boundary 2 · 2013 · 79 citations · 0 references
Video Game DevelopmentOnline GamingGamified WorldEmerging MediaGame TheoryPopular CultureMedia StudiesEducational GameGame MechanicsGame DesignOther FormsDeveloped WorldGamificationGame StudiesUser ExperienceGame StudyGamesGlobal MediaDigital EntertainmentCulturePerformance StudiesVernacular Game-makingVirtual WorldsBusinessMass CommunicationArts
In the developed world, digital media have made games a cultural metaphor for everyday competition and success. The essay examines how gamification permeates economic, social, and cultural life, critiques it through three digital games, and considers play as a transformative counterforce. The author analyzes three games—SPENT, Third World Farmer, and Thresholdland—each reusing a distinct genre to address poverty, underdevelopment, and immigration. The games collectively contest gamification’s victory focus and expose the structural failures and mass loss of contemporary capitalism.
Throughout the developed world, in which digital media have achieved a ubiquitous status for many people, games have become an exemplary cultural form that serves as a prominent metaphor of everyday competition and success. This essay explores gamification—a term that derives from behavioral economics and refers to the use of game mechanics in traditionally nongame activities—as a form that economic, social, and cultural life increasingly takes in the present. After exploring how the gamified world of the early twenty-first century departs dramatically from a society oriented around the production of what Guy Debord called “spectacles,” I turn to three recent digital games that problematize gamification: SPENT (2011), Third World Farmer (2006), and Thresholdland (2010). Each of these games repurposes a different digital game genre (the role-playing game, the construction and management simulation game, and the transmedia game) and tackles a different topic (poverty and homelessness in the United States, underdevelopment of the Third World, and immigration struggles in Europe). Despite these differences, they all actively challenge the victory-oriented nature of gamification while critically foregrounding the structural failure and mass loss perpetuated by systems of contemporary capitalism. In the conclusion, the essay explores play as a precarious, uncertain, but also transformative relation that might complicate the gamified elements (points, badges, and reputation systems) that so often organize games and social practices in the early twenty-first century.