Recently, videogame academic and designer Ian Bogost caught the eye of many by calling 'bullshit', Penn & Teller-style, on the current circus surrounding gamification and those peddling it.
The crux of Bogost’s argument is that, regardless of whether videogame design has anything interesting to teach us about human behaviour, the very hint that it might has been hijacked “as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.” The 'consultants' that Bogost later implicates in this corporate rodeo, which also includes a host of suddenly famous authors and speakers, are evident everywhere - as is their dogma. A quick Amazon search for the term gladly testifies to this end.
I first want to highlight Bogost’s use and definition of the word 'bullshit'. He says: “We normally think of bullshit as a synonym-albeit a somewhat vulgar one-for lies or deceit. But [Harry] Frankfurt [in his treatise On Bullshit] argues that bullshit has nothing to do with truth. Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit.”
Despite Bogost’s professed technical accuracy and the soundness of his subsequent reasoning, that word and all it connotes is inflammatory and unhelpful within the context of any serious discussion about gamification. It’s particularly difficult to credibly call somebody else out for the cynical exploitation of a buzzword when your own argument itself depends on sensationalising the subject.
I feel qualified to talk about this because I work in advertising, an industry that is built in no insignificant part on the bullshit Bogost is attacking. I find myself distressed by his article not least because I also hate to see games exploited like this, and perhaps unreasonably expect the polemics of academics like Bogost to avoid stooping to the lowest common denominator with headlines that I’m sure he knows full well will be quoted at the expense of his argument. I don’t think it's at all condescending to assume that many will not take the time to appreciate the subtlety of his particular definition of 'bullshit'.
Popping the bubble
That aside, here is the bottom line, and I think I’m in tacit collusion with Bogost on this point. Gamification - or any insights that may or may not underpin it - do not and will never offer any alternative to the fundamental mechanics of the marketplace. If your product or service sucks it will fail, and no amount of knowledge about game design - whether earnestly or superficially applied - is going to help it.
While, again, I hate to see games exploited, Bogost’s sheer outrage is also surprising. Gamification is only the latest in over a decade-long stream of tech-inspired trends that have been seized upon by opportunistic hucksters. This is a point to which he actually alludes. From social media to mobile to user-generated content - and everything in between - with any new, cool, shiny, interesting new development comes an explosion of corporate con artists looking to profit in the short term. And there is also no shortage of cynical marketing types looking to buy any new, cool, shiny, interesting thing that is dangled before them.
The average tenure of any chief marketing officer is a meagre 23 months (this compared to the 54-month lifespan of the average CEO). As such, rather than being primarily concerned with engaging in activities that might have some semblance of sustainability, and developing best practice within those activities, many marketing practitioners are more concerned with their own fame so that in t-minus 22 months, when it’s their turn to hop off the carousel, they have something on their CV that paints them as a pioneer of some brave new world. The sad reality is that things like gamification, by virtue of being underpinned by something that is genuinely interesting, find themselves as common avenues of exploitation.
If you’re actually in the business of doing interesting things, then I’m afraid bullshit comes with the territory.
But to reject gamification outright is to reject the idea that business people, marketers and policy makers have anything to learn from game design. They do. And, as Bogost elegantly points out, this represents “changing the very operation of most businesses”. That’s what I find most exciting. I think its important to go back to Bogost’s initial definition of and remember that “bullshit” doesn’t describe the thing itself but the class of people who emerge around it. The circus has to leave town sooner or later, we’ll find that the word ‘gamification’ will be far less divisive and the real work can begin.
Thom Dinsdale works in advertising. You can follow him @thomdinsdale. Read and follow Thoms's other columns on his topic page.