Estimates suggest that nine-15 million Americans are problem gamblers and 1.8 million are addicts.

intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation are two completely different things, and that the former is undermined by the latter."

Psychologists call this the overjustification effect. American writer Alfie Kohn later published a series of books arguing that a "do this and get that" approach to parenting, teaching and management might stimulate desired behaviours in the short-term but will ultimately fail.

But some believe that debates about good design are premature. Instead, they question one of the central tenets of gamification, that rewards immediately improve performance or engagement.

successful gamification needs “to use a thoughtful design process, map out the objectives”

“Poor game design is one of the key failings of many gamified applications today,” he says. “The focus is on the obvious game mechanics, such as points, badges and leader boards, rather than the more subtle and more important game design elements, such as balancing competition and collaboration, or defining a meaningful game economy.”

Bogost’s point is that “gamification” over simplifies and misunderstands what makes games powerful. It takes what he describes as “a mysterious, magical, powerful medium” and reduces it to something that is unrecognisable.

"Games are engaging for many reasons," says Margaret Robertson, New York-based managing director of UK game design company Hide&Seek. "Importantly they have a dynamic structure in which things happen when you take actions, there are challenging goals and objectives, impediments and a real risk of failure. Most things that are called gamification simply involve the use of points and badges and don't come close to constituting a game. A better name would be pointsification."

"Game-based techniques can be applied to many more aspects of life than people might think," says Kevin Werbach, an associate professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania who teaches a course on gamification. "The structures and procedures that game designers have developed can be applied just as well to the work place and social impact situations such as global warming or environmental sustainability." Opower, for example, is software designed to help people cut their energy use by completing challenges, earning points and badges, working in groups and sharing tips

"We realised you could take the game mechanics that game designers had been using for years such as competition, real-time feedback and goal-setting, and apply them elsewhere," says Paharia. "Outside of gaming they still work to drive behaviour because they are based on satisfying fundamental human needs and desires."

"Everything we do is being mediated by technology, whether it is entertainment, work or sports or play, and this is generating huge amounts of user activity data," says Rajat Paharia, the founding father of gamification. "Now we can take that data and apply it to the motivation problem."

big data.

BF Skinner proposed a system he called operant conditioning.

Is gamification just a rehash of old ideas, how does it work, might it be exploitative, could it actually undermine motivation and won't it trigger addiction?

Just 12 months after Gartner predicted the huge growth in the genre, it released another report saying that “gamification is currently being driven by novelty and hype”. By 2014, it predicts that 80% of gamification applications will fail to deliver “because of poor design”.

Only last year, the US-based analysts Gartner predicted that 70% of the world's top 2000 companies will be using gamification in some form by 2014.

Gamification is a buzz word used to describe systems that take elements of everyday games like chess and Donkey Kong and applies them to everyday life.

Foursquare