Gamification of the Workplace.

Gamification of the workplace blurs the lines between work/play and work/home. Play at work is used as a diversion from tasks at hand but its goal is boosting productivity and team building. At the corporate level engaging workers in play is designed to advance greater work achievements and ultimately it benefits the employer and their clients, not the employees.

Play, as described by Johan Huizinga, is:

‘free: in which play is not obligatory (…) [and] unproductive: creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and, except for the exchange of property among players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game’.

Culturally, play doesn’t fulfil any practical purpose. It neither creates any new practical elements, nor does it stimulate the progress of existing ones. One does not play in order to be productive or useful but to embellish their experience of life and distance oneself, even if only temporarily, from the ordinary and utilitarian. Play has also embedded in it the idea of freedom, as play under coercion is no longer play.

Gamification of the workplace is in truth intensifying competition between employees, camouflaged as playful experience. Sold as total fun, it masks the fact that workers have very little control over the games they’re made to play, and that they’re not games at all. Gamified systems are tools, not toys.