Chapter 10 of Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power is titled "Gamification," and it critically explores how emotional capitalism extends its reach by enlisting the very concepts of playing and games, paradoxically turning them into tools for heightened productivity.

The chapter opens by highlighting this fundamental contradiction, asserting that playing should, in fact, represent the "Other of Work," its inherent opposite.

Han argues that emotional capitalism is actively gamifying the life and working world, infusing work with an emotional, indeed a dramatic, charge to generate increased motivation. This strategy is effective because games are designed to rapidly deliver a sense of success and reward, thereby leading to higher performance and greater yield.

Individuals who are emotionally invested as players become significantly more engaged than workers who merely act rationally or are simply functioning.

However, this gamified temporality, marked by immediate experiences of success, proves incompatible with anything that "matures over time" or "lasts a long time," such as the slow processes of farming, contrasting it with activities like hunting that fit the game mode.

The chapter explains that the gamification of work exploits homo ludens, the playing human, in such a way that the player, in the very act of playing, willingly subjugates themselves to the order of domination.

This logic extends beyond formal work to social communication, where the mechanisms of "Likes," "Friends," and "Followers" plug communication into a game mode, leading to its commercialization and, ultimately, the destruction of genuine human interaction.

Furthermore, Chapter 10 delves into a broader critique of labor, referencing the "Manifesto against Labour" by the Krisis-Group, which contends that despite the microelectronic revolution detaching wealth production from human labor, society in the post-Fordist age remains thoroughly committed to work, even as it becomes increasingly superfluous.

The critique extends to the political Left for exalting labor and only opposing its exploitation, rather than labor itself, suggesting that labor and Capital are two sides of the same coin.

Han also examines Marx's perspective, arguing that even Marx adhered to the primacy of labor, where "free time" is ultimately colonized and capitalized as "human capital" to enhance productive power, thus expanding the "realm of necessity" into the "realm of freedom."

In seeking an alternative, the chapter proposes that true freedom would only be possible if life were entirely liberated from Capital, which is presented as a new form of transcendence. This freedom would emanate from the "Other of Work," a wholly unproductive force, emphasizing the importance of "making use of the useless."

This leads to a discussion of authentic luxury, defined not as consumption, but as a mode of living free of necessity, based on "deviation" from need.

Such true luxury, like genuinely free play, can only be conceived beyond the realms of work and consumption, and its emancipatory potential is precisely what gamification destroys by yoking play to the process of labor and production.

Finally, the chapter offers an evocative anecdote of Greek children playing with and tearing apart banknotes, interpreting this as an act of "profanation."

This concept, returning things removed from sacred or "divine" use (like fetishized money) to human beings to do with as they will, is presented as a practice of freedom that liberates individuals from transcendence and subjectivation.

By enabling a "playful margin of immanence," profanation allows for "thinking at play" rather than "thinking at work," pointing towards a "time-space free of labour" where psychology as a mode of subjectivation is entirely surpassed.