Interesting piece vodselbt, thanks for sharing!
Brings to mind a section about Pokemon GO from film critic Nick Pinkerton’s Live Stream Follies Pt 3. (The essay is behind his Substack paywall but if you’re interested in reading there’s a $5/month subscription option):
Invoking again the unquiet ghosts of the Situationists, committed to the introduction of a spirit of play into a crushing quotidian existence, we might say that Pokémon Go invited the player to embark on a species of derivé—a Debord coinage describing a philosophy of spontaneous, follow-your-nose urban drifting designed to break one free of the banality of homogenized daily life, first defined in a 1956 essay written towards the end of Debord’s Lettrist International days.
The difference, and a crucial one, is that the path of the ideal derivé was improvisatory and truly aimless, a course charted by spontaneous, gut-level responses to the cityscape as one moved through it. While the Pokémon Go player might, in their quest, be led to discover previously unknown territory, that discovery would be incidental and subordinate to the carrot on a stick: the Psyduck scooped up outside of a Blimpie’s in Rahway, New Jersey, or whatever.
In describing the gamification in everyday life, a discrimination between types of games is necessary: between those forms of play without rules, identifiable objectives, and winners and losers, like the derivé or the involuted processes of art-making, and those that incorporate all of those barriers and prompts, like Pokémon Go, geocaching, and most of what’s evoked today by the word “gaming.” In a recent paper titled “Gamification: What it is and how to fight it,” academics Jamie Woodcock and Mark R. Johnson develop a distinction between ‘gamification-from-above’—“the imposition of systems of regulation, surveillance and standardization upon aspects of everyday life, through forms of interaction and feedback drawn from games but severed from their original playful contexts”—and a proposed, oppositional ‘gamification-from-below,’ a rejection of games designed to serve management’s goals of optimized efficiency, and a return to pure play.