35B3 retrospective on "gamified play"

[droqen]

re: droqen's
"gamified play"
(date unknown, sometime 2019)

[droqen]

full text, in case the archive goes down:

gamified play

What feels like an eternity ago, gamification was the hot buzzword of the day, and it was mostly met with vague confusion and disgust to my recollection? Some people disagree and remember it fondly. OK. But in my memories of my circles, gamification was shiny and cool for like a week and then spiralled downwards: how crass, that someone would use our tools of joy for tricking people into any number of things. (Tricking kids into learning what we want them to learn? Tricking adults into exercising? Tricking people with money into parting with their money? TBH at the time I wasn't paying attention, really, to what people were doing with gamification, only the gamification itself.)

I like figuring words out for myself and teasing out the hidden meanings that I unintentionally ascribe to them. In this case, I've been attached for so long to the idea of being a person who makes (mostly video-) games, and as the discourse around what games are shifts, so does my sense of self as a creator or, if I dare, an artist.

Today I realized my idea of what games are is gamified play. That is, games (as I see them, or saw them) are suffering from gamification, but the thing they are (and have been) gamifying is the act of play. So if games are gamified play, what if I'm a... I don't know, a play artist? Someone who makes playable art?

Today's big conclusion is "I want to make games without gamification," and if I've got to attach a word to that I've been thinking of just calling them playables.

[droqen]

moochi pointed out a similarity between gamified play's "gamification" and kill gameplay's "gameplay", and i think the lineage is pretty clear to me... although lately i have been divesting myself even of an authorial relationship to play, 'kill gameplay' had less to do with that than just forcing the conversation to go to a place where game devs could not disavow themselves of the thing.

moochi wrote:

i got in some arguments because of [the gamified play post/topic] cause people wanted to distinguish this general gamification from the specific one tha duolingo &c does and i was like its the same thing!!

... i remember getting into these kinds of disagreements, and i suppose that using the word 'gameplay' rather than 'gamification' was a (messy, rough, blunt,) way to avoid this particular conversational branch. in general, the response to my 'playables' and 'kill gameplay' were pretty similar -- a little bit of curiousity and a large amount of 'well i wouldn't go that far but you do you' -- but i do think that the kill gameplay conversations cut a lot deeper into the right places, allowed me to access a better understanding of the topic. i'm not sure if it had a beneficial effect for others.