Feb 23 • General
Gamification stays homeless (and is cursed to stay so)
If you type “gamification” into LinkedIn today and just scroll the feed for a few minutes, something interesting happens.
You do not find one clear definition. You find twenty.
For some, it is a UX layer. For others, a loyalty lever. For others, a learning format. And for many, unfortunately, it is still points, badges, and leaderboards.
Which is exactly what the serious part of this field has been trying to move beyond for more than a decade.
And yet, that image refuses to die.
If you look at the dominant narrative without rose-tinted glasses, something paradoxical has happened.
In many contexts, gamification has become exactly what it originally set out to replace.
A classic motivation program. Built on rewards. Driven by artificial competition. Decorating unchanged systems with cosmetic game mechanics.
That also explains why the term still has no real home.
As long as gamification is primarily understood as an incentive wrapper, it will remain strategically blurry. It gets parked in marketing, then in L&D, then in product. Rarely is it treated as what it could actually be:
Context architecture for repeated voluntary energy investment.
The real question for us as Engagement Designers is not which definition is currently “winning.”
The better question is:
What kind of performance system are we actually trying to build?
One that pushes behavior in the short term.
Or one that pulls people in for the long run.
If gamification is to have a serious future as a discipline, it needs more than new buzzwords. It needs a clear positioning beyond the point economics.
That is where the real work begins inside the Engagement Design Collective. This is also why I wish I wouldn't have been branded as the Gamification-Pope in the first place.
Because we 'lost the war' and Gamification is still seen as a childish carrot & stick approach. And I don't believe that this will change. This is just too sexy for marketing, L&D, HR and UX
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Gamification stays homeless (and is cursed to stay so)
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