Gartner recently issued a press release that made the following provocative assertion: “Gamification is currently being driven by novelty and hype. Gartner predicts that by 2014, 80 percent of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives primarily because of poor design.”

While the rest of the release discusses the various ways that gamification can effectively be used to drive behavior change, skill development, and innovation, the only thing that sticks in most readers’ minds is, “80 percent of gamification will fail.” This couldn’t be further from the truth.

First off, there is still a misconception about what gamification is, and the prefix “game” probably doesn’t help. Gamification is the process of taking something that already exists – that has some core, intrinsic value – and integrating game mechanics into it to motivate participation, engagement, and loyalty.

Let me share with you some other phrases that we use when we describe it to people: “measure and motivate,” “recognition and reward,” “loyalty,” “reputation,” “guiding and amplifying high-value behavior.” I don’t think that anyone would disagree that these are good things, and smart businesses have been doing many of them very effectively for years. The core theme that runs through these, and the mission that gets my colleagues and I out of bed every morning, is motivating people through data. And in this case, we’re specifically talking about user-activity data.

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