Gamification as the Post-Modern Phalanstère - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 185

3. The more they play, the more they are interested in the company they
work for.
4. They do not believe in the imposed hierarchies, instead, as Castron-
ova has also noted, they prefer a merit-based hierarchy that is also
more productive.
These and other theses mentioned in this lecture demonstrate the theo-
ries that point out that youths who play video games have a high level of
qualifi cation, if this is combined with the appropriate stimuli and attitudes.
Their “mental wiring”, as Broglia calls it, is dif erent. The wiring of these
youths is an extension of the System that is already digitalized, but whose
functioning still needs the intervention of these human minds.
However, we should notice that the elements that operate gamifi cation
(rules, challenges, achievements and rewards, points, rankings, levels) have
been familiar to us for a long time in dif erent aspects of our real life,
for instance, in the practice of martial arts and in military activities in
general. Martial arts (Budo) serve as the simulacrum/gamifi cation (meta-
phorically speaking) that prepares for warfare (the act of killing in real-
ity). The rules that determine the “etiquette” or accepted social behaviour
(greetings, treatment of companions, etc.) are clearly established. On the
other side, there are also conditions for success, achievements and rewards
that assume the form of victorious combats, acquisition of new abilities
or belts (system of ranks refl ected in the belt colour), scoring in individual
combats, ranking in long-term championships, etc. All these elements are
preparatory for the real arena (combat rules, strategy, military ranks and
decorations); they are present in all cultures in varying degrees and were
incorporated to the civil games. At the end of the last century, these games
evolved into role-playing games (with their experience points system and
character levels) and subsequently into digitalized role-playing games (role-
playing video games) and from there into other types of video games where
experience results in improvements for our character.
The natural grammar generated by a cultural medium like civil games,
and later by a massively distributed consumer good (video games) and its
infl uence on contemporary (leisure) society, make this view of the world
and the personal evolution (avatar evolution in video games) a part of our
lives whether we like it or not, at least metaphorically. This grammar does
not come from the game world, it is a much older structuring, perhaps of
military origin or stemming from the innate need for a hierarchic structur-
ing and classifi cation of our competitive societies. We can thus argue that
by being classifi ed according to our academic degrees, professional experi-
ence, civil state, properties, dress code, etc., gamifi cation is imposed upon
us from early childhood.
“Video games render social realities into playable form” (Galloway
2006, pp17). In tune with gamifi cation, this infl uence is bidirectional,
i.e. inversely, reality itself becomes a playable structure. In this case, it is