Gamification was initially used as a device for retaining engagement of online users, but it is now spreading in every aspect of life, promising to turn serious tasks into playful and compelling activities. Little remains of the spontaneity of playing. To gamify something means to apply components and mechanics used in video games to non-game settings. It is not about creating a space ‘suspended from reality’ made of shared and negotiated rules, but rather an individualistic technique to create and maintain a behavioral change in order to be more productive and efficient. Real time feedback, rewards and repetitive actions are looped to reinforce the creation of new habits.
In the book as well as on the first video experiments, I examined which role gamification plays on society and on the individual, which I connected visually with the creation of an avatar suggesting the conflict between the possibility of self-reinvention and self-control, and the limits of wanting to indentify with a datafied being.