游戏邦注：本文选自学者兼电子游戏设计师伊恩·博格斯特（Ian Bogost）作著的《Persuasive Games》专栏书，他研究了最近大热的概念——“游戏化”的核心原理，并提出不仅仅是“游戏”，整个关于游戏化的概念都必需重新定义。

我曾试着无视游戏化现象，希望这股浪潮像莫名其妙冒出的丘疹、或者聚会的不速之客、或者是一只Katy Perry音乐的“耳朵虫”（游戏邦注：指歌曲或其他音乐作品的某个片断不由自主地反复在某人脑子里出现的情况）一样会自己销声匿迹。但我了解这个概念后，就意识到堵上耳朵，闭上嘴都不是应对这股浪潮的明智策略。即使我们的目标与游戏化相反，但为了更有效地贯彻我们自己的主张，也必须更好地理解游戏化的威力。

四月初，我在大学写作与交流年会（Conference on College Composition and Communication，简称CCCC或4C大会）上发表讲话。4C大会对于大学里的写作和修辞社团的意义，就像游戏开发者大会之于游戏开发者一样，它的规模也同样很大，并包含了多个同步研讨会。

就像GDC可以炫耀其豪华的晚会因游戏开发公司、发行界巨头和硬件设备大亨而生辉，4C也能因教材出版商的力挺而自豪。

我的第二本书《Persuasive Games》是关于电子游戏及其修辞学的内容，但它并不能立即被相对传统、发展缓慢的修辞学群体所领会。这是我第一次在大会上发言，我渴望在这么多博学、有影响力、传统的学者中传播我的理念。

每个上大学的人都上过写作课。因为我们的交流越来越依赖软件，所以我们应该保证负责这些课程的教师明白计算机算法是怎么运作的。对于大多讲师，包括大学写作和交流学科的教授，这通常是一个有待探索的新领域。

但在我发完言之后的问答环节，我很惊讶地听到其中一个与会者明确提出的问题——关于利用“游戏化”来促进学生的学业表现和融入写作课堂的可能性。这个修辞学学者虽然不明白我正在进行的程序修辞学工作，但他对最近的市场营销技巧倒是非常熟络。这是怎么回事呢？

语言的力量

讽刺的是，这个答案与修辞学密切相关，但却和游戏并无瓜葛。我们喜欢这么想：事物本身概概念的实质比我们赋予它的名称更有意义，但事实并非如此。名称对事物地位的提升具有极大影响和意义。

加州大学伯利克利分校的理论语言学家乔治·莱考夫（George Lakoff）在这一点上享有盛誉，他的观点是人们在自己的论述中概念化或构建世界的方式，对政治学的影响比对政治家的行动更大。举个例子，保守派人士反对社会福利事业，部分原因是他们认为征税是一种巧取豪夺的行为。

保守派政治学家弗兰克·伦兹（Frank Luntz）因精心策划了这些语境而成就了一番事业，他是“反恐战争”（war on terror）和“气候变化”（climate change）这类专有名词的创建者，无论是出于何种政党的立场，这类词在政治领域均被广泛采纳。

正如伦兹所言，你说什么不重要，但人们听到什么才是关键。当我们谈论游戏时，人们常常听不到什么好话。让游戏对娱乐领域之外的人产生吸引力是一项艰巨的任务，它的最大挑战首先就在于使用正确的修辞手法，将其概念升华到更高层次。

“严肃游戏”的修辞学

我们已经历过多次这种情况了——上世纪80年代的政治模仿和90年代的教育娱乐就是例子。最近，严肃游戏掀起了另一波更广泛的领域扩张的尝试。引用一句严肃游戏计划（Serious Game Initiative）的联合创始人Ben Sawyer打出的最新标语，这些游戏的制作和用途已“超越娱乐”的范畴——严肃游戏的应用领域包括商业、健康、军事、教育和出版物等等，这已无需我再赘述。

游戏业界从来不喜欢“严肃游戏”（serious games）这个词，因为它听起来着有些太过简化和贬义，而且无视其他游戏类型的价值和意义。甚至对我们这些致力于推广游戏的人来说，“严肃游戏”这个名称有时也让我们犯难。

人们知道游戏有某种魔力。但人们很少明确地表述这个观点，甚至遣责电子游戏让人沉溺、怂恿人们不断重复无益之事、唆使我们在虚无的东西上砸钱等等。

并非所有人都认同游戏是一种文化、一种媒体、一种艺术。但每个人都似乎同意游戏的力量确实不容小视。这种力量如巫术般神秘、疯狂。你不必喜欢所有游戏，一个就够了。

出于同样的原因，游戏也是可怕的。“游戏”兼有微不足道和威力无穷两个方面的性质。

“严肃游戏”一词有特殊的修辞意图。发明这个词主要是为了迎合高层政府领导、官员和认为“游戏”象征着堕落、强大和庸俗的人群。

无论喜不喜欢这个词（在此声明我不喜欢这个词），“严肃游戏”均显示出了这种迎合大众的强烈意图。这个词为其拥趸指出一条在政治和产业背景下设计游戏的康庄大道，他们声称游戏可以处理重要的社会话题，提供具有积极意义的解决方案。

人们抱怨“严肃游戏”是一种矛盾修饰，他们没有抓住要点：它理应主是一个矛盾修饰。当人们听从“严肃游戏”时， 这个矛盾是显著的，却被悄无声息地化解了。

制作游戏不容易

“严肃游戏”可能有助于克服社会各群体对游戏的最初恐惧，但却无法解决真正制作游戏的可怕现实。政府首脑、军事高官、博士和政客们都不傻，他们知道制作出一款优秀的游戏并不容易，也清楚商业游戏规模庞大、引人注目且耗资巨大，他们明白成百上千的人要以制作游戏为生，他们了解游戏不同于大部分企业产品，游戏与现存的商业形式基本上并不相容。经历了最初的风平浪静，“严肃游戏”却没能抵住后来的惊涛骇浪。不幸的是，在严肃游戏的发展进程中，只有少数游戏乘风破浪，抵达光明的彼岸。

既能有效地服务于严肃的目的，而本身又属于品质上乘的游戏真的不多。制作游戏很困难，制作好游戏更是难上加难，制作能服务于外部目的的游戏就是难于上青天了。

通过严肃游戏计划、GDC的严肃游戏峰会、以超越娱乐为中心的游戏研究设计者（包括我本人、Jim Gee、Jane McGonigal、Katie Salen和Ben Sawyer等许多人）等的努力，游戏的拓展性运用理念已比以往更为吸引人。但严肃游戏及其开发者游戏创建的可行性、游戏应用和拓展等方面的表现却很不如意。

“游戏化”的修辞学

这就是为何“游戏化”一词如此管用的原因所在。这个词保证了“游戏”处于第一位，把人们的注意力集中在这种形式的神秘力量上。但唱反调的人说：“化”这后缀实则是出于一种特定目的，以一种潜移默化的手段，将游戏这种媒介形式套用到了任何一种事物上。

当你“化”了某种事物，你就是在赋予它特定的性质。我们可以用过滤器净化水源，可以通过增加振动频率来强化信号，可以通过种树、清理垃圾来美化城市，可以通过在真相里掺假来虚化报道，可以通过增加水汽来润化空气，可以通过光学仪器来扩大化影像，可以从障碍物后突然跳出来弱化小孩的胆量。

在以上例子中，因为我们可以通过发明可行的设备或解决方案，增加了信号的振幅、移除了液体中的杂质、增加了房间的湿度，但是在大部分的这些情况下，“化”的细节是抽象不明、模糊不清的。城市美化真的只是绿化空间，和城市的基础规划无关？“化”的倡导者通过把目的或特性视为“化”的过程，让实际上是很困难的事，变得看似很容易完成。

这恰恰就是游戏化的全部真相。这里摘录了游戏化运动主要代表Gabe Zicherman所概括的“游戏化”特征：

游戏化可以看作是为了商业目的而使用一些游戏元素的过程。通过requent flyer programs、Nike Running/Nike+或Foursquare等类似体验，我们可以很容易地鉴别出这种趋势。点数、徽章、等级、挑战、排行榜、奖励和职务等元素，就是游戏机制的关键所在。

注意一下，Zicherman是如何巧妙地使他的读者相信积分、徽章、等级、排行榜和奖励是“关键游戏机制”。这种说法当然是错误的——关键游戏机制是游戏中可操作的部分，这些设置是玩家兴趣、启迪、恐惧、迷恋、希望等情绪的来源。分数和等级这类东西只是在这个系统中充当构造和测量进程的指示。

但正如弗兰克·伦兹（Frank Luntz）一次又一次所证明的那样，感觉远比现实重要。当人们听从于“游戏化”时，疯狂而神奇的游戏之兽便可被毫不费力地驯化成为一种简易、顺畅和轻松的过程，在低成本条件下获得高成效。

Margaret Robertson曾批评游戏化现象实际上是把游戏最糟粕的内容当成最精华的部分来展示，并杜撰了“积分化”这个贬义词，认为这样才可以更形象地形容这种现象。

尽管Robertson的评论很引人注目，但对游戏化拥护者来说只是一种无关痛痒的问题。游戏表达法的尊严对游戏化者来说非什么重要之事，他们重视的只是实用性——捕捉一些游戏元素，然后将其散播到商品和服务上。

游戏或者积分并非重点——对游戏化者来说，这二者没有区别。这个“化“才是关键所在。Zicherman的观点是，“游戏化的作用在于让市场营销者把注意力放在他们深谙的手段上——通过游戏的强大黏性，劝说消费者采取忠诚的购买行动。”

游戏化无法复制游戏的精髓

我提到的背景情况，如“严肃游戏”，甚至连我自己提出的“persuasive games”都是一个失败的概念，它们使得游戏看似可轻易被企业组织所制作和利用。问题是，它们本该难以在这种环境下被创建和运用。事实上，游戏破坏了许多行业的运行规则，而游戏化却可以迎合这种规则。

我这么说的充分理由是：因为游戏是系统，提供的是基本不同的特征化想法的方法。它们可以激发我们的独特思考，这是其他形式的媒介所不具备的特点，这种思考看重的是复杂系统的不确定性而不是接受简单的答案。正是这种可能性启发我提出把游戏运用于学习、政治、新闻和商业等其他领域的主张。

但对教育者、政治人物、新闻人物和所有机构工作者（这些机构已经在产业化进程中僵化掉了）来说，这种改变是不受欢迎的，因为它会对他们的工作进行部分或者大规模的重新改造。

我在《Persuasive Games》中列举了大量的例子来说明这一点，其中之一就是广告行业。如果使用得当，游戏就可以给用户带来体验产品或服务的机会。

但这种主张与过去四十年的市场营销策略背道而驰，那时候业内关注的是品牌战术和购买欲战术（游戏邦注：不是通过让人们了解特定产品和服务所具备的特点，而是通过增加产品或服务的亲和力来激发消费者的购买欲）。

在现代市场营销业务里，最佳方案是通用的，重复使用且无需考虑品牌差异，咨询机构和中介商可以为这个方案打包票。游戏化提供的正是这个方案 。无需多想，只需要简单和随意的重复，然后再通过空洞的用户反馈参数证明其价值。就像有了一个网站或社交媒介策略，企业组织凭借游戏化就可以轻而易举地利用游戏的吸引力——只要增加徽章！只要增加排行榜！

游戏化的批评者激情澎湃地发表言论，他们称游戏化错把游戏的第二属性当成基本属性；游戏化侮辱和亵渎了游戏；游戏化混淆了游戏的固有魅力和强制力产生的外在有利诱因；游戏化没有领悟“真正”的游戏之复杂响应性，“真正”的游戏使解决方案看起来困难但有趣，而不是冗长又乏味。

但没有一个反对意见对游戏化产生干扰，他们不想使用游戏中困难、陌生而神秘的功能；他们只追求简单、明确、无聊就好。那些是可能影响“交易API”和以不变应万变的咨询工作室的骗局。

反对游戏化是一场必败之仗。借用乔治·莱考夫最喜欢的一个比喻，这有点像反随胎与支持堕胎的二选一。对于认为堕胎是谋杀的人来说，人们应该享有堕胎的选择权这种论调却是荒谬的。

类似地，对于游戏化的支持者来说，如果只是增加积分和奖励系统，而没有融入游戏交互性的魅力，这也同样毫无意义。要实现这种做法会很困难，因为这可能得改变整个产业的惯例。这得花很多时间和精力，而且这也不合市场营销者、教育、政客和高管们的口味。他们追求的只是简单明了的答案和立竿见影的结果。

这同样也不是游戏化顾问们想要的，他们想要的是在所有人发现他们自己已深陷泥沼之前脱手产品；他们想要的是将这种简易、快速应用的劣质产品与完全不相干的游戏魅力相联系。

“维护生命”是个强有力的词，因为它太难反对了，如果以此作为赞成堕胎的开篇立论来反驳——那确实是个很糟的开头。莱考夫指出，自由党输掉选举很大程度上是因为他们花了大部分时间来强调反对派的主张，不断重复这些词，结果却在潜移默化中强化了对方的观点。相反的，莱考夫认为自由党应该有反映他们自己核心价值的观念，然后据理力争。

对于反对游戏化的游戏人来说，莱考夫的自由党这个例子同样值得他们深省，我们也得让他人听到自己的声音。“游戏化”确实赢了这场修辞战；事实上，人们用这个词来指代游戏的非传统用法的现象已经越来越普遍了。

替代词远没有这么强大。这类词包括Ben Sawyer和Dave Rejeski的“严肃游戏”定义、McGonigal的“游戏的设计”见解（”gameful design”）、我自己的“persuasive games”概念、联系松散的“games for good”运动等等——但没有一者像“游戏化”这么盛行。所以革命尚未成功，我们仍需努力。

用Exploitationware取代“游戏化”

同时，从弗兰克·伦兹那我们还可以学到另一个教训：别让那群反对派创造争论的措词，而应该“捏造”更好的概念来压倒他们。

除了许多口头攻势，伦兹还是语言守势围城的建筑师，他创造了像“死亡税”这样的词，确实招致了比“遗产税”更多的不满。后者听起来是适用于富人的（事实上也是这样），但通过转移人们对“遗产税”的仇富情绪和用对死亡征税的厌恶替换这种怨恨，伦兹赢得了更多主流支持来撤销“遗产税”。

对于游戏化的批评者，最好的举措是暴露“游戏化”与更险恶的活动的联系，从而完全撇清游戏与这个概念的关系。

特别是，游戏化建议用虚拟奖励取代真实奖励。真实奖励要付出代价，但为基于信任关系的双方都提供了价值。相反的是，虚假的奖励减少了或消除了代价，但这么做剥夺了价值和信任。

当企业和组织通过提供奖励来达到自己追求而选民反对的目标时，他们其实就已创建了一种实用性的关系，使双方了解彼此之间的利益联系。公司和客户之间、公司和雇员之间及政府和民众之间就随之产生了忠诚。

举例：某航空公司提供了其商业模式的方案，即达到期望值的飞行常客可获得奖励。雇主提出发展目标，帮忙达成目标的雇员将加薪升职、获得额外津贴。忠诚的真实性催生了互惠。当双方的忠诚并不对等，双方的关系就陷于危机之中了。

游戏化偷梁换柱地以不良的、反常的关系取代了这些真实的、有益的、双向的关系。企业组织要求顾客忠诚，但却用无价值无投入的假货赝品来回馈顾客的信赖。

从这方面讲，“游戏化”是一个误称，更恰当的名称应该是exploitationware。作为一个概念，exploitationware有诸多修辞学上的益处：

exploitationware与游戏惯例无关。这是最重要的一点，因为这样一来，游戏在应用领域就有了发展空间，同时能让它们对游戏化选择产生固有反应。“那么游戏化呢？那看起来好像更低级更容易。”“你是说exploitationware？如果你不介意欺骗消费者，那它就太棒了。”

exploitationware把游戏化与其他更为熟知的欺骗性软件相关联。这些包括了恶意软件、间谍软件和广告软件。然而一些带着软件后缀的软件仍然有积极或者中性的联系（共享软件、免费软件），因为软件开发的负面报道，人们对这些道高一尺，魔高一丈的变体软件更为熟悉了。

exploitationware剔除了游戏化杠杆下的支点。游戏化因其简单、廉价和可复制性而深得咨询机构和公司组织的青睐。它的影响力巨大，一些公司会随波逐流，但大多数公司还是明白错误的选择将付出中期仍至长久的代价。

exploitationware将游戏化定位于高科技市场上存在的恶性惯例行列里。这些惯例包括通过一项产品即一个客户的说法来提取用户的个人信息。谷歌和Facebook看似免费的服务也可能称作另一种exploitationware，因为它们使用免费服务（它们声称自己提供的是免费产品）作诱饵来提取形成它们真正收益基础的信息（它们的实际产品）。

exploitationware为更真实、更有益的游戏运用打开了一扇门。特征化的游戏化作为exploitationware给游戏系统论主张者提出异议的机会。利用游戏做真实的、有意义的事并不容易而且有一定风险，但这种对脱离产业化逻辑（游戏化认为产业化是理所当然的）做出响应的奖励是可观的。

对于那些哀叹游戏化占上风的人，当务之急就是，彻底停止谈论“游戏化”。重新分配一部分精力在反对exploitationware灾难的争论上，但大部分精力要用于处理不同语境下的游戏一词的运用。

对于接受游戏化的迟钝市场营销者和懦弱咨询顾问，就用它来作为自己的对消费者、雇员和普通大众所犯下过错的辩护吧。幸运的是，对于我们这些关注exploitationware的日渐增长的威胁的人，游戏所带来的是积极的选择。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Persuasive Games: Exploitationware

[In this searing edition of his Persuasive Games column, academic and developer Bogost takes a look at the core tenets gamification and argues that not only is it not "games" but that the entire discussion must be reframed.]

I had been trying to ignore gamification, hoping it would go away, like an ill-placed pimple or an annoying party guest or a Katy Perry earworm. But a recent encounter with the concept has made me realize that plugging my ears and covering my eyes to it is a losing strategy. Even if our goal is opposition, we need to better understand gamification’s appeal in order to practice that opposition more effectively.

In early April I spoke at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC, or 4Cs). 4Cs is to the college writing and rhetoric community what the Game Developers Conference is to the video game community. It’s almost as large, with dozens of simultaneous sessions.

And just as GDC has its swank soirées run by big devs, publishers, and hardware hawks, so 4Cs boasts parties sponsored by textbook publishers. Instead of peddling platforms, companies like Pearson and Bedford St. Martins hope to lure the elbow-patch and twin-set set to purchase large quantities of their profitable wares.

My second book, Persuasive Games, is all about video games and rhetoric, but it’s had slow uptake among the more traditional, slower-moving rhetoric community. This was the first year I was allowed to speak at the conference, and I was eager to spread my ideas among this large and influential, if traditional, set of scholars.

After all, everyone who attends college is subjected to writing classes. Since we communicate increasingly often with software, we ought to insure that the teachers in charge of these courses understand how computation works. This is generally new territory for most instructors, including college writing and communication professors.

But during the Q&A session following my panel, I was surprised to hear one of the attendees ask explicitly about the possibility of using “gamification” to improve students’ performance with and engagement in the writing classroom. Here was a scholar of rhetoric who didn’t know my ongoing work on procedural rhetoric, but who was familiar with a very recent marketing gimmick. What’s going on?

The Power of Words

Ironically, the answer has everything to do with rhetoric, and nothing to do with games. We like to think that the substance of ideas matters more than the names we give things, but that’s not true. Names offer powerful ways to advance a position.

UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff has built much of his reputation on this principle, arguing that the way people conceptualize or “frame” the world in their own discourse has a greater effect in politics than do politicians’ actions. For example, conservatives oppose social welfare programs partly by framing taxation as theft.

And conservative political scientist Frank Luntz has built a business around carefully developing these verbal contexts. He’s the guy you can thank for terms like “war on terror” and “climate change,” phrases that have enjoyed general adoption across the political spectrum even though they advance deliberate partisan positions.

“War on terror” suggests that the complex extra-governmental motivations of ideological groups like al-Qaeda are winnable conflicts between “good” and “evil,” clashes identical to two-party state-based conflicts. And “climate change” suggests that global warming is a phenomenon of adjustment rather than disaster. After all, change can be good!

As Luntz puts it, what matters is not what you say, but what people hear. And when we’re talking about games, people often hear nothing good. Making games seem appealing outside the entertainment industry is a daunting task, and a large part of the challenge involves deploying the right rhetoric to advance the concept in the first place.

The Rhetoric of “Serious Games”

We’ve been through this scenario many times before — political simulation in the 1980s, and edutainment in the 1990s, for example. Most recently, Serious Games have offered another, more general attempt to expand games’ scope. These are games made and used “beyond entertainment,” to use Serious Game Initiative co-founder Ben Sawyer’s latest tagline. Application domains for serious games include business, health, the military, education, and public works, to name but a few.

The games industry has never much liked the phrase “serious games,” because it seems reductionist and derogatory, as if to claim that other sorts of games are worthless or pointless. Even among those of us who have worked to bring games to other domains, the name “serious games” has sometimes posed problems.

People know that there’s something magical about games. They don’t always express that opinion positively, but even condemnations of video games acknowledge that they contain special power, power to captivate us and draw us in, power to encourage us to repeat things we’ve seemingly done before, power to get us to spend money on things that seem not to exist, and so forth.

While not everyone agrees that games are culture, or media, or art, everyone seems to agree that games are powerful. And that power is mysterious and wild, like black magic. You don’t have to like games to want a piece of it.

But games are also terrifying, for just the same reasons. “Games” seem both trivial and powerful all at once.

“Serious games” has a specific rhetorical purpose. It is a phrase devised to earn the support of high-level governmental and corporate officials, individuals for whom “game” implies the terror just described; something trite and powerful, something that trivializes things, even if that trivialization is precisely part of its power.

Whether you like the term or not (I don’t, for the record), “serious games” has served this purpose reasonably well. It has given its advocates a way to frame the uses of games in governmental and industrial contexts, by making the claim that games can tackle consequential topics and provide profound results.

When people complain that “serious games” is an oxymoron miss the point: it’s supposed to be an oxymoron. When people hear “serious games,” this contradiction is foregrounded and silently resolved.

Making Games is Hard

The name “serious games” may help organizations overcome an initial fear of the form, but it does little to address the terrifying reality of actually making a game.

Executives and military brass and doctors and politicians aren’t idiots, and they realize that good games are hard to make. They realize that commercial games are big and shiny and cost millions or tens of millions of dollars.

They realize that hundreds of people are sometimes necessary to create them. They realize that games are different from the kinds of products most organizations produce, and that they are therefore fundamentally incompatible with existing ways of doing business.

After the initial calm the term provides, “serious games” fails to quell the resulting storm. And unfortunately, as serious games have progressed, only a few have succeeded at riding the thunder.

There just aren’t enough high-quality games that also serve serious purposes effectively. Making games is hard. Making good games is even harder. Making good games that hope to serve some external purpose is even harder.

Efforts like the Serious Games Initiative, the Serious Games Summits at GDC, and the many efforts in research and design around games beyond entertainment by people like me, Jim Gee, Jane McGonigal, Katie Salen, Ben Sawyer, and others had already made the idea of using games for broader purposes more appealing. But serious games and their ilk had done a terrible job making games seem viable to create, deploy, and use.

The Rhetoric of “Gamification”

This is why “gamification” is such an effective term. It keeps the term “game” and puts it right up in front, drawing attention to the form’s mysterious power. But the kicker comes at the end: the “-ify” suffix it makes applying that medium to any given purpose seem facile and automatic.

When you -ify something, you put it in a particular state, or you fill it with a particular quality. We can purify water by running it through a filter. We can clarify a confusing topic through explanation. We can amplify a signal by boosting its oscillation rate. We can beautify a city by planting trees or removing litter. We can falsify a report by interweaving lies with truth. We can humidify a dry bedroom by introducing water vapor into the air. We can magnify an image by placing it behind an optical instrument. We can terrify a child by jumping out unseen from behind an obstruction.

In some of these cases, we’ve invented devices that perform the actions, solutions that represent definitive answers for a particular problem, be it increasing the amplitude of a signal, removing impurities from a liquid, or increasing moisture in a room.

But in most of these cases, the details of -ification are abstracted, left vague. Does urban beautification really just involve new green space, or does it also relate to the underlying planning of a city? By taking a goal or a quality and framing it as -ification, a speaker makes something seem easy to accomplish, even if it is in fact difficult.

And this is precisely what gamification is all about. Here’s a characteristic excerpt from the gamification movement’s Dark Lord, Gabe Zicherman:

Gamification can be thought of as using some elements of game systems in the cause of a business objective. It’s easiest to identify the trend with experiences (frequent flyer programs, Nike Running/Nike+, or Foursquare) that feel immediately game-like. The presence of key game mechanics, such as points, badges, levels, challenges, leaderboards, rewards, and onboarding, are signals that a game is taking place.

Note how deftly Zicherman makes his readers believe that points, badges, levels, leader boards, and rewards are “key game mechanics.” This is wrong, of course — key game mechanics are the operational parts of games that produce an experience of interest, enlightenment, terror, fascination, hope, or any number of other sensations.

Points and levels and the like are mere gestures that provide structure and measure progress within such a system.

But as Frank Luntz has shown time and time again, reality matters far less than perception. When people hear “gamification,” it’s this incredible facility that registers, the simplicity, smoothness, and ease with which the wild, magical beast of games can be tamed and integrated into any other context at low cost and high scale.

Margaret Robertson has critiqued gamification on the basis that it takes the least essential aspects of games and presents them as the most essential. Robertson coins the derogatory term pointsification as a more accurate description of this process.

As compelling as we might find Robertson’s critique, it attacks a problem that just doesn’t bother gamification’s proponents. The sanctity of games’ unique means of expression is just not of much concern to the gamifiers. Instead they value facility — the easiest way possible to capture some of the fairy dust of games and spread it upon products and services.

Games or points isn’t the point — for gamifiers, there’s no difference. It’s the -ification that’s most important. Zicherman makes the point for me: “What gamification does is allow marketers to focus on what they know best — convincing consumers to take loyalty and purchasing actions — using a powerful toolkit of engagement gleaned from games.”

Making Things Easy, Making it Hard

I mentioned that frames like “serious games” and even my own “persuasive games” had done a terrible job making games seem viable to make and use in organizations. The problem is, they should be difficult to make and use in such contexts. In fact, games undermine many of the practices of industrialization that gamification silently endorses.

There are good reasons for this: because games are systems, they offer a fundamentally different way of characterizing ideas. They can inspire a different kind of deliberation than we find in other forms of media, one that considers the uncertainty of complex systems instead of embracing simple answers. It’s this potential that has inspired me to advocate for the uses of games in areas like learning, politics, journalism, and business.

But for educators, politicians, newsmakers, marketers, and really just about anybody working in institutions that ossified during industrialization, such change is undesirable. It would require the partial or even wholesale reinvention of the way things get done.

I offer a number of examples of this problem in Persuasive Games, one of which is the advertising industry. When done well, games offer an opportunity to give customers an experience of the features and functions of a product or service.

But such a proposition runs counter to the last four decades of marketing, an era that has focused on branding and messaging as a way of creating desires through affinity rather than helping people understand how specific products and services might benefit particular wants and needs.

In the modern marketing business, the best solutions are generic ones, ideas that can be repeated without much thought from brand to brand, billed by consultants and agencies at a clear markup. Gamification offers this exactly. No thinking is required, just simple, absentminded iteration and the promise of empty metrics to prove its value. Like having a website or a social media strategy, “gamification” allows organizations to tick the games box without fuss. Just add badges! Just add leaderboards!

How to Talk about Gamification

Gamification’s detractors make their cases with passion. They argue that gamification mistakes games’ secondary properties for their primary ones. It insults and violates games. It confuses the magical magnetism of games for simplistic compulsion meted out toward extrinsic incentives. It fails to embrace the complex responsiveness of “real” games, games that make solutions seem interestingly hard rather than tediously so.

But none of these objections bother the gamification set. They don’t want to use the hard, strange, magical features of games. Instead, they want to use their easy, certain, boring aspects. Those are the gimmicks that can be leveraged into “monetizable APIs” and one-size-fits-all consulting workshops.

To oppose gamification on these grounds is a losing battle. To use one of George Lakoff’s favorite examples, it’s a bit like countering anti-abortion’s “pro-life” frame with the “pro-choice” alternative. For someone who holds the position that abortion is murder, the idea that people should have the choice to do it is nonsensical.

Likewise, for gamification proponents, the idea that adding points and incentives to things fails to engage the power of games as interactive systems is likewise nonsensical. Doing that would be hard. It would require changing the practices of entire industries. It would take time and effort. That’s not what marketers and educators and politicians and executives want. They want easy answers and fast results.

It’s not what gamification consultants want either; they want to sell off their businesses before anybody discovers that they have been erected on swampland. And they want to associate this easy-bake, fast action marketing schlock with the totally unrelated magic of games.

“Pro-life” is a powerful phrase because it is so hard to oppose. To begin an argument by implying that you are “anti-life” — that’s a bad start indeed. Lakoff points out that liberals lose elections largely because they spend most of their time embracing the terms of their opposition, repeating those phrases and giving them implicit support. Instead, Lakoff argues, liberals should invent their own concepts that reflect their core values, setting the debate accordingly.

For advocates of games who oppose the insidiousness and infantilization of gamification, the same advice applies. But just like Lakoff’s liberals, we’ve got our work cut out for us. “Gamification” is winning the rhetoric battle; in fact, it’s increasingly common to hear people use the term in reference to any non-traditional use of games, as Heather Chaplin did recently in her critique of Jane McGonigal.

Alternate terms aren’t nearly as powerful. There’s Ben Sawyer and Dave Rejeski’s “serious games,” of course, and McGonigal’s notion of “gameful design,” and my concept of “persuasive games,” the loosely connected “games for good” movement, among others. None of these have caught on like “gamification” has done. We have to do better.

Exploitationware

In the meantime, there’s another lesson to learn from Frank Luntz: don’t let the opposition set the terms of the debate. Instead, concoct better concepts with which to oppose them.

In addition to his many verbal offensives, Luntz is also the architect of defensive phrases like “death tax,” which invokes considerably more dissatisfaction than “estate tax.” The latter phrase sounds like it applies to the wealthy (which, as a matter of fact, it does), but Luntz managed to help win much more mainstream support for its possible repeal by removing resentment about its association with wealth and replacing that resentment with disgust at the idea of being taxed just for dying.

And more recently, Luntz has advocated that Republicans opposing Obama’s health care reform by calling it a “Washington takeover” that will force citizens to “stand in line” for care.

For gamification detractors, the best move is to distance games from the concept entirely, by showing its connection to the more insidious activities that really comprise it.

In particular, gamification proposes to replace real incentives with fictional ones. Real incentives come at a cost but provide value for both parties based on a relationship of trust. By contrast, pretend incentives reduce or eliminate costs, but in so doing they strip away both value and trust.

When companies and organizations provide incentives to help orient the goals of the organization against the desires of its constituency, they facilitate functional relationships, one in which both parties have come to an understanding about how they will relate to one another. Subsequent loyalty might exist between an organization and its customers, an organization and its employees, or a government and its citizens.

For example: an airline offers a view of its business model, and frequent flyers who advance those expectations get rewards. An employer offers a view of its goals, and employees who help meet those goals enjoy raises, perks, and promotions. When loyalty is real it’s reciprocal. It moves in two directions. Something real is at stake for both parties.

Gamification replaces these real, functional, two-way relationships with dysfunctional perversions of relationships. Organizations ask for loyalty, but they reciprocate that loyalty with shams, counterfeit incentives that neither provide value nor require investment.

When seen in this light, “gamification” is a misnomer. A better name for this practice is exploitationware. And as a concept, exploitationware has numerous rhetorical benefits:

It disassociates the practice from games. This is the most important position of all, because it makes room for games to move into the same areas of application while giving them a natural response to the gamification option. “What about gamification? That seems cheaper and easier.” “Oh, you mean exploitationware? It’s great if you don’t mind swindling your customers.”

It connects gamification to other, better known practices of software fraud. These include malware, spyware, and adware. While some uses of -ware still have positive or neutral associations (shareware, freeware), people are more familiar with the more nefarious variants, thanks to negative press coverage of software exploits.

It kicks the fulcrum out from under gamification’s lever. Gamification is appealing to consultants and organizations because it’s easy, cheap, and replicable. It’s high leverage. Some companies will follow any trend, but most are smart enough to understand the medium- to long-term cost of bad decisions. Just the threat of negative customer perception of gamification techniques offers a good method to argue against them.

It allows us to situate gamification within a larger set of pernicious practices in the high-tech marketplace. These include the general practice of extracting personal information from customers by pretending that one’s product is actually one’s customer. Google and Facebook’s seemingly free services also could be called exploitationware of a different kind, since they use the carrot of free services (their purported product) to extract information that forms the real basis for their revenues (their real product). For more on this subject, read Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book The Googlization of Everything.

It opens the door for more earnest, beneficial uses of games. Characterizing gamification as exploitationware gives games-as-systems advocates an opportunity to present alternatives. Doing real, meaningful things with games is hard and risky, but it offers considerable reward, reward that responds to the underlying shift away from the logic of industrialization that gamification takes for granted.

For those who lament the rise of gamification, the most important thing you can do is to stop saying “gamification” entirely. Reinvest that energy partly into arguments against the scourge of exploitationware, but mostly into your own approaches to the use of games in different contexts.

And to the crass marketers and spineless consultants who embrace it, I leave it to you to defend your villainous reign of abuse against customers, employees, and the general public. Thankfully, for those of us concerned about the growing threat of exploitationware, games offer a positive alternative.（source：gamasutra）