Playing (with) the markets: Gamification and playfulness in brokerage platforms

In early 2021, millions of amateur traders managed to turn the direction of the markets against established Wall Street funds by heavily investing in GameStop stock. The event led to a proliferation of discourses on the role of brokerage platforms in the gamification of trading. Swimming against the current, the present paper reviews the different lines of argumentation deployed by these commentators while calling into question their usage of the concept of gamification. It does so through a comparative interfacial analysis of three major brokerage platforms, showing that they all share common representations of the markets, which do not mobilise game-like elements. Faced with a lack of empirical evidence for the gamification hypothesis, we propose instead to explore the autotelic logics of play that emerge between the user(s) and the media object(s).