Gamification Can Work — Just Don’t Hire A Game Designer

Editor’s note: Rajat Paharia is the founder of Bunchball, a provider of online gamification solutions. Follow him on Twitter @rajatrocks. Gartner recently issued a press release that made the following provocative assertion: “Gamification is currently being driven by novelty and hype. Gartner predicts that by 2014, 80 percent of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives primarily because of poor design.” While the rest of the release discusses the various ways that gamification can effectively be used to drive behavior change, skill development, and innovation, the only thing that sticks in most readers’ minds is, “80 percent of gamification will fail.” This couldn’t be further from the truth. First off, there is still a misconception about what gamification is, and the prefix “game” probably doesn’t help. Gamification is the process of taking something that already exists – that has some core, intrinsic value – and integrating game mechanics ...

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