Playing at Control: Writing Surveillance in/for Gamified Society

Abstract

Gamification has entrenched constant monitoring throughout society. From education to work to shopping, our activities are tracked, our progress is monitored, and rewards are meted out. But this enforced acceptance of constant surveillance constructs a social narrative in which privacy ceases to exist, and the technological tools at work can easily be shifted from reward to control. This is furthered through the shift from a Bentham–Foucault model of power and the threat of surveillance to the actualisation of complete protocological surveillance enabled by cloud computing, data centres, and machine learning. It is no longer the case that anything we do might be surveilled; we can be fairly certain that everything we do probably is being monitored, judged, and recorded. How can we negotiate these changing narratives? Of what fictions do we convince ourselves when we play the “game” called digital society? This article uses the work of Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, Dave Eggers, and Ernest Cline to assess how fictionality can act as thought experiments for the social conditions of surveillance technologies. Through stories such as Halting State and Walkaway, we explore the collisions between the control-based society of tech companies and the disciplinary structures of traditional states—the points of tension between illusions of freedom, guided game paths, and the exercise of power over users’ data and behaviours. The article argues for expanding our perspectives on the reach of game analysis to the broader connected networks of cultural and political systems, to assess ways of responding to the idea that we are being played with, turned into characters in the gamified narratives of control-based surveillance societies.

(Always) Playing the Camera: Cyborg Vision and Embodied Surveillance in Digital Games

“…Connections between surveillance studies and game studies have previously explored how game design elements are implemented into surveillance technologies and practices (Benjamin 2019;Koskela and Mäkinen 2015;Mäkinen 2017;Whitson 2015). Others have looked at playful representations of surveillance in popular culture in general (Marx 1996), game community related surveillance such as community management and paratext (Kerr, Paoli, and Keatinge 2014), surveillance of players and streamers (Taylor 2016), and how games and gaming platforms often are constructed as surveillance structures (e.g., Cybulski 2014;Wang, Haines, and Tucker 2011) or presented to the player as surveillance structures (Albrechtslund and Dubbeld 2005).…”

Assessing Creditworthiness in the Age of Big Data

“…The first body of work emphasizes the political and legal dimensions of the deployment of algorithms in contemporary society. Key issues include how different forms of discriminatory logics may be inscribed in the algorithms, the lack of transparency in the handling and circulation of data, and the vulnerabilities that are exacerbated through new surveillance practices (O'Neil 2016;Sumpter 2018;Zuboff 2019;Benjamin 2019). At its extreme, leading scholars have warned that algorithmic predictions may ultimately result in the loss of 'the future tense' (Zuboff 2019).…”

“…This is not to belittle the inequalities that algorithms create for people's lives, nor do we wish to downplay the effects of automation and automated decision-making on major domains of social life such as welfare, policing, border management, etc. (Eubanks 2018;Benjamin 2019;Kaufman and Leese 2018). Rather, we wish to complement prevailing critiques by emphasising the ways in which the 'rule making' (Katzenbach and Ulbricht 2019, 2) principle of algorithms is influenced by different operational, legislative, and sociocultural contexts.…”

The Philosophy of the Game in the American Ludic Novels of Pre-Digital and Digital Era

“…In literary criticism, his novel is cited as an example of the negative influence of game practice on modern mode of living. [3], [5], [7] This work is also viewed as a case study for teaching digital ethics.…”