In most jobs the tenants of what made WoW so addicting and powerful in its hayday are inapplicable - in WoW, a lot of the game is a skinner box, designed around

In most jobs the tenants of what made WoW so addicting and powerful in its hayday are inapplicable - in WoW, a lot of the game is a skinner box, designed around positive reinforcement of desired collaberative behavior. Especially in the vanilla incarnation. To have that same effect in a workplace, you need tangible and discrete goals, with real rewards for accomplishment. It actually really translates well into software, and most engineering disciplines, but not well in less productive professions like law or business. Your quest tracker is the issue tracker, your gold reward could be a bug bounty or bonus or team praise. Your sense of accomplishment is in shipping products, the way a guild has a sense of accomplishment for slaying a boss for the first time or clearing a raid. I think the greatest barriers to this kind of thinking, at least in the domain HN is concerned, is that your goals and objectives are not always discrete and manageable (ie, your quest log has an unknown mob kill requirement) and figuring out the next boss to kill can be difficult. If you had that information, I think software can really play out like a video game. When I bug fix in the KDE projects it really is a quest, the goals are discrete and the payoff is seeing my changes in the software I use every day. And I have the same feedback loop I had playing WoW from 2005-2009.