5(2) 2019: Laborious Play and Playful Work I

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“Good Icing can’t Change an Average Cake”. Gameful Experience, Work Relationships and the Automation of Behavioural Management
Gómez, Sebastián (2019) , S. 61-82
Research on the impact of gameful experiences on the automation of labour and value creation is in need of a critical reformulation. The results presented in this study developed from a critical reading of the current literature on gamification and its internal struggles. I ques- tion what the gamification of work is, this time including knowledge collected by decades of academic research in the field of digital cultures and society, converging in a diverse yet attuned corpus of neomateri- alist, post-anthropocentric, anti-Humanist, and intersectional theo- ries of politics, algorithmic cultures and social justice (see Braidotti/ Hlavajova 2017). Findings suggest the experimental development of gamification technologies materializes from an interest in governance through the automation of behavioural management, resulting in the forced correction of non-normative bodies through self-optimization. Beyond colonial, anthropocentric binaries, gamification’s genealogy is not found in the overcoming of the Eurocentric distinction between work and games, but in the algorithmic architecture of techno-capitalism.