A mix of humor and thoughts on the site layout:<p>I harbored a tiny hope that this website would give me a progress bar for reading through it and that I could earn achievements for becoming knowledgeable in different areas of gamification. In addition, when I read about the collaboration, I thought it would be neat to earn collaboration points as an encouragement to share ideas and maybe get some badges that represent my gamification expertise.<p>I came away slightly disappointed and not surprised; gamification requires a bit of thinking about what behaviors you want to encourage from your audience. Because I do not see how this site can benefit me, I do not feel encouraged to play, er, contribute.<p>It would be great if the site about gamification used gamification, stood forth as an alluring example. Nice start, though. Humor aside, I genuinely am interested in looking through some of the material and seeing what I can learn.
I'm a game designer. I can tell you that seeing the "gamification" movement makes my stomach churn. These are just a bunch of f<i></i>*ing reward schemes. Web developers don't have a clue what game design or game mechanics are, and with sites like these, they never will. I think we need a new term, perhaps "reward structures" is enough. Sadly it isn't as "trendy" as gamification sounds. Equating game design with reward structures blatantly disregards the "toy" aspect of games. Games are meant to be fun. Reward structure is part of that, but not nearly the entire thing.
The site covers an interesting idea; but I found it intensely off putting because a lot of the language sounds like "ad-speak".<p>It's also not clear to the un-initiated what on earth it's all about... the first page just launches into text with no explanation. It took me a second to get my bearings.
Wow. I feel like Jane McGonigal would hate this. Especially her video being used to promote it. Jane has said publicly that she wants to design games that change the world, not just "pointify" current products. I highly recommend watching Jesse Schell's talk on the Gamepocalypse (a vivid vision of the dystopic result of gamification). In fact, I believe Jane and Jesse are debating it at a conference later this year. Would be interesting to hear their thoughts on this.
Just a small note: Game mechanics <i>can't</i> be protected per [FL-108](<a href="http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html</a>)<p>> Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. <i>Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles.</i> Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form.<p>So calling it "Open Source" is misleading, I think.
Our wiki is still primitive, but open for feedback and contributions. Akin to the SCVNGR's Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck, we include a repository of classic game mechanics at <a href="http://gamification.org/wiki/Game_Mechanics" rel="nofollow">http://gamification.org/wiki/Game_Mechanics</a>. The difference is we want to make it open for collaboration and discussions through game mechanic definitions, implementation exemples, best practices, metrics, strategies, etc.
Though I like this idea, there are now several projects dedicated to cataloguing game mechanics. Is it possible to have some sort of consolidation of effort?<p>Two others:<p>* I believe the first one was the Game Ontology Project at <a href="http://gameontology.org/" rel="nofollow">http://gameontology.org/</a>, which takes an approach somewhat tilted to the formal-analysis side.<p>* The biggest one with the most contributors is probably the videogame subsection of tvtropes: <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideogameTropes" rel="nofollow">http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideogameTropes</a>
Story goes that a co-worker's wife heard him talking taking a call about game mechanics. When he was done with the call she was puzzled and ask, "Why are you guys so interested in gay mechanics?"<p>It's all I hear now.
"Lets take anything to do with behavioural conditioning and fundamental incentive structures and call them game mechanics, just so we have an excuse to make up something new and forget that everything we're doing has been going under constant research and development since the dawn of the industrial revolution..."
I think this is a great resource. If integrated correctly (game layer) then I believe websites with decent traffic + communities built around them will be able retain users longer (sticky) and increase loyalty will equal more $$$ in the long term.
From the title I thought this would link to code: some sort of OSS library/abstraction-layer for providing common game mechanics. Is there anything like that yet, in any language?