The other day my friend Carl– a very talented rhetorician –drew my attention to an article on NPR describing “gamification” as a new social technology. As Gabe Zichermann, one of the pioneers of gamification describes this social technology,
Gamification “is the process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage users and solve problems”
One of these techniques is currently being experimented with in Sweden with respect to speeding. Using cameras to monitor drivers, this technique places people who drive at or under the speed limit in a lottery. If their name is chosen, they then win the money that drivers who speed have had to pay into the system. Gamification thus strives to regulate human behavior by turning it into a game. Rather than merely disciplining people or regulating their behavior through the threat of negative sanctions, people are here motivated to engage in certain sorts of behavior through the transformation of this behavior into a type of competition.
read on!
Are we here witnessing the emergence of a new diagram of power in Deleuze and Foucault’s sense of the word? According to Foucault and Deleuze we have, so far, had three diagrams of power: sovereign power, disciplinary power, and control power. Sovereign power functions according to the exercise of the power of a sovereign on the body of a subject. Foucault depicts the functioning of this power gruesomely in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish, where we witness a person being horribly tortured in a variety of ways. Disciplinary power is a sort of training that strives to produce subjects that have internalized power so that they come to regulate themselves as their own jailers. The panopticon is the most famous example of such power. We internalize the gaze of our jailer because we never know whether or not anyone is in the guard tower, thereby regulating our own activity. Disciplinary power is organized around the molding of bodies through a variety of behavioral techniques.
Control power, according to Deleuze, is not so much about molding, as it is about modulation. Here the aim is not for the agent to internalize power. No, the agent, in a sense, remains completely free. Rather, to understand control power we might imagine a square room with four doors. These doors only open two at a time and only at particular times. The agent is free to choose whatever door he might like to pass through, yet he choices are still modulated by the flow of doors opening and closing.
If gamification marks the possible emergence of a new form of power, then this is because action and movement is now modulated by agents entering into competition with one another in games organized around particular sorts of goals. While these games certainly have rules, power here does not function through the force of the law and its possible sanctions, but rather through people electing to become participants in the game. Carl, for example, imagined a gamification of the classroom with respect to attendance. In this game, rather than treating absence punitively by docking the player’s grade, the number of classes missed by absent students would then be added to the grade of those students that miss no class. Here class attendance might be increased by involving students in a game.
Here we can imagine a form of society– “game society” –where 1) there are no laws (rules of a game aren’t quite the same as laws), and where 2) we have no unity among the members of society (because they are in competition with one another), yet where, nonetheless, behavior is thoroughly regulated by participation in the game. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something about this model of power that I find deeply horrifying.
Larval Subjects . 
March 28, 2011 at 4:02 pm
It’s not quite identical to the vision the gamification folks have, but it does remind me strongly of the “marketification” vision that some economists have long held, in which all of society would be pervasively organized by market competition. The neo-classical economist’s game-theoretic view of markets, coupled with money as basically arbitrary points to win in that game, seems like it’s aiming at a similar proposal.
March 28, 2011 at 4:09 pm
Mark, can you expand on the vision the gamification folk have in mind? Of course, the way things get implemented in practice are often quite different than what various theories propose.
March 28, 2011 at 4:10 pm
What you describe would be horrifying. And there’s no doubt that “gamification” is a growing interest. In fact, I’m working this morning on a conference presentation on intersections between gaming and writing pedagogy. I will say that the scenario you describe is an extreme pessimistic version, on the other side of the very optimistic view that someone like Jane McGonigal would offer, where gaming becomes a way to solve the world’s problems. What interests me about McGonigal’s book and gaming in general is the way it seeks to take up cognitive research, particularly in positive psychology. Like disciplinary and control societies, a “game society” would rest upon a new theory of mind.
There are a few things I would note though. First, if we are obligated to play, then it isn’t really a game. In the Swedish example, if the drivers don’t opt in to playing in this lottery system, then it can’t be a game. Even then, it doesn’t sound like much of a game. Second, not all games pit players against one another. There are games where players win or lose as a group.
March 28, 2011 at 4:16 pm
True all around, Alex. Power, in Foucault, always has this dual nature so it’s important to avoid seeing it in purely negative terms. As Deleuze nicely articulates it:
On the other hand, I do think that digital humanities too often tends in the overly optimistic and utopian direction. This, I think, is a tendency best avoided… But hey, I tend towards “Phillip K. Dick” modes of thought.
March 28, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Well, I’m not a very sympathetic recipient of the gamification folks’ vision, so it’s a bit hard to say what their vision exactly is (Bogost was on a panel at the Game Developer’s Conference on the subject, so even though also unsympathetic, may have better comments). I see the main people involved as marketers, though, interested in whether “game mechanics” can serve as a new kind of reward signal for otherwise classic behaviorist type marketing. Others seem to have some sort of utopian vision of how if we give people points for brushing their teeth, dentition will improve.
Fundamentally I’m not sure there is a lot of gameness involved, though, which is why it seems much more similar to just classic pervasive-market-incentives thinking. As Chris Hecker suggests, much of it might just be a new game-branded spin on good ol’ “extrinsic motivation”.
March 28, 2011 at 5:11 pm
God help us all.
March 28, 2011 at 5:55 pm
I recognise the DNA but I’m not sure if it originates with games per se. You used the image of a chess game. Chess has more to it than simply winning and losing. There is an element of collaboration, of a mutualist artistry, in chess. Likewise with physical games, the thrill of football is frequently in competition as a *collective* experience rather than in simply winning as an individual disassociated from other players.
I say this because over the last decade we have witnessed the “gamification” (in the sense you describe) of video-games. Playing games used to involve a series of discrete experiences, played solo or in collaboration with friends for whatever enjoyment could be found in each experience (much like amateur chess or football). A small set, called Role Playing Games (deriving from table-top D&D-style gaming) situated players in persistent universes and allocated to them rewards, traits, variables, etc. However, as games evolved into a social medium (I’m thinking of Xbox Live or World of Warcraft, etc.) the DNA of the latter was inserted into the former. This resulted in exactly the situation you describe: users could now accumulate rewards for performing certain actions, defeating a thousand foes, and so on. These objects in the “meta-“game operate as emblems of one’s social worth within the cyber-space. There are now people selling accounts on Xbox Live with maxed out achievements, simply for the value that this bestows on the user.
If the above analysis is correct, it follows that this form of power originates with nerds throwing D-20s. Bizarre.
March 28, 2011 at 6:17 pm
Does anyone else think that ‘gamification’ is about gamma rays? When I read the term, I keep thinking that scientists will make incredible hulks of us all…..
March 28, 2011 at 6:21 pm
oh yes and read MacKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory if you want an idea of what this future will look like.
Clue: it’ll be like Jesse Schell’s vision, i.e. horrendous.
March 28, 2011 at 8:42 pm
Robert, “gamification” is about shapely womens’ legs, obviously.
March 28, 2011 at 8:46 pm
I appreciate the concern, but I do so from the distance that Alex does and with an eye to the market-mentality that Mark emphasizes. Creating an incentive system for positive behavior is not an essential trait of games. Getting points isn’t winning either: consider the the board-game “Sorry,” where you can get so close to winning and one of the other players can completely deflate you. Or take Soccer: is the point of the game, from the player perspective, simply to score points or to participate in skillful maneuvers that, as Gaucamolay points out, are an end in themselves insofar as they are thrilling or satisfying as demonstrations of competence?
While it may seem less like following the law when you are following the rules of a game, I don’t think that warrants saying they are radically different, this is probably clearer when you consider how a in game if you break the rules you are usually going to get penalized. “Gamification” may downplay that, but the games work because they have rules that people obey because of some recognized authority, those that govern general play and the boundaries of acceptable play are not really that different.
I want to recognize Guacamolay as onto something when referencing the role RPGs may have in gamification, but also point out that a vast many of these games are already commercialized. I play plenty of home-made RPGs with friends, and there is a fair amount of that collect-and-adorn mentality, but it’s not essential to gameplay. Having played commercial RPGs and homebrewed ones, I can say that there’s a kind of game-fundamentalism that can occur with the commercial ones, because people get into them on the basis that they are already figured out world’s that don’t work or aren’t fun unless played faithfully. Is this because it’s a game or because of how it’s produced and what it seeks to produce as a “game experience”? Commodified game-systems are not amenable with what you call in another post “fuzzy essences,” but in my experience they are all over any good games. These fuzzy essences arise because of player participation, not because they are designed that way.
March 28, 2011 at 9:18 pm
Hi Joe,
I’m unclear as to how anything I’ve said is supposed to reflect on games in general or what I might have said that could have given this impression. Gamification, if it is indeed a regime of power, would be organized around a particular form of games, not all games. The speeding game and class attendance game, I believe, clearly indicate what I’m talking about. What we get here is a new way of regulating human behavior. Likewise, with gamification as a marketing strategy we get a new way of generating surplus-value or profit without people even noticing that that’s what’s going on. In other words, the point of this post is not that games are bad. Here the market-driven perspective is extremely interesting as it would be yet another feature of how this diagram of power is organized and how this power functions. At any rate, there’s a tremendous difference between rules of a game in gamification and laws. Laws exert their force through sanctions or threatened punishment. Rules in a game fall into the background, and what motivates is not threatened punishment, but rather winning.
March 28, 2011 at 10:02 pm
I read this particular passage with intrigue.
“the number of classes missed by absent students would then be added to the grade of those students that miss no class. Here class attendance might be increased by involving students in a game.”
Wouldn’t this provide a motivation for students to cause their classmates to miss classes, while attending classes themselves? For example, if you locked your
competitors, um, classmates in a closet before class, you’d get credit for their absence.(This assumes that the payoff of attending class outweighs the risk of punishment for breaking the (presumed) rule against imprisoning your classmates.)
Talk about potential unintended consequences…
March 28, 2011 at 10:11 pm
Ha Jack!
April 5, 2011 at 4:08 am
[…] Larval Subjects; -Gamification as a New Diagram of Power? […]
April 7, 2011 at 1:43 pm
[…] idea, however, I’ll direct you to Levi Bryant of the Larval Subjects blog and his post about ‘Gamification as a new diagram of power’. You may wish to brush up on your Foucault for this one: If gamification marks the possible […]
April 7, 2011 at 2:07 pm
[…] review of Jane McGonical’s Reality is Broken somewhat in line with my earlier post on gamification. Please note that I’m not opposed to gamification in principle. It will be recalled that for […]
April 8, 2011 at 4:11 pm
Sounds a bit like strike breaking, or “divide and conquor”:
You set up a system so that those who obey are given an advantage over those who don’t, and as more people disobey, the greater the advantages for obedience become.
In other words you set up a system so that people profit from each others misfortune, specifically their misfortune caused by the power system, and then, (and this is the hidden bit) you seperate those people that you’ve set against each other, either automatically (via them being connected randomly accross the internet, or traveling the same stretch of road at different times) or at the request of one of those parties.
It’s the exact opposite of collective responcibility forming a cohesive unit, instead of tying their interests together, you seperate them. Then you have the partial assistence of the “winners” on your side to prolong the system.
You can see examples of this in the informer cultures of soviet and nazi europe.
April 10, 2011 at 4:06 pm
As noted by Jack Bennett above, the class attendance game is interesting. The class can game the game: say you form a union of students, all of whom take on twice as many classes as they need to do in order to pass the year. Only half the group ever goes to any class, thereby pumping the grades for all the real participants in the classes they want to get good marks in. Alternately, inventing students to ass to the roster.
Really, what I want to say is that the prerequisite that the players are competitors is crucial, and that this system of power can be undermined by refusing to be competitors. I remember a “real-world” example of this in WAR, where players would arrange meet-ups on forums in order to kill each other for efficient pvp rewards.
April 11, 2011 at 12:58 am
[…] however, I’ll direct you to Levi Bryant of the Larval Subjects blog and his post about ‘Gamification as a new diagram of power‘. You may wish to brush up on your Foucault for this […]
April 11, 2011 at 6:58 am
[…] R. Bryant: Gamification as a New Diagram of Power? […]
September 26, 2011 at 3:58 pm
[…] those not familiar with the trend of “gamification”, cf. this wiki and a post I wrote on the concept a while back. So what’s going on here? There have been a number of […]