As an academic, this sounds remarkably like what's going on with our own "gamification" of academic publishing, with impact factors, citation counts, h-indices,

As an academic, this sounds remarkably like what's going on with our own "gamification" of academic publishing, with impact factors, citation counts, h-indices, acceptance rate targets, journal points systems, etc. People do strange things which happen to maximize ("game", as it were) those metrics.