"Gamification", a strategy whereby video game logics are applied to real world tasks, is rapidly gaining traction in education discourses, policies, and practices. Gamification advocates are frequently and prominently declaring the practice "the future of education" or education for the 21st century (Deardorff 2015; Frith 2017; Oxford Analytica 2016). Others are more skeptical of the power and effectiveness of the approach (Bogost 2011; Robertson 2010). Yet for all the celebration, critique, and debate around gamification, the question of the political logics underpinning gamification as pedagogy is rarely discussed. This article explores those politics. The authors challenge the assumption that gamification is a politically neutral practice and argue that it must be understood as a product, and embodiment, of a very specific set of cultural and political circumstances and values surrounding the knowledge economy. In staging this argument, the authors hope to demonstrate how and why the debate around gamification needs to be expanded from a discussion of its efficacy and terminology, to incorporate a political reading of its ideological effects.