Ludification of Work or Labourisation of Play: On Work-Play Interferences

This paper examines the increasingly blurred boundary between play and work, arguing that existing concepts such as gamification and ludification capture only one direction of a two-way relationship. Drawing on Huizinga's and Caillois' classic accounts of play as serious, unproductive, and bounded by a "magic circle," the authors contend that contemporary life shows play entering domains once considered serious, while work practices simultaneously permeate play. To describe this mutual overlay, they propose "laborization" as a counterpart to ludification and, more centrally, the notion of "work/play interference," borrowed from the physics of superposed waves, to capture the transformative and impure character of present-day social practice.

The analysis is conceptual and theoretical rather than empirical, relying on a review of literature in game studies, media theory, and philosophy of play. The authors illustrate the proposed interference through examples drawn from scientific settings, including citizen science games such as EyeWire, machine learning competitions such as the Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge, and collaborative playful research environments like CERN. These cases are used to show how scientific productivity and playful engagement intertwine rather than remain separate.

The paper's central claim is that such interferences signal a broader shift toward a society in which play is increasingly subject to efficiency, seriousness, and technical determinism. Drawing on Caillois' warnings about the corruption of play when its boundaries dissolve, the authors pose an open question: whether these hybrid phenomena should be welcomed as empowering and engaging, or regarded with caution and suspicion. They conclude by asking whether a deliberate combination of labor and play might enable a society to better balance its competing values.