Whew, been a long while since you’ve seen one from me.

That said, I wanted to make some comments about Ian Bogost’s article here, and a few others on the subject of Gamification.

I have what amounts to serious issues with the whole notion of gamification. I see it somewhat along the same lines of the Tomacco episode of The Simpsons:

Exec:	Meet the Laramie cigarette team.  This is Mindy, J. P.,
	and Emil.
Mindy:	Homer, we're in a bit of a pickle.  Kids are crazy about
	tobacco, but the politicians won't let us sell it to them.
Homer:	Those dirty, rotten --
Mindy:	Tell me about it.  But there's no law against selling kids
	tomacco.  That little "m" is worth a lot of money to us --
	and to you.
Homer:	How much?

And this is really where it hits home for me. Where I sit, products are no longer sold on the basis of quality, or need, but on the basis of how well the metrics, marketing and doublespeak are constructed.

This is where the notion of gamification really lies. It’s the current crop of tomacco for the current generation of marketers. Gamification is simply another word for what amounts to submarine marketing. The best place to look at this correlation is the old Joe Camel advertising campaign. While tobacco executives would never admit that a cartoon camel, with an associated point system tied directly to packs of cigarettes was not targeted at new smokers and people under 18…if it walks like a duck and quacks…

Were the points you got off a pack of camels, and the associated merchandise you could get with those points a form of game? I suppose you could make the analogy loosely: you got points for smoking, and could trade them in at the camel cash shop for everything from pool cues to leather jackets.

But, the real question here is: was it a game?

No. I don’t think so. I think it was a marketing campaign dressed up to appeal to base elements in human nature. If that’s not exploitative, I do not know what is. It was a marketing campaign that existed before we dressed it up with a cooler term (gamification) to hide the ugly side of marketing. The main idea of which is carefully constructed elements to exploit the base elements of human nature, especially children, who amount to new long term customers. While you might be tempted to call me out along the lines of “oh, he’s saying won’t you please think of the children…” but adults are just as susceptible. Maybe not as much as children, but they are human beings as well.

Were there game elements in the Joe Camel campaign? Sure. Points, redeemable items. Was there satisfaction, or a “fun” factor involved?

Only if you were on the board of directors of a cigarette company. Everyone else lined up for Lung Cancer or worse.

It’s in that realm the I think the real point lies. Gamification is a disarming term. It illicits a controlled response. It’s doublespeak and it is, at the core a mask for nothing more than a marketing campaign of some sort. That said, if you want to drink the gamification kool-aid, that’s fine and dandy. But if you’re going to ascribe to any philosophy, you should at least know what it really entails. Gamification is a disarming term, with a carefully constructed connotation, so as not to alert the person being -ified they are being pitched at. A wrapper used by marketing types to sell crap using metrics and psychology.

Or, if you don’t like that way of describing it, Ian Bogost has a better term: Exploitationware.