Gamification: Turning regular activities at work into games.
Gamification stands in contrast to what people call serious
games. Serious games are activities or games that are outside of
normal work. These games can help you with estimation (Planning
Poker), road maps (Prune The Product Tree), and team dynamics
(Speedboat). Serious games often incorporate crowdsourcing,
sometimes to scale efforts that might otherwise be difficult for
teams to do alone, and other times to elicit information that
people might otherwise be unable or unwilling to provide. Jane
McGonigal’s book, Reality Is Brokenstarts with the following
proposition about gamification: - Since the launch of World of
Warcraft, players have clocked more than 50 billion hours of
time playing this online game. - People play World of Warcraft
because, for whatever reason, they find it rewarding, despite
the lack of tangible, real-world benefits of playing it.
(Unless, of course, you count the people working in the
underground economy of “gold farming” f