the claim that we've never explored using
game-like mechanics for non-entertainment purposes keeps us from using
knowledge we actually have: gamification's rhetoric claims that this is a new,
unexplored space in which we're just learning things for the first time. But in
fact we already know a lot of things about how gamification works and doesn't
work, and have done a lot of thinking about the relationships between things
like extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, and gameplay, and pretending
that we don't know any of that isn't a good way to make progress.
I mostly ignored gamification for a while, considering it a brief marketing
trend. But if it's here to stay, perhaps we ought to retroactively broaden it,
and include things like "socialist competition" as an experiment in
gamification worth learning lessons from