In recent years gamification has emerged as a design trend in customer relationship
management, marketing, education and governance. It promotes the use of game design
principles in the organization of every day environments, tasks and interactions. As an
offspring of advanced communication technologies, gamification relies on the unhindered
use of networked devices that transforms every experience into a user experience.
Borrowing on the ubiquitous popularity of video games, the premise of gamification is the
technologically enabled relationship between virtual causes and real-life effects, and its
promise - a mutually beneficial coordination of corporate and personal interest.
This dissertation outlines the socio-political implications of the concept of
gamification through a critical examination of its content and intended meanings. The
unpacking of gamification as an aspiration and a worldview reveals that as soon as we take
for granted the equality of the sign and the signified, we also accept that life experiences do
not exceed the signs we use to describe them. Therefore, to play life as a game, as gamifiers
urge, is to live life by design.
The definition I coin considers gamification from the perspective of political
consequences, rather than practical application and mechanics. I work towards this
definition by focusing on the rhetoric of gamification as an expressed intention that
constructs motives and renegotiates beliefs. Hence, the theoretical model I apply draws on
the work of two major theorists. American rhetorician and philosopher Kenneth Burke
offers a theoretical apparatus for the study of the form and rhetorical devices of addressed
messages. French semiotician and social theorist, Jean Baudrillard, informs the
deconstruction of the claims gamification makes. The treatment of language as intention
and action that is necessarily subjective and interested, offers a liminal stand-point from
where the vision of a gamified world can be seen as an ideology which normalises itself by
rhetorical means. Thus, I propose that the concept of gamification, whether applied in
practice or not, is a political act. It constructs an ideology that seeks to reconcile the myth
of the sacrosanct freedom of the Western individual with the constant imposition of
corporate and government demands for compliance, accountability and efficiency.
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