Forget Big Data. Think not of crowdsourcing. Disruption, our sincerest apologies. But of all the insipid terms that the tech industry, an industrious mint of trendy terms, has ever coined, gamification must be the most grating.
In the minds of Silicon Valley’s eternal optimists, and the journalists who so unconditionally love them, gamification is the possibility of rendering intricately complex processes, such as education or health care, more effective by transforming them into games. If kids aren’t reading, goes the gamified mantra, perhaps some friendly competitive system of badges and leaderboards might provide the missing incentive. And if adults are getting a tad too heavy, just slap a gizmo on their wrists that challenges them to burn more and more calories each day and they’ll play along.
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