It's a fine idea as long as it's a voluntary system adopted unanimously by an enthusiastic development team. If it's imposed from without on an existing team w

It's a fine idea as long as it's a voluntary system adopted unanimously by an enthusiastic development team. If it's imposed from without on an existing team with existing culture and rituals, it'll likely be a disaster, with game manipulation leading directly to cynicism. I'm on the outside looking in when it comes to talking about developers, but in my experience developer teams self-organize, coming up with their own mechanisms for positive and negative reinforcement over time. As long as that culture's working, outsiders shouldn't mess with it. Since every culture is slightly different - one team has a build animal, another has complex rules for the buying of donuts, etc. - building a product that impacts team culture is challenging. Anything you build is going to have to be pretty customizable and flexible in order to attract a decent mass of users. For instance, in a badges-with-bug-tracking system, I'd expect the team to be able to determine which badges are used, define their own badges, upload artwork for their own badges, and perhaps have some voting mechanism around the rewarding of a badge. Even then, it's a tricky thing.