*Right Game, Wrong Place? A Case Study: Using a Gamified AR Application in a Heritage… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107535*

During this time there was a significant backlash against this conception of gamification, fermented most notably by Ian Bogost [3] who offered the term 'exploitationware' as a better description. It was argued that it reduces games to the '*incidental properties of their medium, points and leaderboards'* [3] and seeks to parcel up these mechanics into productivity products, which are devoid of the '*playful experiences meant to produce gratification*'. This position was supported by Thibault [9] who viewed gamification as certainly problematic and potentially dystopian, and Dragona [15], who positioned gamification as a mechanism *to 'enable exploitation and control'.* Koster went on to state that gamification misses the point of what a game should be, using '*the trappings of games (reward structures, points, etc.) to make people engage more with product offerings'* ([13], p. 50). Layering these trapping '*on top of systems that lack the rich interpretability of a good game. A reward structure alone does not a game make'* [13]*.* Nicholson [16] characterises this as a difference between meaningful and (BLAP) gamification with BLAP standing for badges, levels and leaderboards, achievements and points. Implicit in this debate are the opposing ideas of what elements within a game actually create the positive experiences that motivate and engage. On the one hand, this is positioned as the mechanics; the achievement of a certain level, or the accrual of points within the system in and of itself [12]. On the other, it is the more expansive notion of the contextually specific experience of engaging with a complex system in which playful moments are attained to produce gratifications [3].

This debate is essential to an exploration of the efficacy of Temple Newsam Augmented Reality (TNAR), in that the project aimed to create a gamified system that is enjoyable in its own right; to simultaneously educate and entertain. The participants, far from being paid to engage with a task that could be gamified to increase their productivity, had paid to visit the space in which the game was situated. As such it is incumbent on the gamified system itself to evoke pleasure in those engaging with it. To achieve this, an understanding of which characteristics within the gamified system deliver these positive experiences is required. Is it the mechanical or the experiential or a more complicated and context-specific combination of the two as suggested by, for example Tulloch [5]. According to Koster [17], gaming is fundamentally about fun, and that fun, when elicited by playing games, is complex, individual and related to learning and mastery, exploration and rich interpretations.

Bilda [18] aligned positive experience to the notion of 'meaningful play', which is achieved by designing *'experiences that have meaning and are meaningful' (p.34),* with this meaning emerging from *'the interaction between players and the system of game, as well as from the context in which the game is played*'*.* Two notions are contained in this quote: the first relates to context and will be returned later. The second is the notion of enjoyment, which is at once entirely obvious and often overlooked. The reason players play games is because they are fun. This is the underlying premise of gamification, that it can make a rote or uninteresting task enjoyable or engaging. The perceived enjoyment of the participant is positively related to their continuance intention [19]. Salen and Zimmerman point to the writing of Caillios [20] as proving a model to understand this, offering characteristics of play and pleasure through which positive experience can be understood, designed for and measured. This provides a potential way forward that bypasses the rhetoric of the above debate and looks at the fundamentals of play, *'the task is to find how this potential can be translated to actuality'* [21]. To do this, a wider exploration of the history and theory of game playing and the pleasure it offers is needed, this being the focus of the next section.
