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This chapter offers an overview of gamification as a historical paradigm that brings games to the forefront of social, political, economic, and aesthetic thought. Though the term gamification, and the design practice to which it refers, can be located within the 2010s, this paradigm has its roots in an earlier moment in the second half of the twentieth century. This chapter extends the history of contemporary gamification back to three US contexts from the mid-twentieth through the early twenty-first centuries: the economic method of game theory, the world-building program of neoliberalism, and the theories of behavioral economics. This historical and conceptual argument is followed by two video game cases—King Digital Entertainment’s mainstream mobile game Candy Crush Saga (2012) and Eric Barone’s independently designed simulator Stardew Valley (2016)—that demonstrate how these contexts yield gamification.

Technology solutions for accessibility have long been created using a narrow utilitarian lens, especially in the Global South, due to multi-dimensional challenges and resource constraints: an emphasis on purely functional outcomes supported by sterile cost–benefit analysis that ignores the fact that people with disability are people first, with their own aspirations for leisure and enjoyment in addition to skills and employment. We propose an alternative design methodology called the ludic design for accessibility (LDA) that puts play and playfulness at the center of all assistive technology design and use. We then describe a seven-step framework for designers to apply this methodology to create impactful solutions. Though LDA is universally applicable, we highlight the factors that make it especially relevant in the context of accessibility in the Global South.

Large amounts of data, relevant to decision making and political argument, are now available. However, these data are often accessible only to people with reasonably developed skills in data acquisition and exploration; less skilled users must depend on interpretations by others. This chapter shows how large amounts of evidence relevant to decision making can be made accessible to a broad public, via software the authors have developed and made widely available. The Constituency Explorer resulted from a collaboration between the House of Commons Library and Durham University, and was designed to support analysis and decision making in the 2015 and 2017 UK general elections. It facilitates access to 150 variables for each of the 650 parliamentary constituencies in the UK, which can be explored in an interactive way. The authors describe the design and features of the interface, and some of the ways it has been used. Finally, they outline some strategies for public engagement which include ‘gamification’ via a quiz accessible to smartphones.

The introduction traces the book’s main argument and previews its structure. It begins with a discussion of the mobile game Pokémon GO to illustrate popular games’ key role in the construction of modern racial fictions and emphasize the need for a more syncretic methodological approach to such cultural artifacts. After delineating the book’s particular focus on Asian and Asian American topics, the introduction situates the book within the broader fields of game studies, Asian American studies, and literary studies. It introduces a master concept, ludo-Orientalism, and offers an overview of how it functions as a nation-building discourse that defines America and the “West” in relation to abstract game ideals of fairness and freedom, shaping how East-West relations are imagined and reinforcing notions of foreignness and perceptions of racial difference

Play is the precondition of civic action taking. This chapter explores what it means when people play and how the creation of trusted, accessible, and inclusive play spaces is central to civic design. Distinct from gamification, civic design looks for games to structure play, creating less, not more, efficiencies in systems. With an extended case study of a project involving the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go, which invited Boston youth into questioning and changing the game’s data, the chapter explores how play can inform and shape civic life.

This chapter provides a detailed overview of the book, which is written in three parts. Part I focuses on how digital technology is changing sport experiences from a wide range of perspectives, while also providing some of the philosophical underpinning to the book. It examines how the logic of gaming provides a unifying theory for digital culture, sport, and the Olympic Games. Part II draws together these analyses and focuses on the broad ways in which digital technologies have affected elite and amateur sports experiences, along with considering how they have re-constituted the spectator’s proximity to the action. Part III focuses on the Olympic Games, as an exemplar of digital media innovation in sports. It documents the rise of citizen journalism and alternative news production practices that occur around sports events, notably the Olympic Games from Sydney 2000 to Rio de Janeiro 2016.

This chapter focuses on how the amateur athletic experience is being modified by digital technology and how should inform a re-evaluation of computer culture. It shows how digital gaming is becoming an integral part of the amateur sporting experience and discusses why the embodied intelligence of virtual gaming can provide a further mechanism through which to teach sports and to promote new forms of socialization. The chapter also considers the importance of ‘serious games,’ which have emerged as alternative forms of sports activity. These examples support the claim that gaming technology is becoming more sport-like, thus challenging the assumption that computer game playing necessarily leads to a more sedentary lifestyle. The rise of the e-sports gaming industry is indicative of this change, but so to is the growth of more informal digitally enabled communities of physical activity, as takes place in a range of mobile fitness experiences. This chapter also sets up the argument for framing the book through the idea of “Sport 2.0”, denoting an emerging sports community that is beginning to occupy the place of traditional sports and which has the potential to overtake it in numerous ways.

This chapter explores the tension between the ephemerality of swimming and its embodied and symbolic ‘realness’ for the swimmer, and investigates the multiple ways in which material and virtual artefacts are produced and mobilised to make swimming count and render it consumable. The chapter argues that in spite of the suspicions within the marathon swimming social world about the potentially corrupting effect of technology to the integrity of the sport, the everyday practice of marathon swimming is highly, if selectively, technologised. This technological ambivalence is negotiated via social world norms of data gathering, processing and sharing, with users positioning themselves as discriminating and restrained users. This highlights marathon swimming as a tradition-oriented practice with a profoundly contemporary inflection.

Competitions have a “liberal” quality, where the traits they measure or reward have some connection to broader moral virtues, beyond the frame of a contest, and where they have transparency surrounding their norms and metrics of evaluation. This allows competitions to serve as consensus-forming procedures, which establish differentials of value in a publicly agreeable fashion. However, competitions can also be organized for the benefit of the organizer, in order to acquire information about participants and accrue competitive advantage in some larger competition. In the age of the digital platform, competitive performance is constantly monitored, but in ways that don’t produce public results or consensus. As in randomized controlled trials, the “world” as encountered by the participant looks very different from the one seen by the observer. This produces a format of “post-liberal competition,” in which (in Goffman’s terms) the “front stage” and “back stage” are radically split from each other.

Chapter 4 begins with Ian Bogost’s satirical Facebook game Cow Clicker and its send-up of the “gamification” movement to add quantification and algorithmic thinking to many facets of everyday life. Such games trouble the boundaries between work and play, as do much more serious forms of gamification like Uber and the high-tech warehouse workers whose every second and step are measured for efficiency. Taken together, these new models of work herald a novel form of alienated labor for the algorithmic age. In our science fiction present, humans are processors handling simple tasks assigned by an algorithmic apparatus. Drawing on the historical figure of the automaton, a remarkable collection of Mechanical Turk-powered poetry titled Of the Subcontract, and Adam Smith’s conception of empathy in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, the chapter explores the consequences of computational capitalism on politics, empathy, and social value.

There is a general agreement among theoreticians of play that play is a “framed event,” and that the “otherness” of play transforms it into a safe experimental space for testing alternative cultural possibilities. Chapter three challenges this consent by arguing that although the boundaries of play may be culturally constructed to bear great importance, often the separation between the “reality of play” and “serious reality” is quite ambiguous. The chapter begins by analyzing the cultural construction, emphasis and maintenance of the boundaries of play within one of the most clearly circumscribed playscapes in urban Japan, the amusement quarters called sakariba. It than proceeds to show that, in spite of their cultural prominence, these boundaries do not necessarily reflect what is going on in the reality of play. Exploring social dynamics in the Tokyoite contemporary sakariba of Shibuya, it becomes clear that what seems to be play for some is not necessarily play for others, and that play can be performed for material or social profits that are cashed in real-life situations. Most intriguingly, some behaviors within the sakariba cannot be categorized as “play” or as “nonplay” but as communicating a challenging “is this play?” message. Great reflexivity lies in such manipulation, and often it reflects deep criticism of the prevailing social order. The chapter concludes by arguing that rather than the boundaries of play, the cultural dialectic over those boundaries transforms play into a significant cultural function.

The Epilogue sums up the implications of the theoretical and methodological trajectories devised in this book. It then moves on to discuss once again the blurring of the boundaries between play and serious reality in Japan, pointing to the dialectical nature of this process. As play is being idealized by youths, consumer culture and even by policy makers, contrary to what may be expected, we may be witnessing the consummation of this trend, following the mechanism of saturation inherent in all social phenomena The chapter concludes with a flight of imagination into the possible futures of the cultural appreciation and phenomenology of play in Japan.

This chapter explores current ambivalences towards using competition between students as a means to intensify learning. The analysis builds on a case study from a Danish school where games are used to motivate second graders to maximize their learning. The current learning paradigm views the intensity of competition as desirable for motivational purposes. At the same time, the downsides of competition are seemingly avoided because there is no scarcity of prizes and therefore no losers. It becomes an open question whether game-playing is in fact competition or not. Individual students must therefore decide themselves whether competing is the most effective way of sustaining their learning. The analysis concludes that current ambivalences towards competition do not primarily stem from a care for cooperation and community but from a care for the individual’s maximized learning. Theoretically, the chapter introduces the notion of side-glance to understand competition as a form of observation.

This chapter addresses the ways in which classical music lends itself to gamification, a pervasive trend in contemporary culture in which aspects of games are applied to non-game activities to encourage desired behaviors. The chapter presents two case studies of recent mobile applications that illustrate different approaches to the gamification of classical music. The first of these discusses the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, an app that updates traditional, and problematic, approaches to music education, namely, music appreciation. The second case study considers Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, an app that embraces the interactivity of games to blur the lines between education and musical performance.

This chapter looks to the near future of online learning in music. It presents findings of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Report for higher education, which include trends and challenges considered important in the next five years and technologies likely to be implemented within three adoption horizons. Included among near-term technologies (the next 12 months) are MOOCs, tablet computing, and games and gamification. Online learning as a disruptive innovation is discussed, and implications of neuroscience and neuromusical research for online learning are explored. The chapter concludes with a proposed agenda for advancing the research on online learning in music in higher education, focused on identifying instructional practices that lead to high-quality student learning and improving online learning in music.

Chapter 5 examines the two boundary conditions that define the current scope of analytic activism: the analytics floor and the analytics ceiling. It thoroughly defines each of these boundary conditions, with helpful narrative examples. It then offers six case examples of promising efforts to push past these two boundaries. Three of the case examples focus on the analytics floor, highlighting efforts to help small organizations run effective experiments, strategically build their membership capacity, and leverage external analytics to monitor public sentiment. Three of the case examples focus on the analytics frontier, including efforts to develop new metrics that track the right activities and align an activist organization’s measurement schemes with its mission and vision, and a pilot project in “governance gamification” that represents a radical change in the governance voice of members/participants in activist campaigns.

Games work in the medium of agency; this chapter explores the special dangers of that medium. Understanding the value of games will show us why the gamification of ordinary life is problematic. Games can offer us seductive experiences of value clarity. In games, values are clear, and our achievements are usually quantifiable and rankable. We know exactly what we are doing, and why. This is unproblematic, as long as it is confined to the gaming context. But it is quite dangerous to export the expectation for value clarity outside the game. Our larger values are subtle and complex. If we are seduced by a fantasy of value clarity, we will be drawn to oversimplify our values. When we oversimplify our values in ordinary life to induce game-like experiences, we may amplify our motivation, but we will also change the target. And when we expect game-like value clarity in ordinary life, we may be too drawn to institutions and systems that present oversimplified versions of values. This chapter introduces the notion of “value capture.” Value capture occurs when our natural values are subtle, but institutions present us with simplified versions of those values, and then we internalize them. Value capture threatens to undermine our autonomy. But if we don’t manage our experience of games properly, they can make us more vulnerable to value capture. And the attempts to actively gamify ordinary life increase the threat of value capture.