Total Gamification

Mathias Fuchs's essay "Total Gamification" argues that video games have moved from a niche, playful novelty into a central medium of contemporary society, and that this maturation carries a risk. Opening with Al Gore's 2011 declaration that "games are the new normal," the author contends that games have lost their innocence: they now simulate battlefields, predict disasters, drive profit, and operate in virtually every social niche. Fuchs characterises games as a "super-medium" able to absorb the forms of older media, and suggests that as the medium becomes ubiquitous, its earlier capacity for liberating play may be eroded by an over-accumulation of gaming.

The essay traces a philosophical lineage from Friedrich Schiller's idealised notion of play to contemporary gamification advocacy, arguing that both elevate play into a totalising ideal that marginalises non-ludic human activities such as labour, mortality, and uncertainty. Fuchs draws on Adorno, Caillois, Bataille, and others to argue that play cannot substitute for labour at a substantive level, and that the framing of games as "normal" obscures questions about why, where, and by whom they are played. He introduces Alex Gekker's concept of "casual power," through which technology-supported design quietly shapes user behaviour by making its own assumptions appear natural.

Fuchs develops an analogy between the rhetoric of contemporary gamification and the "total mobilisation" of early twentieth-century German war planning, including Ludendorff's and Goebbels's expansion of human resources to women, youth, and minorities. He is careful to state that gamification has not yet reached a level of total societal permeation, presenting "total gamification" as a tendency and a warning rather than a present condition. The essay closes by pointing to the contributions in the wider volume, which seek lines of flight from a totality of play.