Abstract: Roger Caillois places game on the Paidia-Ludus continuum and emphasizes the instinct for free and pleasurable play that Paidia embodies. In a reality where video game commodities are becoming more and more common, the Paidia orientation in the Caillois sense fades away until it is transformed into a rhetoric   uch as gamification, and at the same time becomes a driving discourse in the consumption-labor process. Firstly, while video games, as the ideal commodity of digital capitalism, claim to be designed for players’ pleasurable play experiences, their consumption is not designed to form a space for the release of play instincts, but rather to constitute a controlled field that is slightly intertwined with play instincts but essentially proliferates and realizes desire. Secondly, video game commodities become the lubricant of consumption from the perspective of frictionless capitalism because of their dual“definite possibilities”, that is, their definite possibilities before being purchased and their definite possibilities as video games themselves. The connotation of freedom, pleasure and play contained in Paidia is only degraded into the generalized“fun morality”in the Baudrillard sense. Finally, the concept of gamification is abstracted from the reality of the universalization of video game commodities and popularized in various fields such as marketing, education, and training, which in turn reshape the marketing logic of consumer goods in general and provide cover for a sophisticated      management and organizational technique. Uncritically accepting this gamification rhetoric undermines the creative power of free and enjoyable play in Paidia’s direction.

Key words: video game, digital capitalism, frictionless capitalism, ideal commodity