MODULE 6.1: Whitson

Whittson’s definition of gamification

• Gamification → is play applied to non-play spaces

  • Uses game mechanics, technology, and development techniques from games in non-game spaces, or, as defined outside the industry, adding points, leaderboards, and badges to non-game activities.

Whitson’s definition of play

• Play → new driving logic in the technological expansion and public acceptance of surveillance. Ex. Facial recognition technology

  • play is a cultural practice and public legitimation tool

  • allows us to accept forma of surveillance that would not otherwise be accepted by us

Whitson’s definition of game

• Games → “encounters provide the communication based for a circular flow of feeling among participants as well as corrective compensation for deviant acts”

  • interacting with the sets of cultural representations, expectations, norms embedded in the rules, process, and narrative of the game and the context of play

  • games impose social order

Understand Whitson's argument that gamification is a form of surveillance.

• Gamification fosters quantification of the self -→ collect data, provide feedback

• Gamification fosters quantification of the self – collecting and collating data and providing feedback on how to better care for one’s self

• Projects use incentivization and pleasure rather than risk and fear to shape desired behaviours.

• Data collection is directly enrolled in altering behaviour

Explain why Whitson argues that surveillance can be pleasurable rather than coercive.

• Games are often tied with measuring our own performance

• leverages the feedback tools from games

• never-ending levelling up process, guided by a teleology of constant and continual improvement, driven by an unending stream of positive feedback and virtual rewards, and fuelled by the notion that this process is playful.

Define and apply quantification, self-surveillance, participatory surveillance, care of the self, governance through self-management.

• Quantification → a process of translation, self help and self improvement traditions become combined with rhetorics of managing and shaping the ideal, victorious, self-regulating body

• self-surveillance → gamification enrolls people into self-governance by using their highest aspirations and capacities, that of self-care and self-development.

• Participatory surveillance → the social and playful aspects of surveillance

Explain how digitized games differ from non-digital games.

Gaming is the execution of algorithmic codes in coordination with the operation of a player. The player engages with the machine, fundamentally becoming a part of the cybernetic feedback system

• When games are digitized, the rules are not only formalized, they are hidden from players by the black box of the game software

• Distributed to larger audience, the work involved in interpreting the rules (and thus the system of social order) is taken entirely out of the players hands, and is instead reliant on algorithms

Understand why algorithms become "black boxed" when games become digital.

• rules hidden by the “black box”

• interpretation not up to the players anymore, bu the algorithm

Explain how gamified systems use feedback loops, rewards, badges and rankings.

∙Gamification relies on quantification – measures everyday lives to quantify activities which enables cycles of feedback and behaviour modification which are propagated as play.

Understand Whitson's discussion of running apps and gamified workplaces

Shared identity as a healthy subject, part of a community that embraces similar values.

The game adds society to the otherwise solitary process of running.

1. Exposing the minutiae of our everyday lives and delving for meaningful patterns,

2. Using this data to improve ourselves

3. Inciting and maintaining behaviour change by making this self-improvement process more pleasurable

Explain why Whitson believes gamified workplaces often fail.

• Gamification promises to turn workplaces into play spaces

• the competitive ‘game’ would provide incentive to continually improve efficiency, to innovate and find creative methods to field the greatest number of calls

• The bar for achievement is constantly raised

• if workers are unable to turn off a game, it is no longer a game.