Gamification Origins
Gamification is a stupid word. I think at this point just about all of us agree on that. Yet despite the words silliness, the definition is important: the process of applying game-based elements to non-game activities. We humans have been trying to gamify non-game situations (at least knowingly, at scale, in business, according to this definition) since the 1990s. That should come as no surprise given the influence the video game revolution of the 1970s had on youngsters of that time.
Twenty years later the kids that grew up in front of arcade cabinets and playing early-gen home consoles were heading off to college and joining the workforce. Their mental models, full of Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Galaga patterns, mechanics, and scoring systems, acted as the lens through which they viewed nearly everything. …
