[kellros]

My opinion is that gamification is like cooking - you don't just to cook - you learn to cook specific things.

I'd suggest you follow the Lean path in applying gamification:

1. Determine what behavior you want to enforce (Measure)

2. Determine how you will enforce this behavior (Plan)

3. Build the functionality required for the above (Build)

You should also decide where to draw the line; i.e. are you building a game or are you gamifying features to enforce certain behaviors.

You should definitely read Jeff Atwood's post on gamification here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/the-gamification.ht...

Here are some good examples of gamification:

http://www.stackoverflow.com/

http://www.codeschool.com/

http://tryruby.org/levels/1/challenges/0

[pepeto]

Thanks, i still can not answer the very first practical question: How many player-levels should there be?

[mapt]

How on earth is that the very first practical question?

You should be asking yourself questions like 'What do I want to influence the user to do more of', and 'What's in it for them', and 'Is it worth the added complexity' and 'What ways are the most fun for them to start thinking of the things we want them to do as accomplishments'.

Talk of levels is like asking how many seats there should be on an airplane in 1900. Yeah, it might be a trivial consideration at some point in the distant future that will color people's impressions, but the practical questions are how the hell you push something through the air in a controlled, sustained fashion. Seats are irrelevant to the big questions, and they don't even have to be relevant in an actual implementation of cargo planes - the 'levels' abstraction isn't always a useful one in making things more fun.

Based on what I've seen, 'gamification' as business topic appears to be rife with cargo-cultism. Even the best implementations don't add a ton to the experience, because there's no big incentives to work towards, no story to unlock or benefit to be had.

On StackExchange I have an indication of how prominent I am that I can show off to other people and potential employers, in addition to the small-scale competition to help people solve their problems. On Steam, badges from most games are little more than a funny phrase shoved in my face for five seconds unexpectedly. As Foursquare Mayor of my local chinese Restaurant, I get nothing.

To discuss this more, we would need more specifics of your startup.