“You just earned 10 points!”: Gaming and grinding in academia

This short paper explores the gamification of an online academic conference. At the conference, digital gamification was meant to stimulate increased levels of participation among attendees. Instead, it resulted in a series of unintended consequences. Precisely because it was all too easy to score points and ascend the virtual leaderboard by means of machine-like grinding, the “Conference Challenge” posed a moral dilemma for its players: each participant had to determine for themselves where the border lay between playing the game and gaming the system. We use this case to raise questions about the ethics of game-playing in an academic context. In particular, we suggest that the Conference Challenge is a distorted reflection of what’s already happening in the broader “publication game” in the university.


Introduction
Mae looked at the time.It was six o'clock.She had plenty of hours to improve, there and then, so she embarked on a flurry of activity, sending four zings and thirty-two comments and eighty-eight smiles.In an hour her PartiRank rose to 7,288.Breaking 7,000 was more difficult, but by eight o'clock, after joining and posting in eleven discussion groups, sending another twelve zings, one of them rated in the top 5,000 globally for that hour, and signing-up for sixty-seven more feeds, she'd done it [. ..]By 10:16 her rank was 5,342, and again, the plateau -this time 5,000 -was hard to overcome.[. ..]It was almost midnight and she needed to sleep [. ..]But she couldn't sleep.Now, thinking about how much better she could do, she logged on again, this time on her tablet, and pledged to work till two in the morning.She was determined to break 3,000.And she did it, though it was 3:19 a.m. when it happened.(Eggers, 2013: 190-191) In The Circle, Dave Eggers' dystopian thriller about an all-powerful Silicon Valley tech company, we find the main character Mae engaged in the relentless pursuit of points.Employees at the Circle gain points by posting messages (or "zings") on their own and other people's zing feeds.The more zings employees send, and the more their zings are re-zinged by others, the higher they climb up the company's internal leaderboard, or "PartiRank."Each time Mae reaches a new benchmark on PartiRank, she experiences a rush of exhilaration that motivates her to continue long into the night.This kind of intense focus and absorption is what positive psychologist Csíkszentmihályi (1990) calls a "state of flow," a state that can be activated by autotelic activities like playing a game.
The activities that Mae engages in partially resemble a game: competing with others, gaining points, tracking one's progress on a leaderboard.Yet these game-like activities are fused with more quotidian tasks that are associated with the serious world of work-in this case, contributing to a corporate culture that's based on passion, participation, and transparency (Eggers, 2013: 184).PartiRank isn't a game in any straightforward sense.But the ranking system motivates Mae to engage with it-to willingly dedicate her time and energy to it-as if it were a game played entirely for pleasure.
This blending of work and play is sometimes called "gamification" (Deterding et al., 2011;Hamari, 2019).Gamification is commonly defined as the application of a "game layer" to nongame contexts, such as work or education, and typically involves implementing a digital platform in the attempt to turn ordinary organizational activities into fun, intrinsically motivating tasks (Burke, 2014;Werbach and Hunter, 2020;Zichermann and Linder, 2013).On a basic level, gamification applies game mechanics-including points, badges, and leaderboards (or PBLs)-to a work-related task without fundamentally changing the nature of the task itself (Klock et al., 2020;Seaborn and Fels, 2015).For example, the Swedish tech firm Insert Coin promises to create "instant engagement and motivation" with a plug-and-play gamification system that allows employees to collect points, level up, complete missions, get rewards, and compete with others while performing their normal daily activities (Insert Coin, 2022).Broadly speaking, the aim of workplace gamification is to arouse the same sense of involvement and accomplishment that we might feel when playing games, whether digital or analog (Dymek and Zackariasson, 2017).
Gamification has come under critical scrutiny in recent years.Reflecting on the appropriation of videogame terminology, media theorist Bogost (2011) says that gamification is a form of "exploitation ware" insofar as it relies on cheap motivation tricks and bogus incentives to stimulate user behavior-a far cry from the deep pleasures of digital play.Extending this critique, other thinkers propose to "warn society against the use of gamified practices" that seek to intensify labor without extra remuneration (Vesa and Harviainen, 2019: 130).Along these lines, gamification has been described as a form of governmentality that regulates workplace behavior in subtle and insidious ways (Schrape, 2014), part of a broader "ludictatorship" that seeks to exert control over our lives via game design (Fuchs, 2014: 120).For such thinkers, gamification isn't a good faith attempt to infuse our work with a sense of frivolity and light-heartedness; it's a way of disciplining workers and subjecting them to digital surveillance within a data-driven economy (O'Donnell, 2014;Vasudevan and Chan, 2022).The implication is that we now live in the "age of gamification" (Jagoda, 2020), one in which the play-spirit is injected into every aspect of organizational lifeincluding the sphere of academia.
While attending a large academic conference that took place online in 2021, 1 we were struck by the fact that parts of the event had been gamified.During the conference, one of the largest of its kind in management and organization studies, attendees were invited to participate in a digital "Conference Challenge."Those who took part in the challenge were able to acquire points by engaging in a range of conference-related activities, such as attending sessions, posting messages in chat, or downloading content.Each time an activity was performed, the participant received 10 points.This, in turn, enabled attendees to ascend a leaderboard that displayed the highest scoring participants.At the end of the conference, the top three participants-participants who were the "most engaged" in the conference according to the scoring metrics-would receive a complimentary registration to next year's conference.The use of points, feedback, leaderboards, and rewards make the Conference Challenge a textbook case of gamification, even though its "game layer" is gossamer-thin.
As academics ourselves, we had been participating in the conference and presenting our research on (coincidentally) workplace gamification.We were thus attuned to the ways in which game mechanics-often extremely superficial and tokenistic in nature-are sometimes used to engage employees in job-related activities.As such, the Conference Challenge struck us as a laughably poor example of gamification, and we were mildly bemused by the attempt to inject the conference with a dose of artificial fun.However, we soon noticed that some attendees-judging from the level of competition at the top of the leaderboard-had apparently dedicated themselves to the task of scoring points.This made us wonder: why were some academics playing the game with such apparent zeal?Was this example of gamification successful in achieving its objectives, or were there other-more complicated-factors at play?And what does gamification tell us about the nature of academic work more generally?
To answer these questions, we contacted the top 10 players of the game on day three of the conference, as ranked on the public leaderboard.Of these, five people agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity: Dina, Qiang, Kyu, Axel, and Emre (not their real names).Our respondents live and work in a range of countries in both the Global North and the Global South, and are at an early stage of their careers (PhD students, post-docs, and junior lecturers).The interviews took place on Zoom and lasted 20 minutes on average.Our interviews captured the players of the game in situ, as they were engaged in the Conference Challenge; for this reason, they tell us something about our respondents' personal motivations in real time, as the events we discussed were unfolding.We also reached out to the event organizer, who declined to be interviewed but did provide us with written answers to our questions.
In what follows, we offer an account of what happens when you gamify an online academic conference.And what happens, we will suggest, is a distorted reflection of what's already happening in the broader "publication game" in the university.Specifically, the Conference Challenge amplifies a key ethical dilemma for academics-namely, how to balance the twin imperatives of doing research and scoring points via journal publishing.To this extent, the Conference Challenge is a hall-of-mirrors version of academic life at large.

Score attack
The Conference Challenge was designed and implemented by an external events management company, which-among other services-offers a customizable "gamification feature" for its clients.To this extent, the Conference Challenge was framed explicitly as a game-like experience.For example, the Conference Challenge webpage featured a stylized picture of a videogame controller: The image of the game controller is so simple and iconic that it would likely be recognizable to most people attending the event, clearly legible as a signifier of play.At the very least, it indicates that the Conference Challenge is tapping into the visual imagery of videogames, one that evokes a mood of nostalgic leisure.
Beyond the visual imagery, the Conference Challenge was a game-like experience in more fundamental ways.The conference webpage described the challenge as "friendly competition," a chance to network with other attendees while jockeying for position on a ranking system.Participants were invited to "interact throughout the conference to collect points and work [their] way up the leaderboard" (conference webpage), a process that was meant to result in heightened levels of participation.In the words of one of the event organizers, "we were looking for different ways for attendees to engage" and the gamified component of the conference was supposed to "help with flow" (personal correspondence)-a nod to Csíkszentmihályi's (1990) concept of optimal experience.
The rules of the game for the Conference Challenge were simple.Each time a participant completed a task, they received a pop-up on their computer or mobile screen: Over the course of the conference, a typical attendee received dozens of such messages, each one informing them that they had accumulated 10 "game points." Our respondents were initially unaware that they were, in fact, playing a game.For example, Dina received a notification saying that she had won 10 points each time she added a session to her schedule, but it "took [her] a while to realize what these points were."Qiang also stumbled upon the conference challenge "by chance" after receiving a pop-up message about accumulating game points.Kyu recounts being "a bit annoyed" by the messages constantly popping up on his screen: It was like '10 points,' '10 points,' and to be honest I thought this is like some sort of spam. ..It [was] a bit distracting.
At first, the Conference Challenge was perceived as an intrusion, a distraction from the serious work of attending sessions and presenting papers.As Axel says, "almost nobody was aware [of] this game" at the start of the conference.
But once the points started to add up, our respondents soon adopted a play mentality and began to immerse themselves in the game.The accounts of the top players are remarkably similar: When I finished [booking sessions] I got maybe 5,000 or 6,000 points.It's missing a little bit to reach the top fifteen, the top ten, so then I [thought], 'Why not try to reach the top?' (Axel) I saw myself sometimes in the top fifteen so, wow. ..let's see how far I can go.(Dina) This particular gamification is way easier than others. ..If it's that easy, then I'll see how far I can go.(Qiang) The participants soon developed strategies for accumulating as many points as possible.One obvious strategy was to "include everything in your schedule . . .that's how everyone gets a few thousand [points]" (Qiang).But that was a beginner's trick.A more effective way of ascending the leaderboard was to "repeat certain actions" (Qiang) ad infinitum, such as bombarding other attendees with direct messages.As Qiang notes, "[if] you and I just keep sending each other 'hellos' [then] you will always get 10 points."Dina leveraged this same strategy to her advantage when she found out that she could gain "10 extra points when I say 'thank you'" to speakers in the chat box.She reflects on her experiences: If I want to play a little bit more at night before I sleep, if I'm too excited to sleep, I would just look at the three top [players] and see, where am I? Am I still in the top three?Let's see if I can -if I'm the fourthlet's see if I can move to the top three.And I would do that by just saying five or ten 'thank yous' to speakers.
Dina also exploited glitches in the online system to gain additional points.Having initially booked everything on the schedule, she then unbooked the sessions she didn't actually want to attend.This led to a startling discovery: The system, the algorithm, did not deduct the 10 points from me.I wanted to play more, so I clicked again -you know, I booked my spot, then removed it, then booked again -and it gave me another 10 points.
There was no limit to the number of sessions attendees were able to book, unbook, and rebookand hence no limit to the number of points they could accumulate by performing the same action again and again.
Gamification had turned the conference experience into a kind of game, but it was a game that could be won only by performing simple repetitive tasks in a machine-like manner.In videogame language, this is known as "grinding": an activity performed not for enjoyment, but for the sake of acquiring an in-game advantage such as experience points or loot (Paez, 2020).In the world of videogames, grinding is an ambiguous activity.For some gamers, grinding is legitimate because it compensates hard work with in-game rewards (Hernandez, 2013).For others, grinding runs contrary to the spirit of the game insofar as it incentivizes mindless, monotonous behavior (Bycer, 2018).
The same ambiguous dynamic characterized the Conference Challenge.The most successful players of the game were those who had the time and patience to grind their way to the top of the leaderboard.It was straightforward to start accumulating points but, as Qiang notes, "after a while you see only a few [people] seriously playing there"-10 or so out of a total of almost 10,000 attendees.The game quickly became more serious and started to raise complex ethical questions for our respondents about how one ought to play it.

Point and click
For the most part, our respondents admitted using deliberate strategies to climb the leaderboard.Yet they also created a narrative in which they had not cheated or gamed the system.Axel claims he did "nothing to artificially increase [his] points" and had earned his place on the leaderboard fair and square.Similarly, Emre says that he accumulated points "organically" from his conference-related activities, as if the right way to play the game was to not play the game too purposefully.Dina frames her behavior in explicitly ethical terms: "I never put any comment on something I did not attend, so I was really ethical in that regard" (Dina).In lieu of a clear boundary between playing the game and gaming the system, the top players drew an imaginary line in the sand that demarcated fair play from bad sportsmanship-a line that permitted our respondents to justify their own engagement with the game while allowing them to distance themselves from the other top players.
Axel singles out the players at number 1 and 2 in the leaderboard.Both of them, he says, "cheat a little bit" by posting "standardized messages throughout all the sessions, artificially, in order to earn some points."Qiang, too, expresses skepticism about the methods of the top two players (he was placed at number three on the leaderboard at the time): "I couldn't figure out what the number one is doing. ..but the number two is spamming all the sessions with a LinkedIn link."Dina refers to this kind of bad sportsmanship as the "dark side" of conference gamification: There is no way, if you want to be serious -attend sessions, write proper messages to scholars -there is no way you can reach [the top of the leaderboard] because there is no time.
When our interview took place, Dina was positioned at number four in the leaderboard-just outside the top three.She expressed her frustration about the other top players, players who she thought had climbed to the top of the leaderboard by dubious means.This was the only way she could make sense of the fact that she was still stuck at number four: "I've been working hard the past few days, and still I'm not at the top."We should pay attention to the language here: she feels that she has been unfairly denied a place in the top three precisely because she has been "working hard," that is, engaging meaningfully with other participants, posting relevant comments in chat, and attending sessions out of genuine interest, rather than simply deluging discussion forums with cookie-cutter messages.Similarly, Qiang also thinks that some players are taking the game too far and pushing it "out of the original intended meaning." These narratives are interesting because they express a tension between how the participants describe their own engagement with the game (on the side of fair play) and how they describe other people's engagement with the game (on the side of bad sportsmanship).The tension arises from the fact that participants like Dina and Qiang strategized in ways that are in practice hard to distinguish from the spoilsports at the top of the leaderboard: unbooking and rebooking sessions, sending an inordinate amount of "thank yous" or "hellos" to attendees, etc.In the end, the line in the sand seems more like a moving goalpost.
For participants who continued to game and grind during the conference, there was a final twist to come.Toward the end of the conference, a number of participants-including the top two players on the leaderboard-were disqualified from the Conference Challenge by the event organizer.Qiang, too, was swept up in the dragnet and shared with us the letter he received about his disqualification.The letter informed Qiang that his account had been flagged for engaging in activities that are "borderline spam" (personal correspondence).The letter continued: I know that [it] is not your intention to gain points or unintentionally spam each session chat but this could be viewed as contrary to the challenge participation goals.(Personal correspondence) The Conference Challenge, like other forms of gamification, is meant to impose a "game layer" on non-game activities so that these activities become more fun and engaging.To this extent, gamification should ideally serve the underlying reality, not the game layer.This is the point the conference organizer is trying to make: the Conference Challenge ought to motivate attendees to participate in a conference, not encourage them to score points by hook or by crook-or, as Emre put it, just "clicking and clicking and clicking." Yet we can read the letter on another level.Like our respondents, the event organizer draws a red line between fair play and bad sportsmanship, between playing the game just enough (e.g."messaging to make more meaningful connections") and playing the game too much (e.g."posting the same chat [message] on multiple sessions").The irony, of course, is that the top players make the same ethical distinction between a "good player" and a "bad player" as the event organizer.The only difference is that the event organizer was able to enforce this distinction upon the players retroactively, after the game had already been played and won.
Once the final scores had been tallied, the number one player was crowned the winner of the Conference Challenge with a total of 19,970 points.Now that's a lot of clicks.

The disqualified academic
The Conference Challenge turned out to be a bigger challenge than the organizers probably expected.Precisely because it was all too easy to score points ("you just click and click and click"-where's the challenge in that?), the game posed a moral problem for the players: each individual who took part had to determine for themselves where the border was between playing the game and gaming the system.The question is, how much is one willing to engage in pointscoring activities that have no relation to the conference in order to participate in what the organizers describe as "friendly competition"?Put differently, at what point do these competitive strategies become "unfriendly"?There is no good answer to this question precisely because, in this particular example of gamification, the birth of the player (of the game) is the birth of the gamer (of the system).
For the event organizers, the ideal winner wins by playing the game without gaming the system, that is, without adopting strategies solely aimed at increasing one's score.The "game" would, according to this idea, be no more than a device to measure meaningful conference engagement.But by announcing the game as a game, it is hard to see the Conference Challenge as anything other than an invitation to score points.This puts the players in an impossible situation.On the one hand, one ought not to collect points for the sake of collecting points.On the other hand, collecting points is precisely the name of the game.From this perspective, the Conference Challenge is like playing football with the moral expectation that you should not in fact touch the ball.
Of course, none of our respondents came to the conference solely to participate in the Conference Challenge, and in fact they did not even realize-at first-that it was meant to be experienced as a game.All of our respondents had a genuine interest in the conference, which meant that they needed to balance their game-playing with other conference activities.Yet this balancing act was, in practice, a zero-sum game: in order to increase their points on the leaderboard, our respondents had to decrease their engagement with the conference itself-namely, the time-consuming work of attending sessions.In other words, the Conference Challenge inadvertently created a schism between the game and the conference; rather than adding to the conference experience, playing the game only detracted from it.As an example of gamification, an intervention meant to stimulate higher levels of engagement, the Conference Challenge was clearly a resounding failure.
What can we learn by reflecting on a "worst case" example of gamification like the Conference Challenge?Some of our respondents assumed that our research would help to improve the game design of the Conference Challenge, and they even made some helpful suggestions themselves ("not all activities deserve the same amount of points," etc.).But the design shortcomings of gamification are not our main focus here.The truth is that commentators have already laid bare some of the most salient design problems with gamification, such as its overreliance on points, badges, and leaderboards (PBLs)-a technique that Robertson (2010) sardonically calls "pointsification" and that Bogost (2011) views simply as "bullshit."There is little need to criticize the design flaws of the Conference Challenge in any depth because its flaws are so obvious, flaws that any gamification scholar would easily be able to identify.To wit: it invokes the rhetoric of games yet fails to draw on research-based principles of game design or motivational psychology (Deterding, 2019;Landers, 2019), resulting in a core mechanic that is-in game terminologyfundamentally "broken." Leaving aside its obvious shortcomings, the Conference Challenge interests us for another reason: it tells us something about academia.Specifically, the Conference Challenge reveals something about how we relate to research-related activities like attending academic conferences.From one perspective, an academic conference is simply a forum for scholars to exchange ideas.Yet we know this is only half the story.An academic conference is also a job market, a networking opportunity, a CV-booster, a training ground to refine one's publication strategies, an occasion to win prizes and receive awards, and so on.In other words, the academic conference is already a gamified activity, one that's closely related to other forms of game-playing in academia (Kuldova, 2021).For example, the "publication game" is the term that's commonly used to describe the pursuit of career goals through academic publishing (Butler and Spoelstra, 2020).On this basis, academics are expected to follow the "rules of the game" (Gioia, 2019) in order to prosper in an increasingly competitive academic environment, an environment characterized by "mindless measures" (Tourish and Willmott, 2015) like journal ranking lists, impact factors, and other citation metrics.Such performance indicators purport to measure academic quality, but in fact they do more than that: they set the ground rules for academic engagement and shape our scholarly conduct in peculiar and unpredictable ways (Bristow et al., 2017;Butler and Spoelstra, 2014;Kalfa et al., 2018).Academic conferences-especially large international ones such as the one our respondents attended-are a part of this academic-ludic complex insofar as they provide scholars with an opportunity for gaining social and reputational capital (Becker and Lukka, 2022;Robinson et al., 2017).
On this view, the Conference Challenge is best understood as a game layer added to a game layer, a minor league game within the broader game of academia.It is no surprise, perhaps, that the minor league players differ from the big league players-just as in baseball, so too in academia.The major game of the conference is played (and won) by academics from elite universities who use the occasion to establish contacts with colleagues at other elite institutions, fellow scholars who will increase one's chances of getting published in top-tier outlets, securing lucrative research funding, or finding new employment opportunities.By contrast, the minor game-the Conference Challenge-was played by academics who find themselves on the periphery of academia, in precarious positions at precarious universities.For a fleeting moment, our respondents felt like they were finally making some progress, as if they were winning the major game of the conference, even though the serious players-well-published professors from well-off universities-were playing a different game.For our respondents, the Conference Challenge was the only prize at a prestigious international conference that they could compete for, at least at this stage of their careers.Dina expressed this nicely when she confided to us, half-jokingly, that seeing her name at the top of the leaderboard made her feel like "the queen" of the conference.
There is a deeper parallel between the minor league game and the broader game of academia.The Conference Challenge is characterized by fundamentally conflicting demands, resulting in a lose-lose situation for its participants: play the game to its fullest, and you will be disqualified; play the game half-heartedly, and you will not win.The participants must decide for themselves just how far to take the game, without knowing exactly how one might distinguish between tactics that are merely clever and tactics that are downright crooked.A similar dynamic characterizes the publication game.We're encouraged to publish as much as possible, in as many premier outlets as possible, without compromising our scholarly values-or, as Prasad (2013) puts it, learning how to play the game without losing yourself.Yet, just like our respondents, academics are also left to decide where to draw the line between playing the game and gaming the system-or whether such a line exists in the first place.For all our efforts to play the game straight down the line, we might find that we have been on the wrong side of the rules all along (especially if the rules are unspoken and forever changing).This ambiguity isn't a bug but a feature of academia.Because our scholarly efforts are blended with extrinsic motivators of various kinds, it's impossible to distinguish in any definitive way between doing research for the sake of intellectual curiosity and doing research for the sake of accruing real-world rewards.
We know this because we, too, have struggled with the publication game, a game that also poses a moral problem for its players.Naturally, we see ourselves as playing the game legitimately, fully above board-for example, publishing in academic journals while maintaining our critical ethos.Like most of our peers, we like to think that we strike just the right balance between scholarly quality and scholarly quantity.At the same time, we scoff at colleagues who we feel are gaming the system and bending the rules, those unscrupulous players who would do anything for a quick hit or a high score.But perhaps we're fooling ourselves; perhaps our own publication strategies differ little from the publication strategies employed by academics we consider to be "bad sports."We feel this "Speaking Out" paper falls on the side of fair play, that it advances scholarly knowledge without relying on cheap tricks, but of course there is always the suspicion that, in the words of one of our reviewers, it's just "an easy way to score a point in Organization."This comment is revealing because it reminds us that it is difficult to establish an impermeable cordon sanitaire between playing the game and gaming the system.
In the current climate of journal rankings and research assessments, the game of academia is always played, whether or not we want to partake in it, and whether or not we are even aware of its existence.Unless we exit academia, we cannot fail to win points for performing our ordinary researchrelated tasks (even if we are way, way down the "leaderboard").Every time we publish in an academic journal, we receive the same kind of notification as participants in the Conference Challenge: "Congratulations!You just earned game points."We can mute the notifications but we can't refuse the game points; whatever we do, however we play, they inevitably accumulate.We cannot completely opt out of the publication game, even if we politely decline to play along with its rules.This leaves us with the same dilemma faced by our respondents-namely, where do we draw the line between playing the game just enough and playing the game too much?There is no good answer to this question because, like the Conference Challenge, the game of academia is broken.Universities compel us to balance the twin imperatives of doing research and scoring points via journal publishing, as if this demand is straightforward or uncomplicated.Yet these twin imperatives pull us in opposite directions, like a Medieval torture rack that stretches us at both ends.For example: do you salami-slice your data and squeeze out another publication, or do you focus on only your most consequential empirical material and slow your rate of academic production?Do you collaborate with big-name professors who contribute nothing to your research except for their reputations, or do you work with junior colleagues who share your own research interests yet have no profile in the field?Do you target highly ranked journals you never read because it'll be good for your career, or do you target lower ranked journals you always read yet will never get you tenure?It's no use trying to fix the broken game by implementing stricter codes of codes or better measures of research quality.These won't help with the ethical conundrums that academics are asked to navigate in the university.Rather, making these moral questions visible-and thereby recognizing the publication game as fundamentally broken-is what matters.That way, we can widen the fractures and fissures that characterize contemporary academia, drawing attention to the cracks instead of trying to plaster over them.As Leonard Cohen puts it in his 1992 song "Anthem": "There is a crack, a crack in everything-that's how the light gets in."

Conclusion
Despite its absurdity, the Conference Challenge invites us to consider the "game mechanics" of academia more generally and to recognize ourselves as academics at play, a subject position that