“One plays only if and when one wishes to. In this sense, play is free activity. It is also uncertain activity. Doubt must remain until the end, and hinges upon the denouncement. In a card game, when outcome is no longer in doubt, play stops and the players lay down their hands. In a lottery or in roulette, money is placed on a number which may or may not win. In a sports contest, the powers of contestants must be equated, so that each may have a chance until the end. Every game of skill, by definition, involves the risk for the player of missing his stroke, and the threat of defeat, without which the game would no longer be pleasing. In fact, the game is no longer pleasing to one who, because he is too well trained or skillful, wins effortlessly and infallibly.”

This was written in 1932 by the Dutch historian and Orientalist Johan Huizinga, in his work Homo Ludens. In it he lays out his project as one that endeavours to make sense of the concept of play, and the massive historical role that it has played in the rise of human civilization. Huizinga makes the case that play makes up the most creative and exciting parts of culture – an oddly pre-human activity that we engage with in fluid, structured and complex ways. This work has gone on to influence a large number of videogame scholars, due to his typology of what makes a game. Certainly since he published Homo Ludens many have elaborated on the work, but his book is nonetheless an entertaining theoretical look at what makes play so damn exciting.

The quote above caught me the moment I read it several weeks ago because it captures in a lot of ways what makes games fun: uncertainty. Huizinga makes great effort to stress the tension that is ever-present in our games – this tension and uncertainty is core to many games – both physical and virtual. This brings us to the growing trend of gamification – the growth of the ways in which marketers and others have begun to use game-like mechanics on websites in their multi-pronged, multimedia campaigns to engage and build consumer loyalty to products and brands. Think foursquare and Gowalla. Gamification is different from other ways in which media companies have successfully used Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) like ilovebees which accompanied the release of Halo 2.

The trend culminated with the Gammification Summit in San Fransisco last weekend – a summit where experts, designers and critics all met up to speak about what gamification means to business and consumers. Naturally leading the charge in all things “gamified” are services like foursquare and Gowalla – who have managed to make their presence felt rather strongly in the mediascape.

While as a gamer one might think that this is exciting, I can't help but feel utterly despondant at the whole thing. I feel a strong reaction to these kind of things – where marketers begin to try and find ways in which to use games to use us. But going beyond this relatively commonplace cynicism with marketing, I have found my aversion to gamification for much more compelling reasons – and I believe that this is something that marketers and others must heed if they believe that gamification is somehow the perfect way to engineer consumer interest.

Losing sight of tension and meaningful play

For me it is that the process of gamification isn't really turning anything into “games” perse, but instead using “game-like” mechanics (points! Leaderboards!) to give the veneer of a game, while actually engaging the user in a mindless activity that provides nothing particularly special other than the aforemented points and brand loyalty. Ultimately, when you build leaderboards and pseudo-games into websites like the Huffington Post has – you are attempting to find ways in which to turn increased page-views into a form of cultural capital that people find meaningful. Yet most often this manifests itself as a kind of mindless clicking with no tension, no skill. The winner of the Huffington Post “game” is likely to the one who shows their loyalty the brand the most. Similarly with foursquare, the winner of the major component (checking-in) hasn't resolved or interacted with a tension, they have just visited a store.

I believe that this is why Ian Bogost has rightly criticized gamification as just a new glorified version of ages old loyalty programs – such things are not much different than frequent-flyer programs; they are particularly engineered to build loyalty through abstract (and infrequent) rewards. Yet at the end of all this, neither gamification or frequent flyer programs are games in the traditional sense. They are a different monster because they lack, on the whole, meaningful play, and as such, aren't games, just marketing. They trade page-views and branding – the loyalty to the abstract qualities built by marketers and plastered on billboards. Ultimately while I'm sure at some point I will find myself interacting with something that has been gamified on my own terms, I have yet to see what promise the trend has beyond protecting click-through revenue and thus, anything other than business as usual. As Huizinga argues, games are something special, that exist outside of the everyday – gamification is about as everyday as it gets.