Organizational Gamification

Theories and Practices of Ludified Work in Late Modernity

Mikko Vesa, Mikko Vesa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000351095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary collection of texts that examine the practice of gamification, the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, specifically as an organization and management research problem.

As we travel deeper into the twenty-first century, it is becoming increasingly clear the late modernity is re defining its take on games and play. Following what has been termed a general ludification or playification of society, corporations are beginning to see games and play as resources rather than as a wasteful practice. We are witnessing the emergence of the practice of gamificiation with the intention of mobilizing play's motivational power for capitalist production. This book outlines both the essential "how tos" and also critically explores their links to diverse strands of organization theory such as institutionalism, business ethics, critical theory and organizational behavior. Gamification research has been mostly conducted within disciplines such as information studies, game studies and information systems science. This is a paradoxical state of affairs; whilst gamification aims at being a transformative intervention in work processes and practices and is being deployed as such by practitioners.

This book will be of value to researchers, academics and students interested in management and organization studies.

Part 1
Contextualizing Gamification

1
Organizational Gamification

Roots, Readings, Directions

Mikko Vesa

What Is This Thing Called Gamification?

Gamification has become one of the trending concepts of the first decades of the new millennium. Academic interest in gamification is cross-disciplinary, ranging from marketing to information systems science, pedagogy to game studies. Often, gamification is seen as an intervention in which something not inherently gameful or play-like is modified with ideas drawn from game design. That such interventions affect management and take place in organizations is given, yet within the academic field of management and organization studies interest in gamification remains nascent. The purpose of this edited volume is to give the reader the necessary theoretical and practical insight to join and contribute to this nascent research.

Play and games are notoriously elusive concepts. In his review of the game concept, Stenros (2017) notes that since the 1930s there have been over 60 different attempts to define a game. On play Feezell (2013) observes five different approaches to the concept (activity, attitude, form, meaningful experience and ontologically distinctive phenomenon) but argues for a pluralist and non-reductive account of the concept. But this elusive and malleable nature of games and play should not make us ignore or reject their importance; rather, it implies that to study them benefits from tolerance and curiosity when confronted with this diversity. This will also be evident throughout this volume, even if a certain focus is provided by the topic domain of organizations and organizing being narrower than games and play in society at large. In this chapter I present an initial overview of gamification particularly as it pertains to management and organization studies. I then go on to outline a research agenda for organizational gamification that, I hope, gives a rough frame for possible characteristics of the management and organization genre of gamification studies.

As can be deduced from the mass of definitions of games and play, the topic itself is not new to the social sciences. Two books in particular stand out as the classics of the field; Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1955) and Robert Caillois’s (1961/2001) Man, Play and Games. Perhaps, what is most enduring about both is in how they lay out the foundations for defining the concept of play. Huizinga’s work lifts up five characteristics of play; it is an act of freedom, it is removed from ordinary life, it has its distinct venues and times, it rests on adherence to intrinsic rules and order, and it is an act done for itself with no exterior motive. What arises from this is what Huizinga famously calls the magic circle; the unique sphere of play with its own rules, spaces and temporality. Caillois’s take on the characteristics of play is largely in line with Huizinga, but he lifts up the importance of uncertainty of outcomes and the importance of make-believe; a suspension of disbelief; entailed by play, thus rendering Huizinga’s magic circle into a more experiential construct. What is unique to Caillois’s take on the phenomenon is his typology of play, of which he sees four: play as competition, play as chance, play as imitation and play as bodily thrill, all of which can exist in either structured or spontaneous form. And of course, beyond these two seminal classics there is a wide range of work dealing with play and games: much of which is referenced throughout this book (for prominent examples, see, e.g. Bateson, 1972/2000; Sutton-Smith, 1997; Suits, 1978; Apter, 2007; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004).

But, what is this thing called gamification? The origins of the word are somewhat unclear, but it is a solidly twenty-first-century concept that builds on the idea of infusing other activities with game and/or play-like qualities in order to enhance them somehow. For gamification in corporate contexts and, consequently, work-life the idea is simply about infusing work with such qualities in order to enhance, itself variously understood, labor productivity. In doing so, it lifts up an easily overlooked quality of our late modern society, namely that it is a world saturated with play in its modern forms. From Generation X to millennials, today society consists of people who have spent a big part of their lives with Coin Ups, Playstations, Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft to name but a few. Our society has taken a ludic or playful turn, which has rendered conventional domains of play, such as leisure time’s separation from working time or childhood’s separation from adulthood, substantially more porous.

Play, Gamification, Organizations and Management

The idea of play has been slowly gaining more legitimacy within organization and working life. In their review of play at work, Petelczyc, Capezio, Wang, Restubog, and Aquino (2018) open by noting that “Play has gained increasing interest among progressive-minded managers as an important driver of motivation and productivity in work contexts”. They observe that understanding play in organizations is important both for understanding the working experience of the twenty-first century and also for garnering insight into novel forms of efficiency while recognizing the importance of a balanced view that accounts for the positive as well as the negative aspects of play (see also Sørensen & Spoelstra, 2012; Pors & Andersen, 2015). Increasingly, studies report on this twenty-first-century condition in which play and work interact and become embedded in one another (Vesa, Hamari, Harviainen, & Warmelink, 2017; Vesa, Den Hond, & Harviainen, 2018). This leads us to the core topic of this book, namely gamification. Two largely complementary definitions of gamification abound in the literature: “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011) and “a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences to support user’s overall value creation” (Huotari & Hamari, 2012). Many variations of these definitions exist, but their focus remains the same: using game-like elements to make non-game tasks more interesting (Landers, Auer, Collmus, & Armstrong, 2018). Pushing the ticket just slightly in these definitions, gamification is an intentional act, operationalized with specific tools in order to accomplish a desired outcome. In effect, it is an intervention.

But the core logic, nevertheless, is one of means for ends. In gamification, the apparatus of play is taken and harnessed for productivity (Petelczyc et al., 2018), value creation (Huotari & Hamari, 2012) or experiences that matter most for business goals (Wolf, Weiger, & Hammerschmidt, 2019). Today, gamification draws its inspiration mostly from the profession and practice of game design and not, I would argue, from the actual experience of games or play which it rather seeks to generate (see also Deterding et al., 2011; Holopainen & Stain, 2014). It is thus at its heart an economic production practice which values the manufacturing of value-based outcomes through game-derived (re-)design. It is a transformative practice somewhat akin to business process reengineering in that it believes that a source of new value can be discovered by exposing existing work practices and rearranging, supplementing or augmenting them. Implicit in this game design reengineering is also a critique of the modern organization, signaling that there is an uncaptured area of value generation that remains untapped and underexplored. This perspective is highlighted by Nacke and Deterding (2017) when they argue that:

[E]conomically, we can observe the transformation of business models and market differentiators towards innovation, user experience, customer relations, and the tight integration of customers into value chains with user-led innovation, crowdsourcing, and word-of-mouth-marketing, all of which make employee customer engagement a crucial capacity for organizations.

This then is the premise, and also the promise, of gamification. But what of its toolkit; what are these mechanisms that gamification seeks to invoke in order to bring about this reengineering toward untapped value? According to Holopainen and Stain (2014, p. 422), “at the heart of games is gameplay. Gameplay consists of the actions, activities, goals and failures, motivations and incentives the game provides to the players”. At its most elementary, gamification rests on the use of simple devices such as augmenting existing work processes with points, badges or leaderboards. But it can be taken further, and play itself can be categorized as a compound state of contexts, experiences and activities; Arrasvuori et al. (2011) propose the PLEX (playful experiences) framework that lists no fewer than 22 such items; for example, challenge, competition, nurturing and subversion to name but a few. The act of gamification then entails bringing into social action; such as work; this playful experience through gameplay. Playful experiences, in turn, in themselves are associated with specific cognitive states. These include, for example, flow and its associated eight elements (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, 1990) or the paratelic state and its associated protective frame (Apter, 2007). The exact contents of these psychological theories are beyond the scope of this chapter, but the connection to gamification is quite simply this: the playful experience stops work from feeling like “work”. This is achieved by redesigning the mechanics, dynamics and emotions of employee behavior through game design principles (Robson, Plangger, Kietzmann, McCarthy, & Pitt, 2016).

In organizational life at large, and corporate life in particular, this approach finds several applications. The advantages of gamification are argued to include reliving boredom and stress, increasing performance, encouraging unremunerated work and dealing with HR functions (Mollick & Werbach, 2014). To assess whether a function can be gamified, Werbach and Hunter (2012) recommend a six-D design process: Define business objectives, Delineate target behaviors, Describe your players, Devise activity cycles, Don’t forget the fun and Deploy the appropriate tools. While the authors point out that not everything can be successfully gamified, it is also apparent that the promised reach of enterprise gamification then is quite wide. That being said, the concept of gamification has not really found its way into the field of management and organization studies (for exceptions, see Vesa & Harviainen, 2019), but clear antecedents and connections can be found within innovation, entrepreneurship, marketing, organizational learning and organizational design to name a few. Still, based on studies by the consulting group Gartner, Robson, Plangger, Kietzmann, McCarthy, and Pitt (2015) highlight that 80% of gamified applications are liable to fail due to insufficient insight into how it should be designed. Not all experiential states are equally or even sufficiently harnessable for the creation of economic value (Wolf et al., 2020).

Within studies of innovation and entrepreneurship gamification is finding some early traction (Dobson & McKendrick, 2018; Shpakova, Dörfler, & MacBryde, 2019). This as such is not surprising, as these practices are often aligned with exploration (March, 1991) in searching for and creating opportunity through, for example, new products, services or markets. As argued by Hjorth and Holt (2016), entrepreneurship is the new management and the biggest risk is to not create new value. Play, in turn, functions to create engagement with and also distance from work (Mainemelis & Ronson, 2006, p. 81): “We suggest that by temporarily suspending ordinary conventions, structural obligations, and functional pressures, and by encouraging behaviors whose value may not be immediately evident, play stimulates, facilitates, and even rehearses creativity”. Hjorth et al. (2018) speak metaphorically about the climate change in the study of organizing for understanding how, for example, creativity, play and entrepreneurship emerge and relate to each other and with what consequences for organizations as we try to understand the “post-efficiency” organizations of the twenty-first century. In doing so, play can be highlighted as a process of innovation which relocates the nexus of the creative or entrepreneurial force from being a property of persons or organizations to being a property of practice (Roth, Schneckenberg, & Tsai, 2015). Games themselves...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part 1 Contextualizing Gamification
• Part 2 Researching Gamification in Organizations
• Part 3 Reflections on Gamification
• About the Contributors
• Index