The Gamification of Games and Inhibited Play

Gamification has been touted as a revolutionary technique for promoting education, fitness, work, and more, but has also been argued to harm the very areas it claims to improve. Thus, the importance of reflection on gamification in different contexts is clear; in this article, I examine gamification within games themselves. While it may be thought that gamifying a game is either impossible or trivial, articulating its possibility allows us to uncover its impacts. I first explore some definitions of gamification within the literature (Section 1). After introducing the prospect that a game might be gamified despite this being either impossible or trivial on existing definitions, I then redefine gamification such that gamifying games is meaningfully possible (Section 2). I next distinguish kinds of gameplay, building on Thi Nguyen's achievement play and striving play to defend two additional kinds: roleplay and authorial play (Section 3). Finally, I combine the preceding strands to identify a potential harm of the gamification of games: a gamified game encourages certain kinds of gameplay over others, producing play under constraints, whereas gamification as a trend across gaming culture creates an impoverished play environment by establishing game design norms that prevent players from deciding how they play, producing inhibited play (Section 4).