Gamification: Foldit's 57,000 Players and Disneyland's Electronic Whip

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Gamification is the practice of pulling the psychological hooks out of games, such as points, badges, leaderboards and a sense of progression, and applying them to work, school, health care and civic life. Designers describe a three-tier hierarchy: dynamics like narrative and constraints at the top, mechanics like turn-taking, chance and intermittent reinforcement in the middle, and components like points, badges, avatars and performance graphs at the bottom. The term was reportedly coined in 2002 by British developer Nick Pelling, though the Soviet idea of socialist competition, which rewarded factory output with titles and medals instead of money, used the same logic decades earlier. Bunchball offered game mechanics as a service around 2007, including for the community site of the TV show The Office, and the idea became a venture capital buzzword around 2010.

The episode weighs the successes against the backlash. Researchers at the University of Washington turned protein folding into the puzzle game Foldit, and a 2010 paper in Nature reported that players matched or outperformed algorithmic solutions. Stack Overflow, MyFitnessPal and Khan Academy built on points and progress maps. Critics argue that poorly designed systems resemble Taylorism: Disneyland workers called a gamified tracking system an electronic whip, Ian Bogost labeled the trend exploitationware, and Jane McGonigal moved to the term gameful design. The hosts also report how extremist forums such as 8chan used points and status levels, with attackers in 2019 treating casualty counts as high scores.

• Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter note that leaderboards motivate people near the next tier but demotivate those far behind.
• DevHub raised its task completion rate from 10% to 80% by breaking website building into small quests with progress bars.
• Badges act as breadcrumbs, signaling the exact behavior a designer wants, such as a seven-day streak.
• By 2012 the U.S. Department of Energy was funding trials of mobile games to cut household energy use.
• A 2014 review of health and fitness apps in the Apple App Store found most lacked behavioral theory or clear standards.