Sebastian Deterding is one of the most influential scholars working on a critical definition of gamification. He recently published a paper titled “The Ambiguity of Games. Histories and Discourses of a Gameful World”, using Victor Turner’s distinction of liminal and liminoid to articulate how current views of the gameful world are steeped in specific, modernist conceptions of games and play.

Read the paper for free at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2463983