"Good Icing can't Change an Average Cake"

Abstract

Abstract 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 question 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 neomaterialist, post-anthropocentric, anti-Humanist, and intersectional theories 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.