Abstract Book of the 9th International Conference on Social Sciences in the 21st Century
Year: 2025
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The Gamified World: A Critical Perspective on Gamification
Ilaria Iannuzzi
ABSTRACT:
For a long time, the game has been considered, in the sociological field, an element of marginal character, as if to affirm, more or less explicitly, that dealing with the study of the game is itself a game, believing that this dimension is not able to add anything really significant for sociological theory. There is, instead, a close relationship between society and game, as Simmel already in 1917.
The game is connected to the organization of society: there is a parallelism between playful structures and social functions.
More and more frequently, in fact, the term gamification spreads and expands, becoming a real social imperative, which progressively affects more and more areas, from education to the economy, to finance – which becomes “creative” and is configured as the “game” of the Stock Exchange – and even at work. On closer inspection, however, – and this is what we propose to do in this paper – the gamification of societies does not seem to represent only a simple fashion, as such transient albeit recurrent, but rather appears as an economic and efficientistic process.
The goal of this paper is to highlight, through the theoretical research method proper of the general sociology processes that employ leisure, fun and recreation by bending the constitutive dimension of meaning of these areas, bringing them back to an economical logic. Consequences, in terms of inclusion, but particularly in terms of exclusion, need to be deeply analyzed.
Keywords: exclusion, gamification, gamified society, inclusion, smartness