Gamification as the Post-Modern Phalanstère - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 192

self-fulfilment??

NON
CREATIVE
WORK

FORCED
WORK

Gamificated
WORK

LEISURE

CR^ rivE
^VOJ%L

Figure 10.3 Using gamifi cation to replace or imitate “attractive, creative works”.

serve those purposes at all so that the workers of this or that company
are more ei cient, unless gamifi cation does generate a more creative and
spontaneous kind of work that allows recognition and self-fulfi lment and
relevant personal and social contributions, instead of merely accumulated/
accumulating capital and dividends.
In Reality Is Broken , Jane McGonigal mixes concepts and initiatives
without criticizing the basis of work and satisfaction itself. She proposes
a surrogate fl ow when she points out, “You feel like your actions are hav-
ing a signifi cant impact on the world around you” (2011, pp 59). Here
she is making reference to the fact that World of Warcraft gamers sup-
posedly feel and giving us the clue of which should be the critique to our
current productive and personal models of labor. In this sense, I think the
idea of autotelic satisfaction—the love for that we do and feel—may be
complemented by gamifying elements that intrinsically produce fun, relax-
ation and diversity in the toughest and most dii cult tasks. However, such
a love or self-satisfaction would never be attained unless other elements of
Maslow's pyramid are fulfi lled; gamifi cation could be an obstacle to this
purpose if it tries to substitute them.
Gamifi cation emerges as a double alienation, i.e. the alienation of the
work alienation, where “each individual lives his repression freely as his
own life” (Marcuse, pp. 76), of that kind of work that takes up most of our
individual life time and contaminates all spheres (even the domestic one).
“Forced gamifi cation” is intended to produce the sort of gratifi cation that
should arise from non-alienated, satisfactory work, based on our desires
and feelings of responsibility, capacities and creativity, and not from one
imposed by the determinism of the market. In this case, gamifi cation would
be another deceptive business formula used to disguise the displeasure and
frustration caused by production, to conceal the lack of transparency with