It makes sense. For some evolutionary reason our brains find many peculiar tasks to be very satisfying and in order to "find the fun" games are designed to tap

It makes sense. For some evolutionary reason our brains find many peculiar tasks to be very satisfying and in order to "find the fun" games are designed to tap into those. For example there are a huge amount of "organizing" games, such as Tetris, that play on the fact that for some reason people love to assemble things to be perfect and just in the right place. The games industry has been like a big research experiment to find these obscure things that for some reason people love to do. Now we can use this knowledge to improve existing products' usability. The article already touched on the Nike iPod software, but another similar example of using a game for self improvement is the RPG bank toy that exists in Japan. http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/06/bankquest-bring/ http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/06/bankquest-bring/ With this bank/toy the money you put in also exists in a virtual world and so you can buy new armour for your avatar. The Sixty One http://www.thesixtyone.com/ http://www.thesixtyone.com/ steals quite obviously from some of the recent developments in games as it will mimic Xbox Live and give you achievements for doing various music rating tasks on the site. Myself I've considered a few ideas to use games in my work. When I was writing a tool to automatically compile help files for our code I considered trying to build in some sort of leaderboard that would show during a build who had commented the most in the hope that it would encourage people to comment every one of their functions. However there were too many technical issues to iron out at the time and so I didn't proceed with it. I think the overall concept though was a smart one (unless people started doing useless comments...)