> I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: we see in the concept of games —here it comes again— a double mouvement, and indeed something approaching an autoantonymy. The concept in question can signify both a free play of the imaginative faculty, a Schillerian Spieltrieb; and it can signify a situation in which one is bound by formal constraints on one’s motions, and is therefore compelled to respond to one’s existence fundamentally through coming up with strategies. The gamification of our social life, which was honed and perfected on social media before it jumped the fence to affectivity, labor, and who knows what’s next, forces us to sacrifice free play to strategic play, and the leisurely flight of the imagination to narrow problem-solving.
> On the face of it, the gamification of reality looks like fun. But when everything becomes a game, it turns out, that game ends up dissolving into its merely apparent opposite: work. The dupes of the new ideology, underlain by the metaphor of the game, think they’re giving us life in an arcade —a child’s dream!— but what we’re really getting is life in a global warehouse, monitored and metricized, forced at every turn to devise strategies that maximize engagement with whatever it is we’re putting out there… all in the name of scraping by.