Gamification is an inadvertent con. It tricks people into believing that there’s a simple way to imbue their thing (bank, gym, job, government, genital health outreach program, etc) with the psychological, emotional and social power of a great game. And when their gamified thing doesn’t deliver on that promise, the only rational thing for them to do is to turn round and say ‘Games don’t work! We gamified the dickens out of this thing, and it still didn’t make as much money/reach as many users/generate as much social heat as World of WarCraft/Farmville/Minecraft’. Any game designer looking at their gamified thing would say, ‘Of course it didn’t do what those things did! Those things are all games and your thing isn’t!’ But they won’t be heard, because they won’t be in the room, since – and this is very telling – the gamification process rarely involves any actual game designers.

Kritische Anmerkungen zum Gamification-Hype und seinen Herausforderungen. Kernaussage ist - ein Reward-Badge reicht nicht, es braucht eine Symbiose vom Kernnutzen des im Fokus stehenden Produktes/Services und dem Spielprinzips, die nur ein "Game Designer" herstellen kann.