Game mechanics for thinking users

The most successful example was a workflow application that a team of customer service reps use to answer tickets. The system categories tickets and rates them for severity. Severely rated tickets get a big threat score and go higher in the queue. The system graphs the threat level of open tickets, and shows a google-o-meter to say whether things are looking bad, ok, or great, and then we named those states "Godilla, Pony, and Unicorn". We graph the overall situation over time. So users can see their impact on successfully answering and closing tickets. Each time a user worked a ticket, they could see the little needle rise a little higher, closer to unicorn status.

Productivity skyrocketed as users worked their butts off to keep things in "Unicorn" status.

Users could also see what other teams members were working on in real time-- whether they had a ticket open, and how long it had been open. This helps establish a culture where you want to keep working, because you can see how hard other team members are working.

These mechanics really helped the team stay motivated and working. Without software like this, it can feel hard to stay motivated to work on an endless stream of workflow. It helps combat the feeling of pointlessness when answering so many similar tickets.

The system that I described is currently being used at a major virtual world company for answering customer service tickets. One of the people that used it loved it so much that he got the google-o-meter needle graph that I used tatooed onto his arm, with the word Unicorn written under it.

In my opinion the tab completion in the Bash shell is an example of game mechanics used outside of a game.

I think this is a profound observation. I think a part of the attraction of P2P is that it can introduce real complexity into a game. I dislike being treated like a patron of a resort casino.

This is one of the greatest realizations that Microsoft has come to with the XBox.