Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying game mechanics to software

By game mechanics what they really mean is exploiting people's need for social status. Every bullet point was related to zero-sum social status, and no other aspects of gaming were mentioned.

The thing is that if you want to get into the game of exploiting people's need for social status, you have some pretty strong established competitors: school, church, the military, computer games, etc.

I saw a talk by a Microsoft guy, and I know the MS open source lab is working on discovering ways to get people to contribute more to their software. I am pretty sure that my working model of this phenomenon hits more of the salient points than theirs, but it is kind of scary nonetheless.

This slide show seems to be more of an effort to distort common and well-accepted applications of motivational psychology as originating from games. Of the five game mechanics listed, probably only one (points) originated in games: I collect every time I go to the grocery store, receive feedback every time I touch a hot stove, make an exchange (almost) every time I speak, and customize every time I go to a restaurant and ask for chicken instead of turkey. You could probably absorb these lessons as applied to software a lot better by analyzing the reinforcers present in EBay and the other sites mentioned than by thinking of games.

There's probably a lot more to learn from what I expected this article to be: An in depth discussion of how game theory applies to web applications.

Yeah, I always liked this one.

Are there really no other analyses like this out there?

interesting comparison