More nothing now |
We are most human when we play freely, imaginatively, pointlessly. Gamification risks atrophying that most precious capacity
by Justin Neuman BIO
A mass snowball fight in Meridian Hill Park in Washington, DC, on 25 January 2026. Photo by Oliver Contreras/AFP/Getty Images
is an assistant professor of English at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School in New York, US, and the founder of ultra-normal.com, where he builds philosophical software for daily life. He is the author of Fiction Beyond Secularism (2014), the co-author of Modernism and Its Environments (2020) and the co-editor of the ‘Cultural Frames, Framing Culture’ series.
Edited byMarina Benjamin
Our kids were playing Settlers of Catan over the holidays. Or rather, they weren’t. They’d rearranged the strategy game’s hexagonal tiles into an archipelago of islands that no rulebook recognises, imagined ‘bridges’ built from wood, brick and stone, and invented a purpose for the game about network connectivity that had nothing to do with earning points. They were not playing Catan. They were playing in Catan, using its materials as components to make a world the designers never imagined.
My first instinct was to reach for the rulebook and teach them how the game actually works. My next was to figure out how I could win. It took me a while to realise what I really needed to do: build up the courage to ask if I could sit in and build with them. That was the moment something shifted – not for the kids, who were already there, but for me: a 48-year-old professor sitting on the carpet, making islands and building bridges without a point in sight.
You can play a game or you can play in a game. When you follow the official rules, pursue the stated objective, and measure yourself against opponents or a scoring system, that’s competition: playing a game. The Greeks had a word for this kind of play: agôn, from the god who personified conflict, struggle and contest. But when my kids disassembled the board and turned it into a world, they were doing something older and stranger. They were engaged in what the French sociologist Roger Caillois, in his taxonomy Man, Play and Games (1958), called paidia: free, spontaneous, unstructured play. The kind with no winner, no score, and no optimisation. The kind of play that has almost no place in adult life and, arguably, the kind we need the most, especially now, when even our leisure comes with leaderboards.
The entire architecture of digital life – with its algorithmic feeds, frictionless production and the ambient expectation that we should be consuming or optimising at all times – nudges us towards chasing outputs rather than generating meaning. We track our sleep and score our calm. Fitness apps turn the morning run into a contest; meditation apps gamify stillness with streak counters; language apps award achievement badges for what used to be called curiosity. Even journaling apps nudge users toward consistency scores. The gamification of leisure has turned into work everything that used to exist as its counterpoint. Leisure has become a third shift with its own metrics, its own guilt, and its own sense of falling behind.
The philosopher C Thi Nguyen calls this ‘value capture’: the process by which a game’s simplified, legible values start to colonise the real-world activity the game was supposed to serve. Their power arises from the fact that games don’t just create worlds, but new visions of the good, telling players what to care about by virtue of what the game rewards through scores. When you’re doing Duolingo to maintain your streak, or when your place on the running app’s leaderboard replaces the reason you started running, that’s value capture. The metric ate the meaning.
A Village Festival, With a Theatrical Performance and a Procession in Honour of St Hubert and St Anthony: 1192 (1632) by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Courtesy the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK
The Dutch historian and cultural critic Johan Huizinga saw this coming almost a century ago. In Homo Ludens (1938), he argued that play is not marginal to civilisation but, rather, generative of it. For Huizinga, law, philosophy, poetry and war all emerge from play’s ‘magic circle’: the bounded space where ordinary rules are suspended and something else becomes possible. Huizinga worried that the play element had been declining in Western civilisation since the end of the 18th century, eroded by industrialisation and professionalisation. What he feared has now been fulfilled. It’s not that we killed play; we captured it and harnessed it to a productivity framework. Then we packaged and sold it for passive consumption. The magic circle was instrumentalised into a dopamine hit.
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