Is 'gamification' the future?
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
However, the trend of humanification -- designing for and by humans, taking us away from an age of faceless software -- is well underway, and I don't think that's going away any time soon. I also think that's a Good Thing.
Can you imagine what would happen if Zynga took their playbook and decided to build a weight-loss startup (the market for weight loss products in the US alone is $35 billion/year). Not to mentions the dozen of other billion-dollar self-help industries that can be transformed with game mechanics.
Sooner or later life is going to be like a MUD with standardized ways of measuring skills and comparing yourself against your friends. In a couple of generations time kids will grow up talking about "levelling up" in real life skills.
The application of game mechanics to real-life is only just beginning and it's going to have a huge transformative effect on how people live their lives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_nut#Risks_of_eating_pine_n...
Remember, real life is tough. Clicking a mouse is easy.
When most people say "I don't care what other people think", it's not really true. It just indicates a mismatch with the audience under discussion.
Look at Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg; you think they care what others think of themselves as a person?
You mean like the zuck arranging to announce a $100M donation live on oprah a week before the social network hit theaters?
That said, "gamification" techniques can be a wonderful thing. Points are a useful way to highlight positive interactions with users ("you did X, this is a good thing, these points help you realize that"). Badges are a good way of providing metagame elements, both at the beginning of an experience (to shorten the learning curve) and at the end (to provide extended engagement). This all relies on a compelling core experience, of course.
I think that Dennis has been clear that Foursquare is a social layer on top of physical locations, not a game. That people generally see it as a shallow game can be considered both an example of the compelling (and perhaps overriding) aspect of the gameplay elements and an indictment of the core 4Sq experience.
A lot of hype, little real value.
Big difference between the gaming industry (PS3, Nintendo, Zynga... which are awesome) and attempts at trying to make the world a game.
People see World of Warcraft and say "it's just a bar going up", which is entirely true, but with investiture of that bar (say, for comparison, or sense of progress/reward etc etc) it becomes something else entirely.
There was another big wave of it a few years ago when "crowdsourcing" became a big buzzword for a while, and people were designing game-like mechanics around that.
"Points and badges have no closer a relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and loyalty cards. Gamification, as it stands, should actually be called pointsification, and is a bad thing because it's a misleading title for a misunderstood process… Games are good, points are good, but games ≠ points."