Production 2: Foundations
Although Jason Nolan and Melanie McBride’s and Vittorio Marone’s arguments presented interesting frameworks for digital game-based learning, they did not provide a formalized definition of gamification, as the use of gamification is not quite what their frameworks aim to incorporate. In fact, their work aimed to prove that meaningful game-based learning must extend beyond gamification to foster a deeper level of engagement.
Gamification stands in deep tension with many theories of play because it essentially undermines the qualities that make play meaningful. Classic theorists like Caillois have emphasized that play is “free, voluntary, circumscribed, uncertain, undetermined, unproductive, governed by rules, and “make-believe” (Marone 3). In contrast, gamification imposes and makes use of extrinsic rewards, such as points, badges, and levels, to instrumentalize activity towards predefined goals. In essence, gamification strips away the values that make play “play”. Sutton-Smith’s rhetorics of play posit that understanding play is difficult simply because play itself is imaginative, ambiguous, and exploratory, and that this ambiguity is what makes it difficult to understand it perfectly.
In Marone’s Playful Constructivism, he posits that Constructivist views describe play as a process of meaning-making and identity formation, citing an example where controlling an avatar in a digital game can be considered a form of hybridization since players become one with their “digital embodiments” (Marone 4). Players’ identities are shaped through these aspects of games. Marone further states that “people actively participate in gaming affinity spaces to influence and to be influenced through interest-driven interactions focused on gameplay, game features, and discussions prompted by a game” (Marone 10).
Although some sociocultural theories highlight play as emergent and collectively negotiated, gamification is usually imposed in a top-down manner by institutions or educators who do not exactly understand the core of point of digital games, and they are the ones who prescribe what counts as success, thus hollowing it out into a system of compliance.
To return to Sutton-Smith, his rhetorics of play are a powerful analytical tool because they highlight the many ways that play can be framed and utilized across social and educational contexts. McBride and Nolan’s argument states that “the hidden curriculum refers to the hegemonic values and social relations that underlie traditional education” (Nolan and McBride 597) as well as “pertain[ing] not only to the operationalization of games for schooling, but the use of games and game-based structures that serve to reinforce and emphasize the competitive and hierarchical values of institutional education” (Nolan and McBride 597). Meanwhile, the explicit and null curricula refer to the curriculum which is explicitly recognized in a teacher’s curriculum, such as textbooks, while the null refers to “what is missing, left out or occluded under the influence of the explicit and hidden curricula” (Nolan and McBride 601).
When taking all of these points together, the authors’ critiques highlight a clear connection between gamification and formal education, and more importantly, centring "play" as a significant value. Meaningful digital game-based learning has to move beyond gamification in order to preserve the full potential of play.
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