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. People are motivated by progress. People are motivated by social validation. These designs have just taken things people already want to do – learning stuff, going places, getting fit – and motivated people to do them more by making it easier for users to a) track their progess and b) tell other people what they’re doing.

The most important things about a game is that it offers an experience that is enjoyable in itself. If a game is designed well, people will play it just for the entertainment. Very few gamifcation examples seem to remember this, and so not many focus on creating a fantastic gaming experience as their priority, but there are some.

In his book Playful Design, John Ferrara talks about the game Foldit. The game gives users puzzles to complete based on protein folding and scientists examine the solutions provided by the highest scorers to see if there is anything that can be applied to real-life proteins. One of the solutions helped scientists to decipher the structure of an AIDs-causing monkey virus – remarkably, something they’d been trying to do for 15 years before they got Foldit players on the case