I saw Gwen Faraday speak on Gamifying Technology at the Norwegian Developers Conference two days ago.

The stereotype is that gamification is just points, badges, and a leader board and running with the stereotype Gwen Faraday personally failed to gamify an application well and thus had some experience to speak to the nuances in the space. It needs to be tailored to the situation to be done well and not dropped into place generically. Autodesk had enormous success in gamifying one of its offerings and that then had enormous failure in authoring sort of a universal gamification platform that could get plugged into all of its wares. Foursquare pioneered the geolocation space by using badges to get people to adopt its platform. The introduction of badges took them from fifty thousand users to ten million in a two year window, but unfortunately they did not have a plan for what was next. Even if you have successfully gamified something things can still go wrong. Zynga has been criticized in an ethics sense for a dying clock model that makes it disadvantageous to stay away from their stuff for too long lending itself to addiction. In trying to speak to some of the fine-tuning needed the example of motivating constructor workers to fill out their timesheets on time was given. The book "Drive" by Daniel H. Pink sees a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivations are for monotonous mundane tasks as in the chase with our fill-out-your-timesheets administrivia. Points that could be exchanged for value were proposed as the extrinsic candy for this circumstance. Peer pressure was also recommended so maybe everyone gets some points for some value if everyone gets their timesheets in on time. In contrast, intrinsic motivation has to with tasks of joy and things you actually want to be doing. Fiero is an Italian word for pride which is becoming common as a descriptor for the satisfaction of winning a game. It is an intrinsic motivation. Enter dopamine, serotonin, endorphin, oxytocin, etc. Player Types, Octalysis, and 6D Gamification Design are three deeper strategies beyond the simple intrinsic/extrinsic divide for profiling your audience. Gwen suggested that avatars are idealized versions of ourselves which positively affect us in real life which surprised me. In trying to squint my eyes and fit all avatars, as crazy as some may be, to that mold I suppose I can.