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Cisco, Amway Corporation or the American Medical Association—just to
mention some of Institute for the Future's public members (see http://www.
iftf.org/members)— consent to the introduction of a critical and democra-
tizing tool like this into their own companies? Will we eat points if we do
not have decent salaries?
On the other side, we have the concept of Epic Win , which in my opinion
is utterly infantile as well as a stimulus of limited use, whose motivational
ef ects disappear fast as times goes by. McGonigal presupposes that we all
need this kind of epic motivation (predominantly bio-masculine) and can-
not achieve self-fulfi lment on our own through love for our actions. Instead
of emphasizing the need for education, stimulation of personality and gen-
eration of creative individuals in view of their self-fulfi lment, she suggests
that we treat every task as if it were about winning the war against Dark
Vader and Palpatine's Empire rather than working on the idea of satisfac-
tion by well-done and well-paid work, carried out with all guarantees and
as far as possible from Marcusian alienation.
Kropotkin used to say that “there is not a strict frontier between work
and game . . . those who play, without considering how useful or useless
it is the activity they are immersed in, go into action in all seriousness as
required by the game rules [ . . . ] the only purpose of leisure is to allow
individuals to contemplate the world's work and their own display inside
this work” (Kropotkin). Gamifi cation opens the path to playing without
leisure, to playing at work, to the lack of silence (time out) necessary for
contemplation, allowing only the noise and the incessant murmuring of
working and imposing a rhythm dif erent from that of the game, which
follows the game's rules only to comply with the demands of work. Game
is demanding with respect to our own standards; work is demanding with
respect to the premisses of the global market and the dictatorship of fi nan-
cial departments.
In my opinion, refl ection on the changes operated in our mode of orga-
nizing work and productive forces should not be exclusively focused on
productivity: “who has bothered to study the importance of game and cre-
ativity in ancient civilizations?” continues Kropotkin. The concept of gami-
fi cation, as it appears in McGonigal's texts, is almost exclusively linked to
productivity, and “every appeal for productivity comes from above. But
only creativity is spontaneously rich. It is not from 'productivity' that a
full life is to be expected” (Vaneigem 2007, 55), but from those human
activities that make possible a self-discovery and a development as persons
within this society, something that, paradoxically, turns out to be much
more productive also economically.
Maslow coined the term metamotivation to describe self-actualized peo-
ple that act upon innate forces beyond their basic needs, so that they can
explore and develop their complete human potentialities. Is gamifi cation
corporations' ultimate attempt to control even that which should or should
not motivate us? Is it the fi nal extirpation of self-motivated creativity?
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