Meaning making and the gamification of everything.

I’m beginning some work on the overlap between play and storytelling, so I’ve been reading up on where this issue has been in the past few decades. While there isn’t much consensus on some of the basic questions of ludology and narratology, there certainly has been some agonizing. When it comes to video games, many ask whether one paradigm or the other is the most appropriate methodology for breaking down digital media, or whether the rift between them is illusory, or whether what games are doing in the first place is storytelling. It’s led me not just from narratology to ludology, but back to my old discipline of linguistics as I search for answers (or at least leads) from work done on the interface between syntax and semantics, two systems that work together to create and interpret language, but which are typically modeled using completely different structural features. Here is where I think ludology and narratology can be limned and perhaps then partially reconciled.

But where my mind wandered today as I read through a few articles with the AFC title game going quietly in the background comes back to play in specific, and not the type of play that directly corresponds to football or even professional sports in a direct way. Rather, I was thinking of bad play. Play that isn’t really based on fun, per se. Play that’s being pushed and becoming something other than play. A consequence of the gamification of contemporary life in America, cordoned off and packaged for purposes of rent extraction, if you will.

I am of course referring to gambling, and not the wholesome type of penny-ante parlor games, or even slot machines and limit hold’em tables. The kind you do quietly on your phone, betting on ever more obscure and sophisticated parlays. It’s an activity I absolutely do not understand, as I am very averse to just this sort of risk taking. Because while I can appreciate the thrill of winning a pot in a poker game or the hope you feel as you scratch a losing ticket, I can’t understand how anyone can derive pleasure from betting their savings, sacrificing relationships, their futures, whatever, on hunches, in solitude, through an app. And so I started thinking, from what is probably a unique position vis-a-vis the act of sports gambling, about what that activity means, what sits behind it, and so on.

I don’t think I’m even concerned with why people, on an individual basis, are attracted to these things. This is because I don’t think it’s pathological, although there are probably types more attuned to the logic of betting. This is because of the move from sports betting to placing bets on everything, the just-around-the-corner practice of betting on calamities, crashes, electoral upheaval, and catastrophes that newer platforms are now monetizing. The obvious impetus is to manufacture a ready-to-enclose commons on the part of the companies, of course. It’s easy, I think, to conceive of a business model where the product is simply some statistical drivel and a shiny UI where people are enticed to deposit their money on long-shot bets that the economy or a passenger plane will crash in the next six months. It’s even darker to conceive of why people want to do such a thing in the first place (bet on such things, that is). There is a level of desperation and misplaced masculinity, I’m sure, but there’s also a certain antisocial tendency that is ironically collective at play. I’m thinking now of the Grand Slam track meet I attended last summer where I witnessed a member of the crowd heckle a runner before she raced, telling her he bet against her and trying to psych her out. To be honest, I thought it was all in jest, as I could not imagine any situation in which this person was serious, that he didn’t know the athlete, that this conduct was for real. But by the time I realized she had lost the race, and was making the rounds of the stadium taking pictures with young fans as he followed her around gloating. The next day ESPN reported on the incident, revealing that the man was banned from races and the betting platform on which he typically played. He had a whole personality as an influencer known for bullying athletes. I struggle to think of a more pathetic use of one’s time or way to misplace one’s pride.

So when does play become not fun? What is this brave new world of ubiquitous calculation of odds and tossing around of cash and what does it say about how we see ourselves in play?