Presentation at the "For The Win" smart gamification symposium, Wharton School, August 8, 2011.

1. Outside the Box
(one critical question)
Sebastian Deterding (@dingstweets)
Wharton Gamification Symposium
Philadelphia, August 8, 2011
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2. <br>
I’ve been asked to pose one critical question about gamification in six minutes, which is of course an impossible task: There are many
more questions to be asked, and most of them need more than six minutes to elaborate. So I decided to break the rules a bit.

3. Dystopia
Utopia (I & II)
To summarize some of my gripes (and hopes), I’d like to present you three visions of where gamification can go – one dystopian and
two utopian – before continuing on to one specific question.

4. At worst, gamification is ...
selling incentive systems
and technology under the
ruse of games.
(Call that
“the sorry state of the art”)
The dystopia is pretty much where we are right now. It is the overselling of reward or incentive systems (and the underlying paradigms
of behaviorism or homo oeconomicus) and »turn-key« technology solutions under the ruse of »the true power of games«.

5. At best ...
marrying the psychology
of motivation with the
practice of design.
(Call that
“motivational design”)
Against that, the hope (and unfulfilled potential) I see in the »gamification« hype is bringing together the insights of psychology on
intrinsic motivation with the practice of design – and get these into education and the workplace.

6. At best ...
a step towards the holistic
study and design of rule
systems.
(Call that
“rule design studies”)
The second utopia I call »rule design studies«. All of our social (legal, economic) life runs on rules – implicit and explicit –, rules that
are now increasingly hard-coded into software (see Lessig’s »Code is Law«); but we never made those rule systems an object of
interdisciplinary, holistic study on their own right.

7. The best title for this idea has already taken by this introductory law textbook: How to do things with rules. How to design a law for
registering CO2 emissions, say? Or a business process for matching jobs and teams in a distributed enterprise? Or craft a code of
conduct and regulation mechanisms for an online community? From the precise wording of the rule to the organizational processes
and software down to the actual interface design?

8. Law Sociology
Governance Social order
Public Policy Institutionalization
Interpretation Scripts (STS)
Economics CS
Game Theory Algorithms
Incentives Modeling, abstraction,
Business processes automation, simulation
This would span many disciplines: Law, sociology, economics, computing science...

9. Law Sociology
Governance Social order
Public Policy Institutionalization
Interpretation Scripts (STS)
Economics CS
Game Theory Game Algorithms
Incentives Studies Modeling, abstraction,
Business processes automation, simulation
Design
Dynamics & Aesthetics
Semiotics
What game studies would bring to this table, again, would be design – a practice-based, holistic understanding how all these elements
interact to give rise to behavioral dynamics and aesthetic experiences (think MDA framework) – and how they can convey meaning and
values (think procedural rhetorics).

10. </br>
Ok, end of breakout, on to the critical question.

11. My question is this: Why, in the context of games and gamification, when we are all here – outside the box –, are we still only thinking
and talking about stuff happening here – inside the box?

12. What do I mean? Well, what’s the first thing that comes to our minds when I say »playing video games«? I submit that it is
predominantly this here:

13. The Box
Very literally, it is a box. Some square screen, some interface tied to a piece of hardware running a piece of software that generates
output in reaction to our input.

14. Game
The Box
A designed artifact
It is a game – a designed artefact. And that is what we have been talking about in gamification: the artifact and its design.
Are we missing anything in this picture?

15. Game
The Box
A designed artifact
Very much so. We’re missing everything that is happening outside the box: People, and what they do with the game, including all the
culture and social norms and conventions and negotiations and practices ...

16. Game
The Box
A designed artifact
Playing
A frame of engagement
What we are missing is playing – a specific mode, context or frame of engaging with that artefact. Playing video games – and the
experiences and engagement we associate with it – very literally requires both: A game, and playing it.

17. For we can play with many different things: Sticks and stones, other people, passing cars on a long holiday trip - even work. Likewise,
we can engage with games in many different ways: We can test them, review them, analyse them, play them - or work on them. To
illustrate, let me present you some quotes from interviews I did for my PhD research:

18. “I need to be very routinized;
I mustn’t let myself drift.
”
“I hammer it through.
”
“Often, you have to force yourself to do it.
”
“You're under real pressure.
”
“It's extremely exhausting.
”
“It wears you out.
”
“My friends usually cannot comprehend how
stressful this is.
”
What are people talking about here? The context of my talk is a dead give-away, of course: They talk about playing video games. These
are video game journalists reporting on their experience of playing a game as part of their job reviewing games.

19. “Sometimes, you have to play,
you have to get further –
and then, play is work.
”
I find this quote sums up their experience most nicely.

20. Question (v0.2)
When work can make the
best game tedious,
why should games make
work engaging?
So my question, or the second version of it, is this: Why, when the context of work can make the best game a tedious experience, why
should games (or game elements) automatically make work engaging?

21. Sociotechnical systems
Information ecologies
Situated action
Embodied interaction
Social contextures
...
And the weird thing is: We know all this – in theory. In organizational psychology and HCI and STS, we know this at least since the
1950s (which is when the term »socio-technical system« was first introduced): To understand the uses and effects of technical systems,
we cannot separate them from the specific social contexts in which they are embedded.

22. Question (v0.9)
What about context?
So that’s the technical (penultimate) version of my question: What about context? Well, what about it? What characterizes the context
we are interested in – playing video games?

23. “Sometimes, you have to play,
you have to get further –
and then, play is work.
”
I think this quote gives a good entry into that question. For it points us back – not to game studies, but to the beginnings of the study
of play.

24. »First and foremost,
all play is a voluntary
activity.«
Johan Huizinga
homo ludens (1938)
As Huizinga already pointed out, one core characteristic of play is that it’s voluntary.

25. »First and foremost,
all play is a voluntary
activity.«
a.k.a.
“autonomy”
Johan Huizinga
homo ludens (1938)
It is »voluntariness«, autonomy, which research based on Self-Determination Theory finds is one of the three intrinsic, basic human
needs that playing games caters to, and thus makes it so engaging. (And Scott Rigby will certainly talk more on that tomorrow.)

26. And that is what's worrying me: Past implementations of gamification have happened in leisure contexts. Today, we’re entering work
places and education – more often than not, involuntary contexts. Dropping one and the same design elements into these very
different contexts might have very different effects. A leaderboard, say, might easily demotivate workers by feeling coercive, reducing my
autonomy as a worker.

27. Game
The Box
A designed artifact
Playing
A frame of engagement
So to sum up: We don’t need games (or game elements) to play. But we might need play to make games (or game elements) engaging.
Yet what we are thinking and talking about is only inside the box that is the game. We are missing the other half.

28. Question (v1.0)
What about play?
So that’s the critical question I want to ask: What about play?

29. Thank You.
@dingstweets
sebastian@codingconduct.cc
codingconduct.cc