism to cry out against injustice. I leave it to you to discover the rest of this story.
Let’s move on from video games and fiction to discuss the use of the scoring system in real life. The first example is the US credit score. Defined in 1958, it’s a score between 300 and 850 that is calculated on the basis of credit card use to assess the repayment capacity of each citizen. This score is, of course, available to anyone who needs it to decide whether or not to take out a loan, but it is also used to set the interest rate. In this case, the rate reflects the ‘risk’ taken by the lender, and therefore increases the more unstable the borrower’s situation. The owner of a property may also have access to this score and may therefore refuse a tenant if he or she considers that the score is not sufficient (generally below 620). On the loan side, it is estimated that the score must be above 700 to have access to a decent mortgage. The credit score therefore defines a large part of everyday life in the United States.Let’s turn to China. China also has a financial credit system, equivalent to the credit score system, but also a legal credit system that evolves according to offences committed under the law. In 2002, the central government announced the launch of a social credit system, to be tested by local governments. The aim was to give each citizen a score of between 350 and 950 based on his or her compliance with the rules, not the laws, drawn up by each prefecture. Twelve years later, the State Council published the Planning Outlines for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014-2020) with the aim of speeding up implementation. By 2023, most of the initiatives had been halted, as the penalties imposed on the worst-rated citizens were finally deemed too severe by the central government. This ultimately led to the project being transformed into a voluntary loyalty scheme similar to that used by airlines. We can therefore conclude that, in addition to being an intrusive surveillance system, it is deemed pointless if it does not justify a certain form of oppression.
To sum up
Entertainment is not just a tool for light activities. It has been used since the dawn of humanity to facilitate learning. Very quickly, with industrialisation and the emergence of capitalism as we know it, ‘games’ proved to be an excellent way of getting the most out of employees and consumers. Once the superfluous has been stripped away, gamification presents itself as a modernisation of these manipulative techniques in the service of managers rather than the managed. This system is so deeply rooted in our society that it is even incorporated into many video games to encourage players to carry out actions that they might otherwise find tedious. Associated with the game is the score, which in turn has been stripped of its playful aspect to become an extreme ranking that determines our place in society and the most basic things we have access to, such as housing. We could find many things that have been falsified in the name of capital, so that the greatest number of people can meet the needs of a self-proclaimed elite. The freedom to play is being nibbled away to the point of disgust. Whether on the scale of a hobby, a company or a nation, be alert! A simple game can hide much more than entertainment or a reward; its creator may be looking for much more. I can only advise you to get informed, ask questions and multiply your sources to find out what you’re going to be eating.
On the other hand, video games are also the perfect solution for going in the opposite direction, proposing alternatives and experimenting on a small or large scale. Imagine a game that removes all notion of capital, why not online, to see what a different society might look like. Without going that far, it is possible to find titles like Wanderstop, which offers a break in the midst of this frenzy. At the heart of its burn-out theme, it removes any notion of time and performance from the player. Even the achievements don’t require you to do anything other than let yourself be carried along by the story. During the few hours you spend in this atypical tearoom, the emphasis is on letting go and listening, offering you a chance to reflect on subjects that we tend to leave to one side. In particular, it presents what we are prepared to do to become what is expected of us.
As I said above, gaming is a tool with which we can do many things, let’s make the right choices.
sources :
L’histoire de la gamification – Goama
(PDF) History of Gamification and Its Role in the Educational Process
L’histoire de la gamification : du jeu ancien à l’engagement moderne
Au travail, jouer oui, « gamifier » non !
Score de crédit aux États-Unis — Wikipédia
Système de crédit social — Wikipédia
L’impact de votre pointage de crédit sur votre parcours d’achat d’une maison | La NCHFA