The Ludic Paradox: Why Behavioral Change Through Games Requires Agency, Not Control

The global games industry engages nearly three billion players, yet instrumental applications ofgames for behavioral change, from gamification to serious games, demonstrate a puzzlinginconsistency between short-term engagement and long-term outcomes. While these interventionsconsistently generate initial enthusiasm, meta-analyses reveal that behavioral effects typicallydiminish beyond three months, with changes rarely persisting after interventions conclude. Thispattern contrasts markedly with games' demonstrable cultural influence as evident in communityformation, identity development, and sustained engagement over years or decades. We propose thatthis discrepancy reflects fundamental theoretical inadequacies in how behavioral interventionsconceptualize games' influence on human behavior.Drawing on converging evidence from cultural economics, computational neuroscience, cognitivescience, and game studies, we develop a framework that reconceptualizes gameplay as culturalmeaning-making rather than behavioral conditioning. The framework articulates how sustainablebehavioral transformation emerges through dynamic interactions between four interrelateddimensions: games as designed cultural artifacts, play as evolved behavioral disposition, gameplayas situated embodied experience, and re-play as reflective cultural practice. Situating thisframework within active inference and free energy principle perspectives provides computationalprecision to these meaning-making processes, whereas cognitive gadget theory illuminates howplay serves as a foundational environment for constructing distinctively human cognitive capacities.Central to our analysis is what we term the ludic dilemma, a tension between play's intrinsicallymotivated, autotelic nature and attempts to instrumentalize it for predetermined behavioraloutcomes. We suggest that this tension helps explain the persistent failures of mechanisticinterventions while pointing toward alternative approaches that preserve play's essential qualitiesand enable behavioral transformation through extended cultural processes. The frameworkgenerates testable predictions about temporal dynamics, cross-cultural variations, anddevelopmental trajectories that distinguish cultural meaning-making accounts from mechanisticalternatives, with implications for an understanding of cultural learning, behavioral changeinterventions, and human cognitive evolution.