You're half right: you may not actually be able to think of them like features. But "game mechanics" were "video games" and "psychology" a long time before the

You're half right: you may not actually be able to think of them like features. But "game mechanics" were "video games" and "psychology" a long time before they were distilled out, which means to take advantage of them properly, you really need to know a lot from both of those fields. Like anything else, you may have to design with them in mind from the get-go, and you'll probably get it wrong the first few times out, which means you'll need to practice (or have betas). Instead of completely retooling your software, perhaps instead you can add a meta-game on top: Office Hero was a game added atop Microsoft Word by Lost Garden writer danc: http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero && http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/01/ribbon-hero-turns-learning-office-into.html http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/01/ribbon-hero-turns-learning... You'll never be able to "let's just add badges!" just like you can't "let's use gradients and glossy buttons!" to move the needle. There's even the notion that video games and traditional UI interaction design are incompatible: IxD is about making things easy, but video games are about intentionally challenging the user. If your users aren't expecting a game, they may end up incredibly frustrated instead. I did a workshop on adding game mechanics to an existing product (a calendar/dayplanner) and the results varied wildly. One group (Ray and Nicole) integrated social game mechanics into the application really well. Another group (Cecy and Brody) treated each mechanic as a feature, and by the end of the discussion I felt like it was "missing something." You can read the write-up of the workshop here: http://vi.to/workshop/20100426/ http://vi.to/workshop/20100426/ My notes include a lot of references, as well as images of the handouts and my own distillation of these principles: http://vi.to/gmnotes http://vi.to/gmnotes