You can take your Amazon gift card and stick it. I think mature people just have a passion for something and they need to do something they love. You don’t need nerdy incentives, especially automated platforms. You need smart people who love what they’re doing.

Love what you do and you’ll never work another day in your life.

– cinemafication. 10 easy steps have allowed every major company to draw from the success that every movie enjoys, and make themselves more efficient and productive.

– literaturification. More ambitious at 15 steps, this takes the strict design principles that every best-selling novel adheres to, and applies them to brands, helping them sell more things to more people.

– comicification. Amateur designers who were certified by Scott McCloud were able to increase profits between 20 and 60% by using the same proven principles that drive so many people to read so many comics. The War of Drugs was considered to have been won with the distribution of anti-drug comics in the 80s.

Like these great schemes that preceded it, Gamification is only the latest arrival in a long history of reducing creative and complex work into a facile set of rules that can be sold through “guest posts” linking to marketing schemes. It’s a proud history.

If you don’t see the value of it, you’re a reactionary who probably still thinks the pleasure produced by games is complex and nuanced. But I ask you, if games couldn’t be reduced to simple — certifiable! — principles of engagement, how would game industry giants like Sony or Zynga be able to just keep growing, month after month and year after year?

For example, the *props stuff above and work.com are not, in my opinion, gamifying work tools. They are really just kind of gaudy attempts at finding ways to “reward” employees with emoticons. One of them actually allows you to automatically reward employees. Lolz. How unrewarding would it be to be rewarded to goofy graphics and emoticons by the server on a scheduled basis?

Games work for two reasons mainly:
1) anonymity – you can be anyone you want to be and no one is the wiser
2) actual reward – you get something that furthers your goals within the game or which can actually be used

These gimmicky things have neither of those to items mentioned above. Corporations and businesses want all the cool stuff that happens in games and so forth but they then require everyone to register with their real names and titles. Fail. Corp bosses are either hypocritical or lying to themselves with regards to their desire for collaborative tools. No tool will ever really work if you have to plaster your real name an face all over it. No one will every really tell the rest of the group/network what they really think if they know that the boss may just fire them over it. So, until corps and businesses let go of that, none of these initiatives will ever go anywhere.

The other thing is the rewards. They are useless. Can they be sold to get something cooler? Can you slay a dragon or blow up a star-ship with it? See, the gamers don’t like games because of the awards they receive; they like games because of the dope-amine rush they get when they use those awards to do something cool. The awards are a means to an end. Giving the gimmicky awards will do nothing unless they are a means to an end which gives that rush. Come up with a way to have a quest at work which lets you play against the “boss” (in this case the real boss) and you may be getting somewhere.

Otherwise, this is just not going anywhere. Just another example of companies attempting to copy something successful and incorporate a junky corporate framework which ultimately makes the “game” unappealing.

The pointlessness of arguing against the efficacy of gamification without facts was precisely the impetus behind my Huffington Post piece (and by extension, this article). Engaging in a fact vs conjecture argument is a waste of everyone’s time — just as it is in politics, art or any other domain.

Make no mistake, there are plenty of problems in gamification, but every design discipline has its failures. The key is to learn from those errors, understand how they worked and how they didn’t, and incorporate that understanding into the next iteration. This is as true today as it was when the Wright Brothers finally figured out the shape of an airfoil, and it will continue to be the model for gamification as long as I’m involved. We’ve substantially added to, evolved and matured in our thinking even in the 3 short years since the movement started — and I have no doubt this will continue.

http://successfulworkplace.com/2013/01/28/gamification-of-feedback-makes-your-team-go-faster/

We covered gamification of leaderboards in the enterprise today actually through Leaderboarded and Toby Beresford in a guest post. I play devil’s advocate a lot but I do believe we need to share info and make sure the value is driven back into productivity and that the momentum in employee engagement isn’t lost.

X is true for A
X is true for B
X is true for C
X is true for D
Therefore, X is true for D, E, F, G, and so on.

When you show only the success stories, they are examples of something that worked in a specific context, and by no means evidence that “gamification works.” For we do not have a sample that includes the ones that did NOT. Well, except when gamification thought leaders need to explain the high-profile failure they had previously held up as success examples / proof.

So it may be that while X worked for A, B, C, and D, it was tried and failed for… The rest of
the alphabet. The burden of proof is on those who are proposing and especially selling these solutions.