[Frost1x]

Gamification is rarely designed in a way that's helpful to anyone playing the game but instead, the game is often designed to benefit the game designers or whomever pays them. Any help to game players is typically an unintended side effect and often results in changing the rules.

For gamification to actually provide benefits to game players, the game designers need to first be truly vested in improving aspects for the players of the game, not for meta goals outside the game. The second you see a process turned into some game/point system, ask yourself how that system could benefit the owner/designer of that system. Chances are, a meta goal exists and some sort of resource extraction from players exist (time, money, effort, knowledge, etc.).

If you understand a game very well and a weakness exists, it's possible for the players to extract winnings outside the game back to themselves but they need to understand the metagame and a weakness needs to exist that is realistically attainable. Game designers/owners are at an advantage because the game designers are often positioned to patch the rules of the game as weaknesses are discovered and exploited while the game players have no such power to adjust the rules.

[Chris86]

hey, Chris here (one of the makers of HackerStash) - it's really hard to get this right for sure and we're thinking a lot about balancing the incentives! We removed a lot of the weekly challenges during beta testing that we felt weren't conducive to symbiotic participation...it's a work in progress though.

In terms of benefits our end, all money from subscriptions goes straight into the prize pool and back out to the communities favourite projects each week. The main reward at the moment is the times when we genuinely see people helping one another. In the future if it can generate income for us that would be cool but we don't really know how that would even be possible - for now so the community comes first :)

Loved your breakdown of gamification motives, it's a really helpful perspective, thanks. If you have ideas for how something like HackerStash could offer the benefits of gamification without risking incentives that eventual lean in favour of the company itself that would be awesome!