“You can Deny Seriousness, but you can’t Deny Play”:

Emergent Resistance to Purposive Games

Luca Morini

Abstract
The present article will discuss how in recent years serious games, gamification and related purposive
approaches to games and play have seen an extremely widespread adoption by a variety of institutions,
both corporate and public, as means of engaging with users and gathering data on and through them,
aimed at “improving” marketing, education, healthcare or workplace management. This explosive
spread has elicited a diverse set of academic and theoretically inclined responses which will be touched
on and discussed throughout this contribution, highlighting a plural set of critiques built on trans-
disciplinary pedagogical, political and philosophical grounds. However, in parallel to the above
mentioned academic response, the growing gaming literacy within large parts of the public has brought
to the spontaneous emergence of resistance to gamification and purposive games in general. These
practices, that the contribution will discuss through a series of theoretically linked vignettes, question
and resist the cultural implications of all purposive approaches to play and games. Having gone
through the above mentioned perspectives, the participants will then be engaged in a role-play activity,
where they will be encouraged to engage critically with a particular, and to devise ways to subvert the
constraining and purposive game elements away from their intended purpose and toward true, free
play. This will help participants to adopt an active role in engaging with the challenges and the
contested politics that will characterise the “Ludic Century”.

Keywords: Gamification, Purposive Games, Playfulness, Critique.

*****

1. The Rise of Gamification

In recent years a new “magic bullet” discourse has emerged (Kopec & Pacewitz, 2015), as a
“disruptive innovation” (Bower & Christensen, 1995) able to tackle all of the challenges of 21st
Century life: that of digital games, and particularly that of gamification, usually defined as “the use of
game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding et al. 2011). Gamification in particular, at the
forefront of related purposive approaches to games and play (Stenros, 2015), has seen an extremely
widespread adoption by a variety of institutions, both corporate and public, as means of engaging with
users and gathering data on and through them, aimed at improving the efficacy of a variety of services
(Zichermann, 2011).
Thanks to a wide range of studies (Bogost, 2011; Deterding, 2011; Watson, 2012; Kopec & Pacewitz,
2015; Stenros, 2015) the political, epistemological and anthropological roots of gamification have been
already thoroughly discussed, unpacked and demystified through the adoption of a critical and
historical approach. To start with the most basic historical level, the theory and practice of gamification
(a term invented by computer programmer Nick Pelling in 2002) finds the spark of its modern impetus
in the field of marketing, with the publication of the 2010 Bunchball Whitepaper, “Gamification 101”
and it’s important to note how Bunchball was also the first company to provide gamification services
and consultancy. This evident conflict of interests notwithstanding, gamification has in the last few
years gained a lot of traction, due, according to Pedercini (2014) and Smolen (2015), to a consonance
with the language of management and with the concurrent neoliberal push for scaling, efficiency, and
the construction of easily recognizable standards and benchmarks.
Gamification has however been seamlessly adopted in the creation of applications that go well beyond
its original domain of marketing, and entered the fields of healthcare (see Pereira et al., 2014),
workplace management approaches (see DuVernet & Popp, 2014), and has finally entered the field of
education (see Sousa et al., 2014), eliciting a vivacious debate that constitutes the core theoretical
grounding for this paper.

2. Four Layers of Academic Criticism

Despite the plurality and pervasiveness of the above discussed applications, gamification’s reputation
within the academia has been contested to say the least, with strong criticism of both specific
implementations and of the underlying theoretical frameworks coming from a plurality of disciplinary
fields and perspectives. I will focus on four main “strands” of criticism, attacking gamification as a
rethoric, as a psycho-anthropological theory, as an governmentally oriented epistemology and as an
eco-systemic vision. I will start with what is still, to the present day, probably the most famous and
resonant condemnation of gamification comes from Ian Bogost, who, himself quoting philosopher
Harry Frankfurt, discusses gamification as “bullshit”, that is, an “activity unconstrained by a concern
with truth”. Bogost’s concern here is mainly rethorical, in the highest sense of the word, pertaining the
capacity or the will to inform and persuade, something he denies most of gamification applications,
discussing them (together with consultancy in general) as first and foremost a way for the (lucrative)
practice to perpetuate itself. While this particular criticism, more of an ad hominem directed at
gamification practitioners than an actual philosophical attack on the practice, has been explicitly
addressed by proponents of gamification (see, among others, Chou, 2015) it has not yet brought to a
careful reconsideration of the scientific and epistemological framework which underlie it, and that will
be addressed below.
A second strand of critique is indeed of a scientific nature, addressing some implicit psychological and
anthropological assumptions of gamification: gamification applications rely overwhelmingly on
extrinsic motivation, that is rewarding their users, be it with trivially with points, badges, achievements
(as it has been criticised within the gamification movement itself, see again Chou, 2015) or with social
status. This anthropological construction of the ideal user as Homo Economicus fails to address
intrinsic motivation, as in finding meaning and value in the activity itself, and with it infringes on the
autonomy of learning and working subjects, who become the objects of “Mandatory fun” (Mollick &
Rothbard, 2014). In doing this, gamification is inherently behaviouristic, and even when it goes beyond
simple Skinner Boxes (see Skinner, 1953), for example advocating the reach for social status or the
feeling of mastery, it is hard to find an example of gamification that is not aimed at shaping behaviour
in an intended way, as game designer Jeff Watson argues (2012). That is, gamification’s (and
purposive games’) main paradigm is that of behavioural design and compliance generation, and as
game designer and cultural critic Paolo Pedercini highlights, any tool that actually “works” in this
sense can be dangerous, and, even if born of good will, can be co-opted by marketers and governments
to further their own agenda (Pedercini, 2014).
A third critical perspective, which can be placed on a higher order and also widened to the “gameful”
approaches supported by Jane McGonigal (2011), pertains the epistemological and governmental level,
advocating the possibility, meaningfulness and (most relevantly) usefulness of the quantification,
algorhythmisation (and subsequent commodification) of the self. This epistemology and ideology are
ingrained in many gamified applications, and are resonant of the general culture of late capitalism, as
best expressed by game designer James Schell’s “Visions of the Gamepocalypse” (2010):

Your toothbrush can sense that you’re brushing your teeth. Ding, five points for that. Oh, and
you brushed your teeth every day this week. Ding, 20 points for that. And the toothbrush and
toothpaste company love this, because it means you’ll buy more toothbrushes and toothpaste.

Anthropologist Casey O’Donnell pushes the criticism of this dystopian vision further, arguing that
these applications can lead users to give up control and judgment to opaque automated systems of
arbitrary design, something that he finds especially dangerous as pertaining gamification of the
workplace, transformed in a site of total surveillance.
These remarks bridge us to last strand of criticism I defined eco-systemic, and is well expressed by
Sebastian Deterding in his talk “Designing against Productivity”, where he discusses how most
gamification systems are integral part of a culture aimed at maximizing productivity at the expense of
the plurality of human experience. Deterding’s accusations echo anthropologist and system thinker
Gregory Bateson’s criticism of conscious purpose (1972) as something that can deny us vision of the
larger patterns and processes which constitute and make sustainable the environments we live in.
The core of the argument here is not so much against the shallow characterisation of productivity itself
offered by gamified approaches, which has been already touched on in the quantification oriented
criticism. The core of the issue lies in how the focus on productivity comes at the expense of every
other aspect of human life, and, even most relevantly, on the systemic side effects of this single
mindedness itself, effects that we can see reflected in our social, political and environmental crises, and
that adopting the techno-deterministic gaze of gamification will only aggravate (see Selwyn, 2013).

3. (Gaming) Literacy for Subversiveness

While, as discussed above, the academia brings forward a plurality of articulate theoretical perspectives
it is, however, outside of it that, in the author’s opinion, have emerged the practices that can better
complexify and resist the multifaceted push of gamification and purposive gaming approaches. At the
core of these alternative practices stands an informally constructed, systemic, playful, design-based
“gaming literacy” (as discussed by Eric Zimmerman, 2009 and Gee, 2012), a capability that echoes the
pedagogical writing of Freire & Macedo (2005) in its characterisation not only as a passive capacity for
decoding and acquiring information, but as an active capacity for reading the world, and even more
importantly, to be active producers of knowledge, and therefore to “write” it, enacting social and
political change. This gaming literacy practices are indeed the domain of participatory cultures, as
defined by Henry Jenkins (2006), in contrast with consumer culture, as cultures where cultural
production is democratised and seamlessly shared, transforming the public from passive consumers to
hybrid “prosumers”.
A number of linked cultural phenomena that stand out of the contexts of formal education testify the
rise of this new literacy, which coincides with new configurations in production relationships.
Emerging in the nineties, informal communities of gamers started to modify (“mod”) commercial
games and share them freely, implicitly criticising notions of authorship and intellectual property,
while at the same time demonstrating a technical know-how beyond their supposed “amateur” status
(see Sotamaa, 2003, for an in depth examination of these practices). In more recent years, this amateur
co-creation phenomenon has widened and obtained a place in the gaming industry as a whole, as the
so-called “Rise of Indies” (Wolf & Iwatani, 2015) sees the emergence of hybrid designers-cultural
critics that argue for a wider possibility of expression through the medium of games (among which Zoe
Quinn and Anna Anthropy, touching on sensitive themes such as clinical depression and gender
dysphoria). Most relevantly to this discussion, this movement pushes for a wider engagement of
audiences as producers and creators, overcoming the distinction between gamer and game creator, not
only through technical know-how, but again echoing Freire, through cultural awareness and critique.
It’s in the context of this growing, informally constructed new literacy that we can frame the
subversive uses of purposive game applications, practices that game-using institutions often
simplistically reframe as “cheating” or “trolling”. Cheating practices in digital games are discussed at
length by Mia Consalvo (2009), and far from being considered simplistically as an unethical, they are
also a possible avenue for playfulness (following Salen & Zimmerman’s definition of “free movement
within a more rigid structure”, 2004), as in many cases the subversion of the rules can be a way of
reasserting agency and taking back control from a system that has become overly rigid and therefore
uncomfortable to inhabit. Cheating can therefore be the only way keep play (“free movement”) alive,
even if that means breaking the very rules that sustain it.

4. “You Can’t Deny Play” – Three Cases

So here we come to the title quote, taken from Huizinga’s seminal Homo Ludens, which testifies the
power of play to overcome constraints, even structural and (deontological) ethical ones, pushing
against the above touched on narrowly economy-oriented perspective on being human:

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God.
You can deny seriousness, but you can't deny play. And in acknowledging play, you
acknowledge mind.

The intent, here, is precisely to acknowledge the minds of those who employed play to deny
abstractions such as gain and efficiency through the subversion of purposive gameful systems,
illustrating three specific cases which showcase ways in which the first three above discussed streams
of academic criticism are actually embodied in spontaneous, game literate, participatory practices of
resistance and disruption.
The most known case of pervasive cheating in a gamified application is that of FourSquare (as
discussed by Glas, 2011), a platform which allowed users to “tag” themselves in the real world and
obtain badges and achievements based on the type of locations attended (e.g. a “I’m on a boat!”
achievement) and the frequency of attendance thereof (e.g. “Mayor” status for the user who “checked
in” most frequently at a specific location). Here the “lack of concern with truth” touched on by Bogost
created opportunities for pervasive cheating, in the form of creative mis-tagging of locations and in
deceptive behaviour in self-position reporting
It has to be said that FourSquare’s designers’ very open policy as pertaining cheating, explicitly
favouring participation to rigour (ibid.), and the reliance of the platform on community tagging on
locations, always left the door open to cheating, and even embraced it. This, however, still allowed
playful cheating users to make the game backfire onto the non-gamers who would exploit the platform
for real world gains. The most notable example is that of cheaters disrupting practices of in-game
marketing, and therefore FourSquare’s links with corporate entities, by using their “unfairly” obtained
achievements to freely access benefits and gifts, the self-servingly deployed rethorics of sociability and
advertising subverted through play.
A similar case, which bridges us to include the psychological strand of critique, is that of cheating in a
Students Orientation app, Orientation Password, as discussed by Fitz-Walters & Tjondronegoro
(2011), which tasked students with exploring the campus facilities and rewarded them with a plethora
of achievement. While response to the app was positive, citing usefulness and engagement, here is the
psycho-anthropological, extrinsic motivation based approach of the gamified application that backfired
in some cases. Even though, differently from simply checking in with FourSquare, there would be an
intrinsic motivation for the students to play through the game in the intended way (that is, getting to
know how to navigate the University grounds), its focus on outcomes in lieu of processes prompted
some students to abuse the lenient GPS criteria, exploiting technological and infrastructural constraints,
to check at multiple locations at the same time, bypassing most of the app’s intended, real world
contents. While the study did not collect the subjective impressions of these cheating students, their
choice is still notable, in that they actively sought a way to elude the game system, even to their active,
immediate detriment, in a refusal to submit to the game implicit imperatives while still appearing
extremely successful in its explicit objectives.
In a similar note, a third, extensive field of cheating in purposive gaming pertains especially fitness
related applications (among which we can count the very different implementations of Nike+, FitBit,
StepByStep and Zombie Run!). While promoting fitness can be considered in itself a laudable
objective, Whitson (2014) discusses how this links not only with widespread self-quantification, but
also with a kind of bio-power (see Foucault, 1990), that is, a technique to implement control of the
bodies, and orient them to specific objectives, in this case an hegemonic aesthetic of efficiency and
productivity. Cheating in fitness application (as discussed in Cercos & Mueller, 2013, and Gal-Oz &
Zuckerman, 2015) takes a plurality of forms, among which tricking step-counting devices by applying
them to bike wheels, retroactively changing objective to obtain achievements, or even simply shaking
the device to make it mismeasure distance walked. What all these practices have in common is that
they “game the system” (Deterding, 2014), finding different, creative pathways to the achievement of
objectives that do not comply with the bio-political imperative to productivity and fitness, and entail an
increased awareness of its structure and technological implementations.
Though this cases can fruitfully work as examples of resistance practices, it is undeniable that research
in the field is still quite scarce (in compliance with a general lack of research on “failed”
implementations of any technique), but while the above cases and applications of gamification thereof
look generally benign, we can imagine dangerous scenarios that involve the above touched on
“gamepocalypse”, a complete eco-systemic pervasivity of gamification practices. These hypothetical
scenarios will constitute the basis for the conclusive section of this paper.

5. Playing against the Game Dystopia

Having gone through the above mentioned perspectives, I am taking a more interactive stance to
confront the last of the critical strand, the eco-systemic one as, deeming it inclusive and on a higher
order of complexity than the others, it necessitates an approach radically different from linear, written
argumentation. I am therefore proposing my readers a playful exercise, where they will be encouraged
to engage critically and playfully with a broadly gamified scenario, and to devise ways to subvert the
constraining and purposive game elements away from their intended purpose and toward true, free
play. This will help participants to adopt an active role in engaging with the challenges and the
contested politics that will characterise the “Ludic Century” (Zimmerman & Chaplin, 2013), our
present, game-dominated media ecology.
Imagine this scenario: a society where there is no concern with truth, but where control of media
channels directly translates to power; where every activity is quantified according to standardised
criteria, optimised on the basis of this quantification and sold; where people are expected to be made
compliant by the allure of extrinsic rewards, be them monetary or connected to social status; where the
public sphere is pushed to be increasingly oriented to the single minded pursuit of productivity, and to
submit to the “market imperatives” as if they were ontological truths or physical laws. Does this
remind you of anything?
Truth is, gamification and purposive gaming are only the most explicit expressions of the general state
of affairs in late capitalism, and their spread (which, maybe unexpectedly, can find its precursors in
Soviet Russia’s obsession with productivity; see Nelson, 2012) is closely linked with the rise of global
audit culture (Shore & Wright, 1999) and with an explosive increase in surveillance and
managerialisation of the public sphere (see Allen, 2005). In this environment purposive games are a
useful and ideologically coherent to cloak surveillance and governmental injunctions (again in a
Foucaultian sense), and have the same constraining function of the paradoxical injunction “be
autonomous”, discussed by Bateson (1972) as a form of double bind, a subtle form of control founded
in communicative confusion more than in open coercion.
Now, let us add just a couple more basic constraints, to better frame this (overtly realistic) scenario as a
game: the quick, dirty way to do this is adding turns, a quantified resource and well defined, if
exceedingly simplistic, roles (see Elias et al, 2012), for example Public Institutions, Business and
Citizens. Then we distribute the resource, coins will do, giving ten to Business, a single one to
Citizens, and none to Public institutions (very roughly mimicking wealth distribution in the United
States). Each player, taking turns, can narrate an interaction with another player which culminates in
the discussion of a rule that applies to that specific player in the imaginary “gamified society” scenario
(e.g. Business can declare that Public education must be about getting a job, or Citizens can declare
that We have a right to free healthcare). The “ruled” player can then reject the rule by spending a coin,
or they can instead narrate themselves submitting to the rule to be given a coin from the “ruling” player
(for similar, if more structured, experiments, see Crocco, 2011, subverting the common boardgame
Monopoly in a discussion of inequality and critical pedagogy, or Burke’s role-playing game Dog Eat
Dog, proposing a poignant exploration of power dynamics in colonialism, which is the main inspiration
for my example).
Playing this game as it is, Business has overwhelming narrative control, and can soon come to define
the full range of the other players’ activity, in a dystopian expression of gamified biopower. So here is
your challenge: how do you cheat? How do you break the system? But most importantly, how can you
redesign it from within to be more sustainable and humane? While this might look as an empty
exercise in utopianism, we must remember that, quoting American artist and historian Bowyer Bell,

“to cheat, not to play the game that reflected the norm, indicated that there was another world,
the world of deception, in which people did not play the game, your game, but their own.”

This is, ultimately, our challenge, as scholars and educators: to resist the simple vision of the norm, and
make known that there are always other worlds, other games that can be played. Even if it requires
breaking the rules.

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