[tammer]

Funny. The title gave me the expectation of something I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is in fact the inverse of the article's content.

Mobile apps are video games. The moment someone (apple) designed an app-centric fullscreen OS, the stage was set for the generation of UIs that can become as immersive as good adventure games.

Mailbox is the example that sticks out in my mind currently. Can't really get much more boring than e-mail, but they figured out how to gamify it in a way that mimics the internal consistency of a cult classic title. The 'tutorial' mode of this and other apps gives me a phantom pavlovian feeling of opening the shrink-wrap on old cereal-box-sized CD-ROM packaging.

I think the if we look to video games for inspiration we can produce even more engaging environments in applications designed for productive use. Upon reading the article it looks like games have lessons for designers on both sides of the equation: the design itself, and the design process.