We see gamification all over the place on the web and mobile. We are collecting followers in Twitter, likes in Instagram, levels in Candy Crush (I don't play Candy Crush but I know people who d0), and mayorships in Foursquare. People like playing games.
But as the folks from Stack Overflow say in their fifth birthday post on Stack Overflow,
gamification has never gotten a single person do anything they didn’t already basically like to do
When I read that line, it struck me as basic truth. Gamification can amplify things people already like to do. But it cannot get someone to do something they aren't inclined to do in the first place.
So as we design gamification into our apps, games, and lives, it's worth understanding what it can and can't do and what it is good for and what it is not good for.
And a big happy birthday to Stack. Five years, five million programming questions answered. And those answers are viewed by 45 million people a month. I didn't realize there were that many programmers in the world. Maybe services like Stack are making it easier to be a programmer and the number of programmers is growing as a result. Hmmmm.
