Gamification: opportunities and challenges

"The structures and procedures that game designers have developed can be applied just as well to the work place and social impact situations such as global warming or environmental sustainability."

Similarly Werbach, co-author of the recently released book For The Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business, says successful gamification needs “to use a thoughtful design process, map out the objectives” understand the players and then pick the most appropriate elements from games to achieve the desired goal. Effective examples, he says, provide users with real-time feedback, clear, achievable goals, narratives that they care about and challenging but achievable tasks.

Two major concerns about gamification are: addiction of course, and its oversimplified reward scheme.  The central tenets of gamification, that is, rewards immediately improve performance or engagement has been criticized by psychologists on the ground of  overjustification effect.  Try to motivate someone with external rewards can undermine their pure enjoyment of doing something (full article).

HT: M. Cole.