Gamification is a pretty hot topic these days. Mashable, for example, recently ran an article titled Gamification: How Competition Is Reinventing Business, Marketing & Everyday Life. This Google Trend chart for “gamification” tells the whole story:


Here’s the thing: I’ve been gamifying everything I do for my entire life. Granted, there hasn’t been a social aspect to it, but the concept of building metrics around an activity — then systematically striving to improve my “score” — is old hat.

Deep down, I am a very lazy person. Heck, it’s not even deep down. But I’m very competitive, and I love a challenge. Gamification has made me an extremely productive person despite my natural inclinations. I’ve gamified everything: school, exercise, housework, startups, etc. As a simple example, if I have too many things to do, I will write out a 20-item list and “reward” myself (break, coffee, news-reading, whatever) for each 25% of the list I complete. It helps me to focus, and gives me a strong incentive to check that next box. It’s gratifying.

The single biggest thing I’ve learned about gamifying, though, is that you have to be very careful about how you award “points.” This will hardly be news to most folks, and definitely not news to economists (or even readers of pop economics.) You need to be sure you’re motivating yourself or your users to do the right things. Here are a few examples from my own personal experience:

• Motivating the wrong behavior: like many others, I organize my inbox by archiving/ deleting emails that no longer require attention. The fewer emails I have in my inbox, the more on top of things I am. I gamified my inbox. One day, however, I caught myself responding to emails — and putting the onus to respond on someone else — without actually doing real work. I was replying simply to cut down the number of emails I had to deal with. Not good.
  
  
• Motivating neutral behavior: a close friend of mine recently joined foursquare. For the time being, at least, she’s hooked on it, and has racked up an impressive 250+ points over each of the last three weeks. Interestingly, she is so hooked that rather than going for a run outside the other day, she instead decided to go to the gym so she could earn the foursquare points. Gamification changed her behavior, but didn’t necessarily make the outcome any better or worse. (As an aside, what if foursquare gave more points for eating at healthy places than unhealthy ones? Doubled points for outdoor activities? There are some real opportunities for social engineering here…)
  
  
• Motivating the right behavior: at Transmitive, we use a variety of project management/ to-do tools to make sure we’re executing against plan. Every Monday, we jot down a list of at least 20 things we need to get done in a given week. Our initial attempt to gamify the to-do list — percent of items complete — was close, but not right. As any project manager knows, our mistake was to treat each item equally. Our new score is based on priority-weighted percent completion and, sure enough, it motivates us to get things done, and to get the most important things done first. When done right, gamification can be extremely powerful.

Frankly, I suspect that most people have gamified things their entire lives. For me, the only newsworthy thing about gamification, then, is that the scorekeeping becomes both social and standardized. But for you gamifiers out there, I urge you to consider whether you’re motivating the right behavior from (and for) your customers.

As always, I’m curious to hear your story at dk@transmitive.com.