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Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham: Gamification by Design. Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps. O'Reilly, Sebastopol 2011, 169+xix pages. In the course of but one year, "gamification", the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, has managed to grow from a self-description used by some vendors and proponents to a placement on the Gartner hype cycle - and in the IT business, it doesn't get much more 'official' than that. Yet the term still stirs hot debate. On one side, game designers and scholars despise the whole notion as an "inadvertent con" (Margaret Robertson). On the other side, proponents counter that gamification already 'delivers' (in terms of numbers), yet is still in its infancy. Hence it would be premature to call foul on something so young, with no time to learn from failure and sort wheat from chaff. So who's right, who's wrong? For one answer to this question, let's have a look at the new book by Gabe Zichermann, Gamification by Design. Zichermann is one of the most public gamification proponents today, and chair of the Gamification Summit, now in its second iteration this September 15-16 in New York, where the book will be officially launched.

Growing up in my generation (1980s) and prior, going back to the advent of the television, it was inevitable that our young minds would be shaped by the world around us, including the technicolor world of television. While what we learned wasn't always the most beneficial to our development (Roadrunners recognize and can escape elaborate traps funded by the ACME Corporation) there were plenty of items that weaseled their way into our general psychology and helped shape our views of the world. It couldn't be helped. You are a product of your environment; how you disseminate that information is a whole different topic. Since a huge part of our childhood was cartoons, I've chosen another childhood classic to geekily hyper-analyze today: The Smurfs.