Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

The elephant in the room is that gamification does not work in the workplace. Work, a place where we spend most of our time and energy in our entire lives, is something most people want to be meaningful and important—treating it like a game is the opposite of purposeful.

On top of that, it's not effective. The idealistic idea that competition breeds productivity and effectiveness is a flat-out lie. Instead, you get in-fighting, unfairness, bitterness, resentment, and incorrect direction. Even in a seemingly simple procedural job like a production line, gamification and management by objective leads to the wrong results. It is extremely difficult to correctly align the objectives with the true goals of the company, and especially difficult to produce quality output.

Instead, what companies need is good leadership, clear communication of common purpose, and ways and motivation to improve both individuals and systems of production constantly. There is no replacement.

Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

I'm quite happy to see the natural rejection of this entire industry, it inspires confidence.

>The elephant in the room is that gamification does not work in the workplace. Work, a place where we spend most of our time and energy in our entire lives, is something most people want to be meaningful and important—treating it like a game is the opposite of purposeful.

Here's a cool, PROFESSIONAL, gamification strategy:

Do something better, more useful: get PAID more.

You seem to be conflating competitive games with using game mechanics to achieve a result. Gamification goes well beyond points, badges and leaderboards and helps managers tap into intrinsic motivators (like personal satisfaction) to achieve results. Done poorly, its all PBL all day and doesn't work for the reasons you've outlined. I think its fair to say that "bad gamification" doesn't work, but its a big leap to toss out the entire field based on the narrow selection of "bad execution" that you use in your example.

I like to think of "good gamification" as "help people notice the stuff they are actually getting done."

When people notice what is getting done, they'll more likely be able to judge whether it's the right stuff to be done and what actions produce more of it.

A corollary of this is "you get what you measure". Whatever you are rewarding, you'll get more of it.[1]

[1]: Wally from Dilbert: "I'm going to go write me a minivan!" http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/

I agree with you for the most part, but I still think there is value in understanding certain motivating elements of different genres of games, from RPGs to trivia. I think in many cases we can leverage these learning's in workplace activities.

But just slapping some badges on a web profile and putting people in competition based on their everyday work activities is not very productive.

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