[Supermancho]

It's useful to remember that this story is a blog posting.

Games are tools that humans use to learn about reality by performing pattern recognition to optimize in an artificially constrained environment. This can include your own arbitrary personal constraints. Gamification of things is putting arbitrary rewards and restrictions on activities. Involvement with reality (eg Pokemon Go) is orthogonal.

I believe there are actual whitepapers on this subject (what is a game?) from decades ago.