Fellow game developer here. I can't wait for "gamification" to die. It represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what games are and can be. To make it more annoying, in practice, it often seems to be accompanied by a disrespect for the users.

I'm not saying artificial rewards systems are without any merit (e.g. check out the way people react to karma scores in places like HN), but I've seen no indication that this new buzzword has provoked any sort of actual intellectual interest in this stuff -- more just a race to add badges to everything.

Edit: And there's the downvote for raining on the parade! Shocking.