Media Review: Experimental Games: Critique,Play,and Design in the Age of Gamification

Living in the Age of Gamification

Games are everywhere. Sport metaphors seep into our everyday language. Gamified apps help us to learn a language or achieve our daily goals. Companies encourage us to have fun at work in the name of productivity and profitability. And capitalism itself is constructed as a gigantic game with global players competing for finite resources on the open market. Games are no longer diversions or distractions from reality; today, they are central to the ways in which we encounter, understand, and shape reality (Vesa, Hamari, Harviainen, & Warmelink, 2017).

This is the starting point for Jagoda’s Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification. Specifically, the book focuses on videogames—forms of digital play that have infiltrated every aspect of our personal and professional lives. Jagoda starts from the premise that videogames are shaped by politico-economic theories—especially those emerging from the “paradigm of neoliberalism” (p. xv)—and in turn influence how we relate to ourselves as economic agents and social actors. Along these lines, Experimental Games provides a conceptual toolkit for thinking about the complex relation between work, play, and technology in an increasingly digitalized world (Beyes, Chun, Clarke, Flyverbom, & Holt, 2022; Hjorth, Strati, Drakopoulou Dodd, & Weik, 2018).

The term “gamification” typically refers to the application of game mechanics to non-game activities, such as work or education (p. 43). Jagoda broadens this definition to encompass a more general trend, one that is fundamentally entangled with political and economic developments. In effect, Jagoda sees gamification as the cultural counterpart to economic neoliberalism (p. 9). Acting in unison, gamification and neoliberalism compel us to adopt an attitude of cheerful entrepreneurialism, a mindset that’s necessary in an age of gig work and precarious employment. Videogames are just one way in which we’re trained to become enterprising individuals in a sink-or-swim society, inviting us to think of ourselves as subjects oriented towards relentless competition, achievement, and optimization (p. 18).

To illustrate his thesis, Jagoda asks us to consider the independent videogame Stardew Valley (pp. 67–71). Released in 2016, Stardew Valley is a farming simulator in which players are tasked with growing crops, raising livestock, and selling items. On one level, the game is refreshingly anti-capitalist. At the start of the game, the main character resigns from their boring office job in a large corporation and moves to the countryside to tend to their deceased grandfather’s farm. What could be more quaint and old-fashioned than working the land on your own estate?

On another level, Stardew Valley is infused with neoliberal values. The game incentivizes players to expand their farm and upgrade their tools; optimize their activities and maximize their profits; save their earnings and reinvest capital. Stardew Valley is oriented towards perpetual economic growth—as an open-ended videogame, there is no “game over.” Jagoda (p. 69) reflects on the game’s relationship to contemporary society: “Stardew Valley is something more than a representation of neoliberal life: it is a participatory training ground for the types of processes, modes of thinking, and habits necessary to survive and thrive within. . .a neoliberal lifeworld.” Videogames like Stardew Valley teach us how we ought to act, not only in a virtual world, but also in our everyday life. It’s telling that most videogames—with some notable exceptions that Jagoda discusses later in the book—are organized around principles that resonate with enterprise culture: develop your skills, evaluate your options, make quick decisions, expect a win but accept the possibility of failure. For this reason, Jagoda argues, videogames “both index and drive the development of neoliberalism” (p. 61; emphasis in original), giving cultural-material form to an abstract economic model.

Jagoda traces the origin of our gamified society to neoclassical economics during the Cold War. In particular, game theory—developed by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944)—was the first attempt to apply the logic of games to the entire social field (p. 47). Here, a game like chess is no longer just a game; it’s now a model for understanding rational decision-making and economic behavior. Every move and countermove can be mapped on to a payoff matrix, a visual representation of profit and loss. But that’s not all. As Jagoda notes, game theory invites us to view anything as a game as long as it involves some kind of interaction between participants: waiting in line at the supermarket, driving a car in heavy traffic, or bringing the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse (p. 48). In simple terms, a game is anything that allows its players to strategize and make choices. The aim, Jagoda reminds us, is to predict human behavior: at what point do people switch lines in the queue, overtake the car in front, or detonate the H-bomb (p. 49)?

If neoclassical economics uses games to model and predict behavior, neoliberal economics—associated with thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—prescribes rational economic behavior as the best course of action for every member of society (p. 53). For neoliberal economists, the market (shorthand for society in general) is a kind of massive multiplayer game, a space of freedom in which rational actors must analyze the situation, plan their moves, and exploit opportunities for personal gain (p. 56). Our entire life, according to this discourse, is an ongoing economic project directed towards increasing our “human capital” (Fleming, 2017).

The model of neoliberal economics would be further refined in its twenty-first century incarnation: behavioral economics. Popularized by Thaler and Sunstein’s (2009) bestseller Nudge, behavioral economics recognizes that individuals sometimes make choices based on pure emotion, not market logic. The trick is to alter (or “nudge”) human behavior in subtle ways so that it aligns with the principles of economic rationality. For Jagoda, videogames are a prime means to achieve this goal because they “make palpable and palatable, even desirable, modes of rational choice and behavioural modification that are compatible with game theory” (p. 61). Think, for example, of gamified apps like Fitocracy or Beeminder that nudge us towards making better (read: economically rational) choices, such staying healthy or managing our finances. But even seemingly escapist videogames like Candy Crush Saga impose a logic of rational choice on players, encouraging us to level up, measure our progress, and compete against others—as in the game, so in real life (p. 66). Videogames are the ultimate time-wasters, of course, yet for Jagoda they also contribute to “the formation of habits” (p. 66) that will serve us well in our jobs and our careers.

The question, for Jagoda, is whether videogames are also capable of disrupting the logic of late capitalism and subverting the economic system in which they are enmeshed. As a game designer himself, Jagoda answers in the affirmative. He believes that videogames have the potential to “create new ways of being, acting, and experimenting within (and perhaps beyond) our digital and networked present” (p. 39). To this extent, Jagoda suggests that we might be able to subvert neoliberal forms of gamification with more radical and subversive game design—thus allowing us to “push against the social, economic, and political contexts” (p. 277) in which we live and work.

Certainly, Jagoda offers compelling examples of games that interrupt the smooth flow of gamification, such as the independent videogame The Stanley Parable (pp. 130–136). Released in 2011, The Stanley Parable is a first-person adventure game set in an office building that is mysteriously empty. The player gets to explores the office building and make a series of choices, accompanied by a voiceover that guides them through the building and comments on their progress. A few minutes into the game, the player comes to a room with two doors. The voiceover says that Stanley enters the door on the left, even though the player is free to choose either door. If the player enters the door on the left, the game continues as normal; but if the player disregards the instructions and chooses the door on the right, the voiceover gently chides the main character (“Stanley was so bad at following directions; it’s incredible he wasn’t fired years ago”). Jagoda writes:

At the simplest level, The Stanley Parable can be read as a satire of video games that promise freedom through interactivity but in fact condition players to engage in a narrow range of button pushes, actions, and pathways that all lead roughly to the same place. (p. 131)

The Stanley Parable makes visible what remains largely hidden in gamification. Gamification purports to foreground autonomy and self-actualization, but in fact it surreptitiously channels us towards preferences that are pre-coded as fully rational and therefore “in our best interests.” Like any good satire, The Stanley Parable forces us to grapple with the gap between rhetoric and reality. In this case, the game asks the player “to think about the construction of systems in which they are temporarily participating—rather than merely being within or giving themselves over to those systems” (p. 135).

The Stanley Parable is a good example of an experimental videogame, one that short-circuits the inner wiring of neoliberal gamification. Other examples in the book are less convincing. If The Stanley Parable is cerebral, an indie game like Luxuria Superbia is more corporeal. Released in 2013, Luxuria Superbia invites the player to interact with the inside of a flower in order to bring it into full bloom, which results in a crescendo of music. The flower itself is unmistakably vaginal, and the prompts that appear onscreen are oddly sexual (“Stroke my anthers,” “Hold my stamen”). On a touchscreen, the game becomes a directly sensual experience as the player uses their fingers to caress the flower to completion. For Jagoda, the game “gestures towards nonsovereign becoming” (p. 187), a loss of self that poses a fundamental challenge to systems of control. Perhaps. But just how different is Luxuria Superbia from Candy Crush Saga—another touchscreen game that releases a satisfying burst of color and sound each time the player swipes their screen, but which for Jagoda exemplifies the “ideology of neoliberalism” (p. 66)? Both games trigger a rush of endorphins and create a feeling of happy absorption; to us, it’s unclear why one is subversive and the other reactionary.

Despite these problems, Experiment Games offers an enthralling analysis of gamification and neoliberalism. The book succeeds in showing how digital games intersect with the social, political, and economic context in which they’re played. As platform companies like Upwork encourage users to score points to win clients and mega-corporations like Meta seek to transform our entire life into a fully gamified VR experience, Jagoda offers some intriguing avenues for thinking about how workers are being reconfigured as “players” in the broader game of business—a development that organizational scholars would do well to consider.