4 ms·

Badges/leaderboard for pushing a button != game. More like cheese for the caged rat.

• _delirium 16y ago
  It's also not new; lots of it is new branding on an old concept. HN has long had karma points and a karma leaderboard, if just that is enough to count. Forum software since at least the 90s has had "levels" for posters depending on how long they've been there, how much they've posted, and on a few forums some attempt to measure of the quality of their postings. Even the old Experts Exchange had a "gamified" question-answering setup, with a system of points, levels, and features. There was another big wave of it a few years ago when "crowdsourcing" became a big buzzword for a while, and people were designing game-like mechanics around that.
• Lewisham 16y ago
  Games only have value if you have emotional investiture in them. I have no investiture in Stack Overflow points at all, but I do like seeing my karma go up in HN (cue epic downvoting now) as I get some sense that I can hang with the cool kids. People see World of Warcraft and say "it's just a bar going up", which is entirely true, but with investiture of that bar (say, for comparison, or sense of progress/reward etc etc) it becomes something else entirely.
• j_baker 16y ago
  That was actually the paper's author's point: "Points and badges have no closer a relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and loyalty cards. Gamification, as it stands, should actually be called pointsification, and is a bad thing because it's a misleading title for a misunderstood process… Games are good, points are good, but games ≠ points."