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?Ye]k$_Yea^a[Ylagf$ Yf\dYZgmjhgdala[k Across the United States, thousands of children are enlisted in fundraising efforts to support underfunded primary schools and youth programmes ranging from marching bands to soccer teams, to, perhaps most famously, the Girl Scouts. Mostly, these children sell things: chocolate bars, magazine subscriptions, cookies, popcorn, scented candles, giftware, bed sheets and even mattresses. They troop door-to-door in small-town neighbourhoods, they send cases of candy to work with their parents who sell them to colleagues, and they implore family friends and relatives to please, please buy something. While these budding young salespeople may care about the funding of their sports teams or school dances, they are often further motivated by rewards schemes that mirror sales games. Sales benchmarks may be rewarded with toys, music or gift cards, or top sellers may earn more substantial prizes, such as video game console systems. We bring up fundraising practices not to decry or endorse the extent to which these practices have become a standard part of childhood in the United States but to highlight the ways in which many are socialized through a system of gamified labour. Perhaps all children participating in such practices benefit from the increased funding available for school or extracurricular
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activities, but that some children – those top candy hustlers – benefit more through a gamified series of rewards is difficult to argue against. Put cynically, this gamification aids the effort to extract unpaid labour from children, who are compelled to literally work for the funding of their own educations and experiences from a very early age. This is an obvious place in childhood where gamification happens. However, it is just one of many places in which, from early in childhood, we are intimately institutionalized both in the labour of school and the leisure of home to gamify learning and labour processes – stars for good behaviour translate to rewards from the reward box, board games teach counting and fine motor skills (i.e., Hi Ho, Cherry-O, Wernhard 1960), and now, we are told, playing Wii games helps with coordination and learning. These practices are not necessarily new. Attendance rewards for children date back to at least the Victorian era. Churches, particularly those in small towns and rural areas, have long posted weekly attendance numbers in sanctuaries, a practice intended to motivate both pastors and the members of the proverbial flock. The Girl Scout cookie sales date as early as 1917, and in the 1990s, the national organization introduced official rewards for cookie sales, formalizing reward schemes that had previously occurred at the local and regional level. That we bring the discourse of popular entertainment games into the discourses of gamified labour is unsurprising. For many of us, games and labour have existed side-by-side since our childhood; we have been ideologically trained to expect this kind of conjunction. And this training comes at the culmination of decades of events and practices that have normalized gamification as part of daily life – Foucauldian discourse forming within the multiple institutions of our daily lives (Foucault 1971). Today, much of intellectual and mental labour is often technologized through computerized systems in terms of management and the work we do with it. It makes sense, then, that when we gamify intellectual labour, we do so through computer games – the computer is the medium with which such labour is carried out. The current discourse about gamification may be relatively new, but many of us have grown up fully immersed in the longer historical tradition of gamification. Recently, gamification has been celebrated as a potential solution to problems ranging from health care management to employee training to education (McGonigal 2011; Zichermann and Cunningham 2011; Kapp 2012; the Games for Health conference 2004–; Gee 2007; Squire 2011). However, even as gamification projects are rolled out in various industries, little time has been spent reflecting on the potential moral and political problems these same projects may present. Gamification often blurs the boundaries between labour and leisure, and not always in obvious ways – creating game texts, playing them, using them as training, data-crunching game results, and modifying work practices or work processes – all these forms of labour are often disguised within the promise of fun. And this sense of fun obscures the very nature of games as work (something that Sutton-Smith [2001] and McAllister and Ruggill [2011] discuss in their respective monographs), which then allows the labour of games to erode the boundaries of leisure and non-commoditized activities. The authors of the articles in this special issue were asked to grapple with the thornier aspects of gamification. Who, for example, does gamification benefit, and how? What ethical problems arise from the commodification of play through gamification? And how might the labourification of games change how we think of and theorize games? In engaging with these and related questions, contributors address the problematic aspects of the largely
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celebratory rhetoric surrounding gamification. This is particularly timely as universities, granting agencies, and corporations are interested in leveraging the tools of a multi-billion dollar industry for over-determined purposes. In addressing gamification as a potential moral and ethical concern in the domain of labour politics, we ask that we subject gamification to careful thought before over-deploying it as a strategy. Ultimately, the purpose of this special issue is not to argue against gamification; rather, we intend to add a level of critical enquiry and consideration for those who are considering this novel approach to non-game-based materials. In ‘Taylorism 2.0: Gamification, Scientific Management, and the Capitalist Appropriation of Play’, Jennifer deWinter, Carly A. Kocurek and Randall Nichols consider the use of business training games in corporate settings. These games promise to make training more appealing and thereby increase productivity, seducing employees into more readily serving corporate goals. The authors argue, however, that this type of gamification extends the principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management. Scientific management employs systems of measurement and observation to define best, most effective practice, and this approach now underlies game-based training. The use of this approach is leading to a collapse of labour and leisure and potentially rendering play one more arena of obligatory productivity. Steven Conway examines the design practices and principles that undergird many gamification projects. In ‘Zombification? Gamification, Motivation and the User’, he argues against the organization-centred approach to design that dominates many gamification projects. This approach treats users as mindless zombies, lurching through the system in pursuit of engineered rewards with little space for desires or goals of their own. Decrying this organization-centred approach to gamification, Conway advocates instead a user-centred approach to gamification that addresses both the ways in which users are evaluated and rewarded and the types of activities in which they are asked to engage. Drawing on the work of cultural studies theorists, Mathias Fuchs interrogates gamification as ideology. Beginning with Marcel Mauss’s proposal of the gift as an alternative to capitalist exchange, Fuchs considers gamification in the frameworks of cultural theorists like Georges Bataille, Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. While Bataille might suggest that play could serve as an escape from the drudgery of work, Fuchs argues, Adorno and Benjamin can be seen to suggest that efforts to escape from work through play might render play a drudgery of its own. In his article, ‘Gamification as 21st century ideology’, Fuchs ultimately argues that the very effort to harmonize play and labour through gamification is itself an ideology. Marigo Raftopoulos asks what best practices for gamification projects might look like in ‘Towards gamification transparency: A conceptual framework for the development of responsible gamified enterprise systems’. Raftopoulos considers the efficacy of enterprise gamification in creating or potentially destroying value. She examines seven typical positive rhetorics surrounding games and the negative possibilities that are obfuscated by these positive rhetorics. Ultimately, her article proposes a framework for such projects. Using values-conscious design, she argues, can help gamification projects ensure more responsible and sustainable results. Finally, Robertson Allen presents an interview with Colonel Casey Wardynski. During his time with the US Army, Wardynski oversaw the America’s Army (US Army 2002) project, and in this interview he discusses
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the inspiration and execution of the video game that became one of the Army’s most effective recruiting tools. In the contextualizing essay and subsequent interview, Allen notes that America’s Army (2002) effectively targeted a core demographic – young men with computer skills and an interest in the Army – and that the project is ‘embedded in the logics of market analysis and neoliberal business principles’ (181). The purpose of this game is to recapture intellectual labour in a way that traditional recruiting tools miss or ignore. Taken together, the articles in this special issue offer a strong indictment of gamification and the underlying cultural ideologies that have been underexplored by game studies. We do not mean to insinuate that games shouldn’t teach; rather, we see in these essays a common thread that games do teach, but they teach ideology through the schooling of intellectual and manual labour, and it is this ideology that should be made visible for discursive interrogation. We hope that these essays will spark a discussion in the game studies community and encourage those in disciplines that employ gamification to consider the quotidian and conditional rhetorics of gamification as both a historical and contemporary practice.
J=>=J=F;=K Foucault, M. (1971), The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith), New York: Pantheon Books. Gee, J. P. (2007), What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kapp, K. M. (2012), The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-Based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education, San Francisco: Pfeiffer. McAllister, K. S. and Ruggill, J. E. (2011), Gaming Matters: Art, Science, and the Computer Game Medium, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. McGonigal, J. (2011), Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, New York: Penguin Books. Squire, K. (2011), Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age, New York: Teachers College Press. Sutton-Smith, B. (2001), The Ambiguity of Play, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. US Army (2002), America’s Army, Washington, DC: US Army. Werbach, K. and Hunter, D. (2012), For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business, Philadelphia: Wharton Digital Press. Wernhard, H. (1960), Hi Ho, Cherry-O, East Longmeadow, MA: Milton Bradley. Zichermann, G. and Cunningham, C. (2011), Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps, Cambridge, MA: O’Reilly Media.
;GFLJA:MLGJ<=L9ADK Jennifer deWinter is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and faculty in the Interactive Media and Game Development programme at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She teaches courses on game studies, game design, game production and management, and co-directs and teaches in the Professional Writing programme. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Works and Days, Eludamos, Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, Computers and Composition, and Rhetoric Review among others. She is co-editing the soon to be published books Computer Games and Technical Communication
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(Ashgate) and Video Game Policy (Routledge), and she is the editor for the textbook Videogames for Fountainhead. Contact: Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Department of Humanities and Arts, 100 Institute Rd, Worcester, MA 01069, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Carly A. Kocurek is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She teaches courses in game studies, game design, media studies and digital culture. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Game Studies, The Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, Reconstruction, Flow and In Media Res, and the anthologies Before the Crash (Wayne State University Press, 2012), Gaming Globally (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and Computer Games and Technical Communication (Ashgate, forthcoming). Her currently untitled book, a cultural history of the early video game arcade in the United States, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press. Contact: Illinois Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, Siegel Hall, 3301 South Dearborn, Suite 218, Chicago, IL 60616, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Jennifer deWinter and Carly A. Kocurek have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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The Emergence of Video Processing Tools Television Becoming Unglued Edited by Kathy High, Sherry Miller Hocking, and Mona Jimenez
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