For me the biggest trend or fad of the last six months is that of gamification, essentially taking a lot of things we love about videogames, and using them for non-gaming exercises. Jane McGonigol's rhetoric has been key in a lot of this – she has termed game designers to be “happiness engineers” - to be those most suited to finding ways to motivate players, and then getting them to have a great time doing so, and hopefully in the process, creating excess social good. Of course marketers have gotten their hands the idea and have run with it – this is gamification, or as Ian Bogost has suggested people put it – exploitationware. It kinda makes everybody uncomfortable, but that's okay. That's the point.

I think that gamification has caught the affection of so many in the corporate world because it holds the same promise that advertising geared to the subconscious desires of humanity did. It attempts – through subtle goals and mechanics, to engineer consumers. By using these methods marketers can once again take the upper hand. I mean, where else is there to go? Sure ads and brands still scramble desperately to appeal to our inner subconscious – to our eternal longing for social acceptance and self-worth – but like over-inoculating entire populations against flu each year leading to stronger viruses immune to contemporary drugs, our overly-self aware, discursive and self-referential advertising culture has bred a generation of jaded, media savvy people, whose very first response to just about everything is often this:

THIS IS FAKE/STAGED/PHOTOSHOPED

We don't believe anything anymore! We call out bullshit before we are even certain that its bullshit because we have been told and taught to believe that everything is a lie. As the philosopher Slavoj Žižek has said many times, if we believe in anything today it's deconstruction. We, as academics – and I would say as a culture - deconstruct with extreme prejudice.

I believe that videogames are powerful tools and powerful ways of communicating – but they are only just that – another way to communicate, just as the telegraph, radio and television were. Yet gamification seems to offer the promise of a new way of engineering happiness – a new way of controlling the population when consumerism seems to have come up so short in creating the docile consumer that governments and corporations would like. This is the continuation of Edward Bernays' Freudian cynical view of people; as blind slaves to nature. Instead we should be very open to the understanding that there is a moral dimension to gamification: it can exploit people.

In addition, chances are this vision of a new docile consumer created through its use is likely a myth, sprouting out of many peoples desire to reinvigorate the old ways of controlling populations and publics.

So knowing this, how should we use videogames, and what else can they do? That's what I hope we can think about in our ongoing discussion and what videogames mean for power at the bottom up, instead of from the top down.