The gamification of philosophy: how the profession became hoop-jumpers for top journals

Philosophy is gamified. We jump through hoops to try to get published in the "right" journals, and we do it willingly. We almost all do it, even those very lucky few of us who have earned tenure.

Perhaps we do it because this is genuinely the work we wish to write. Perhaps we just want to show we're still in the game. As Maeve McKeown writes in a paper on gamification and political theory  which just as well could apply to philosophy: 

Contemporary political theory is a game. Individuals compete to publish in ‘top’ journals, to amass greater numbers of publications than their peers; then journal-ranking is combined with number of publications generating scores. The aim is to get the most points. Whoever gets the most points wins: they get the best jobs and the most prestige. This Hunger Games–like contest has serious consequences for people’s lives, determining who can make a living from academia, who will be relegated to the academic precariat or forced out of the profession [...] these conditions are stifling intellectual creativity, diversity, and dissent in political theory/philosophy. 

Now, gamification isn't necessarily bad. We gamify things that we might otherwise not see through, such as language-learning. Yet, gamification narrows a broad range of experiences into a predictable path.

Take learning languages with an app. You do not get the non-linearity, the setbacks, the sparks of discovery, the joy of learning and erring together, when you use Duolingo versus a more holistic approach where you talk to native speakers, immerse yourself in literature and so on (note: I'm not saying anything bad about Duolingo per se, I'm a long-time user! But I do acknowledge the gamified method is a pale shadow of a more integrative approach). No, all of that richness of language is reduced to a series of pings for correct and wrong answers, and your weekly score on the leaderboard. I'm in the Diamond league. Yay! 

When an entire discipline gets gamified, we are in for trouble. Because, as McKeown observes, top generalist journals aren't truly general. A lot of marginalized approaches do not find a place there. But it's not only that. We discourage ourselves from being truly playful and creative. Play and creativity is a crucial aspect of philosophy. We all recognize it when we praise Zhuangzi, Nietzsche or Wittgenstein. But we can't allow ourselves to write like that. We can't, because of the way academia is set up. Academia doesn't reward out of the box thinking. 

McKeown situates the gamification of publication in the context of the neoliberal academy. She notes that political theorists aren't fond of this term. However, there is a good reason to use neoliberal here as "associated with privatization and deregulation; letting the market run public services in the name of efficiency".

It's important to note that this tendency to see efficiency and markets as the final arbiter to anything we do, even our hobbies and the private sphere, is not exclusively right-wing. In fact, Elizabeth Pop Berman makes the case that an  “economic style of reasoning” came to predominate Washington policy among liberal technocrats, who hoped to improve efficiency. Using the market as the arbiter of anything, framing e.g., the loss of lives in terms of loss of productivity and lowering GDP, would reduce waste and make things overall better. A lot of philosophers, who are (broadly) liberal) buy into this efficiency rhetoric.

There's of course the matter of survival. With so many philosophy programs threatened with reduction or closure, it is small wonder we're trying to survive. With so few jobs and adjunctification, we can blame philosophers for hoop-jumping? Prestige becomes the marker and currency for excellence, and in practice, prestige (judging by journals considered "top" generalist journals) means overwhelmingly "Anglo-American normative analytic philosophy". So we all jockey for a limited number of spots in heavily skewed journals. Perhaps we even writing things we don't really care all that much about, we are content, we settle for making small moves in topical but arcane debates, for readers in the single digits and even fewer citations and uptake. 

A few of us, through luck and other factors, can play this game really well and end up getting lots of citations and uptake. For the rest of us, it's a scramble. Unlike with the Duolingo leagues which (apparently) adapt to your time commitment, there's only one (geographically distributed) leaderboard in the game of philosophy and few people can find a place on it. It's saddening to see so many people leave the profession. I do not think going alt-ac is a tragedy, for many people it's great, and I encourage people to at least explore alt-ac as there are so many ways we can do philosophy meaningfully, in and outside of the academy. But it's still saddening to see all those diverse, powerful voices not get a place in the narrow gamified space that academic philosophy affords, and it's our loss. 

I was recently asked in a podcast why I put so much energy lately in drawing philosophy, and in writing fiction, and things like that, rather than publish in top journals. One easy explanation is that I have the privilege to do so, since I have tenure and don't need promotion. But there is also that I genuinely think I am better at those ways of doing philosophy than writing journal articles. I still write journal articles, but only limited quantity and only when I think the article is something interesting that I can explore best in that format. For many of us, writing philosophy and doing philosophy in a more diverse way would make us better thinkers. 

We know the arguments for the cognitive division of labor, outlined by authors such as Helen Longino, Philip Kitcher and others. But we struggle to implement this in our own lives, because of the overall market logic. 

Maybe we can do little bits individually to make things better. Maybe those of us with tenure can try to work at the philosophy that they truly care about. It could be a paper in Mind, of course, but it could be many other things besides. Maybe we can work to look for diverse expressions of philosophy in job applicants, and not penalize (at the very least!) an assistant prof who goes up for tenure for having a collection of poetry published. 

Overall, the forces that make us see self-preservation as this narrow thing to aspire to are very strong, and it is foolish to think we as philosophers could escape them through deep thinking. As Kant already mentioned in the First Critique (about different kinds of illusions, I know, but the point applies), deep thinking isn't going to get us out of this. Those forces make us see having a tenure track job, a home, a retirement account ("Check here to see if you have saved up the right amount for retirement for your age bracket"--I wonder who writes these things, and what purpose they serve) as key to self-preservation.

But in philosophy, there's a much richer notion of self-preservation than the narrow neoliberal view allows. Stoics thoughts that self-preservation means preserving your virtue, even if it means giving up your life. Caleb Ward, in this beautiful piece on Audre Lorde, contrasts mere security with a rich sense of self-preservation, which is preservation of the whole person. Interestingly, this rich sense of self-preservation and survival is not antithetical to the demands of life.

Very often, we're told we need to buy into the market logic because things like housing, food, retirement (if we get there) are the essential things of life. Philosophy is a frill, an excess, something that doesn't fit this faux-Darwinian picture. And yet, we managed to shoehorn philosophy in it by gamifying it, and thus denying ourselves the fuller expression and self-preservation it might potentially afford. 

Comments

[Conrad]

I see writing for a "top" journal as less stifling than Helen does. It's a constrained art form, like the pop song or the sonnet. There are rigid constraints on all three art forms. But it's a mistake to think that pop songs, sonnets, and Mind articles are less creative or worse vehicles for human expression in virtue of their constrained form than sprawling prog operas, free verse, and the poetry that a junior philosophy prof submits as part of their tenure file.

A different criticism is that the "top" journal form is no better or worse a form of philosophical expression than poetry, so it's arbitrary to privilege the former over the latter when allocating philosophy's scarce goods. But we shouldn't allocate those goods arbitrarily. So we shouldn't privilege Mind articles qua Mind articles over poetry.

There is something to this criticism. I'd love for there to be more jobs for philosophers and for some of those jobs to go to poetry-philosophers. But jobs are scarce, so we should examine this argument more closely. I think it depends falsely presupposes that we should assess a quality Q, such a philosophical "merit" (humor me), using form A rather than form B only if A better tracks Q than B. But this is dubious. Suppose we want to assess the quality of being a good runner. The 100m dash doesn't track being a good runner any better than the 200m dash, nor vice versa. But it would not be unfair or wrong to distribute medals for best runner according to who runs the fastest 100m dash (or the fastest 200m dash or a marathon) if we don't have enough medals for all three events.

The alternative is to have no fixed standards for which race to run when distributing medals for best runner. Some years it will be a marathon. Others, it will be the 100m dash. This is the analogue of accepting poetry in addition to Mind articles in a candidate's tenure file or from applicants for TT jobs.

This is worse for junior philosophers in at least two respects (your post also addresses some points to senior philosophers; I set those aside). First, it makes it harder for graduate students to set expectations since it is less clear which achievements are most prized by the profession. Second, it introduces more noise into the hiring procedure. If we accept, say, poetry as a serious contribution to a job file, on a par with a Mind article potentially, then we'll get some job committees who prefer the poetry and some who prefer the Mind articles. Candidates will have to roll the dice on which forms of expression to pursue to get a job. Candidates are gambling with their futures enough already. So we shouldn't introduce an addition source of uncertainty into their pursuit of a career. Favoring, say, Mind articles over poetry may favour a form of philosophical expression that is not intrinsically superior to the other. But accepting all forms of philosophical expression introduces even more uncertainty into junior philosophers' lives. This is a case where increasing a group's options actually makes them worse off.

Finally, since hiring is a zero-sum game, diminishing the impact that a Mind article has on a job committee effectively increases the weight given to other components of one's file. Does anyone think that reference letters should be given *more* weight than they currently receive? Or that committees should care more PhD pedigree or demographic pedigree? If Mind articles matter less, these factors will matter more. And they shouldn't.

[F. Contesi]

I agree with Conrad that writing for a 'top' journal in philosophy at the moment is an art form. But it should not be---philosophy should be judged on its content:

https://iai.tv/articles/analytic-philosophy-has-a-language-problem-auid-2096?_auid=2020

[Conrad]

F. Contesi, I look forward to a time where it's possible to beam one's philosophical thoughts directly into the (consenting) interlocutor's mind, but until that shining day, good form is a necessary condition on accurately judging content.

[Helen De Cruz]

Thank you Conrad, I like all the points you raise. I'm going to just respond to a couple of them.

First: on the point of job candidates now at least having some norms. Philosophy is even now not a meritocracy where there is a clearly defined metric (the top journal single-authored philosophy paper) that will get you a job guaranteed. We pretend that it is, and in that respect philosophy is gamified, raising the paper in the top journal as a necessary condition for being part of the profession.
Sure, publishing a paper in such a venue will definitely increase your probability of success but is no guarantee. Each year there are stories of candidates with several papers like this who get no interviews, no jobs. So the gamification makes the process deceptive, because search committees are already more diverse in their interests than we think. I can easily imagine someone putting the file of a candidate in the "hold" pile because she published a poetry collection.

Transparency for job candidates is great, but it's never going to be absolute (for one thing, as Marcus and others have often noted, many teaching colleges are not so interested in having candidates with top journal papers). There are also the general issues with meritocracy as outlined by Jo Littler and others.

I can see the sense of having a beautiful form to express your creativity. As a performer of ancient music, I enjoy the creativity that composers can bring to fairly fixed classical forms such as the Gigue or the Sarabande. And I occasionally read a beautiful, creative paper in a journal such as Mind. But by and large, I do not enjoy reading papers in top journals. This is not to say they aren't creative, or profound, just that it's not resonant with how I do philosophy now, or the topics I'm currently interested in.

It's the same for many other people--we would thrive best as a profession if we had a plurality of approaches. Such a plurality would not be (more) confusing to job candidates, who are already now reading tealeaves and lured into the gamification. At least, candidates would in a less gamified approach do things they thought worthwhile. They might succeed, or might not, just like now. And for some, writing papers for top journals is really what they want to do, and do best, but at least there would be more forms for us to do it in and to find philosophical expression.

[M]

Changing the criteria by which candidates are evaluated doesn't change the fact that there are way more qualified candidates than there are decent jobs. So there will still be just as strong an incentive to game the measures of evaluation, whatever they are (or are perceived to be).

I suppose making hiring and promotion decisions by lottery would change this, but there's about a 0 chance of that happening.

[Caligula's Goat]

It's a terribly distorted view of the "game" of philosophy to think that publications are the only thing that matter.

I've been on a lot of search committees, we've almost never hired the person with greatest number or most prestigious publications. Hiring, and the philosophy game, is more like the artworld than it is like a high score. Content (research) matters but only insofar as it speaks to the people in the gallery (i.e., particular search committees).

Does a Picasso score higher than a Cassatt? The question is almost meaningless. Both are highly prized and recognized in their own circles for their own functions. A good curator (i.e., department) wants to create a gallery that is representative of really good works (i.e., representative of good philosophy in all its various forms). Sure there are artistic movements that become popular and then give way to other things (expressionism, dadaism, pop art // natural language analysis, naturalism, x-phi) but to think that what got a work/philosopher into a gallary/department is sheer output is to completely misunderstand the game.

I really do hate the gamification analogy, it feeds into a terrible misunderstanding of what it is that philosophy hiring is after.

[Q]

M is right, which is why the only solution to these problems is to dramatically reduce PhD admissions.

[Z]

Q: Alternatively, we could be less paternalistic and simply inform students that the job market sucks and they should do a PhD only if they’re comfortable with outcomes that don’t involve academia.

[Q]

Z: I'm suggesting we drastically cut PhD spots not for the benefit of would-be applicants, which would be paternalistic, but for the benefit of current PhD students and job market candidates. The very existence of a glut of candidates forces the kind of gamification and hoop-jumping that Helen is worried about here; if there were way fewer candidates, things would be less competitive, and everyone would face less pressure to publish a ton in top journals and so on. Cutting PhD spots is a way to reduce the market pressure on all of us.

[Animal Symbolicum]

If M is right, then perhaps, as Q says, the only solution *given current conditions* is to reduce admissions. But to open up the profession for the long term, we probably have to change the current conditions, which include too much administration disappearing too much of what little money schools are getting. These conditions are symptoms of neoliberal metastasis. There is a case to be made — a case that cuts across left and right political divisions — for resisting neoliberalism in the name of education (among many other goods, of course). This begins on the community, city, county, and state strata. We philosophers might not have the resources to spearhead the project — being so busy subjecting ourselves to the indignities of the game or, in accordance with Caligula's Goat's observation, to the vagaries of departmental curators — but perhaps we could play some small part in getting things going.

[Z]

Q: god help those well connected and lucky enough to be among the benefitted class. There’s a reason these proposals always come from people at top ranked institutions. They’re good at seeking rents for their students.

[Z]

I have an idea: we can make it easier to be a musician by dramatically limiting the class of people eligible to perform at open mics. It’ll be terrific!

[outgroup member I guess?]

"We know the arguments for the cognitive division of labor, outlined by authors such as Helen Longino, Philip Kitcher and others." I don't know what arguments are being referred to here, nor how they relate to more diversity in philosophical practice. Anyone?

[V]

I agree with Q and I didn't go to a school ranked highly enough to benefit from limiting the number of people accepted to grad programs.

I'm also fine with some paternalism. The fact is that at 22, it's really hard to know what will make you happy. Now that it's been a decade since I started this adventure, I see things very differently than at 22 -- and with greater wisdom.

You'll never see the reduction though. The need for TAs is not really the problem: there are work-arounds. The real problem is that having a grad program is considered more prestigious than not having one, and professors are prestige-mongerers.

P.S. if any of you reading this happen to be young and considering grad school, I strongly recommend that you talk to older individuals *outside* of academia about the decision to go into academia, and inform those people about your job prospects if you go the academic route. By "job prospects" I mean not just your odds of getting a job, but what kind of salary and pressures you might expect on the job if you happen to get one. My guess is that you'll find that many people look back at their 22 year old selves and find they were naive in their opinions what would make them happy. We just aren't very good at estimating that, especially when we are that young.

[Z]

We’re also not so good at estimating it on behalf of others. I’ll just report that I probably wouldn’t have gotten into grad school if they admitted fewer people. It was a long shot, but I’ve got a tenured job at an R1 right now after 3 tries on the market. I’d made peace with the grim prospects and earnings before I undertook the decision, and I’d be pretty annoyed if people who thought they knew better or wanted to protect their interests stepped in to artificially reduce my chances.

[Helen De Cruz]

Hello outgroup member. Apologies (I just didn't want to make a very long piece).
Kitcher: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2026796
Longino: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2027028
These are about science, but I think they also apply to philosophy.
A paper of mine on this specifically (freely accessible) here--https://helendecruz.net/docs/DeCruz_Rea_Panchuk.pdf

[Yan Kancuch]

Many valuable art forms are constrained but not all constrained art forms are valuable.

A small but important difference between pop songs and sonnets on one hand and top academic articles on the other is that the former are good things that make the world more lovely and livable.

One good sign of this is when an art form's audience also includes people who aren't the makers of that art form.

[Not all departments]

Caligula's Goat: Of course, I was waiting for the "not all departments!!" comment. That's great that you don't put that much weight on journal prestige. But so. Many. Departments. Do. Failing to recognize this is just naive. I'm glad you come from an enlightened department (although do you *really* not put any stock in journal prestige? I highly doubt it) but you're greatly outnumbered.