Gamification of the Web
Opposing visions of the gamification of the web from this morning:
Joseph Puopolo on Techcrunch:
Gamification has become one of the hottest buzz words in the industry and is probably in the process of taking over a website or user experience near you.
I surveyed the community services I frequent -- Metafilter, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr, Mlkshk, Mixel. These services do present goals to their users and they have crafted a user experience that nudges them towards those goals -- but they do it without points, ranks and the other mechanisms and patterns advertised in the Techcrunch post above.... At some point people are going to wake up to the fact that the gamification industry is a scam.
For sure, "visualizing success" is a major component of social sites, but there are still scant examples of successful sites with more game-like components like leaderboards and badges, despite the rampant startup growth.