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A Thousand Primers, Not Just One
If gamification isn’t specific to its subject, it won’t be effective.
It’s hard to know the true causes for why a game succeeds or fails, but when I first tried Cache & Seek, it invited me to collect treasure from places I had no interest in running to—busy streets, back alleys, odd corners of parks—which immediately turned me off. The risk of a badly placed treasure in a location-based running game isn’t just a couple of lost minutes, but returning home with muddy shoes, venturing down a scary alleyway, or worse. What mattered more to us was effort, which was the impulse for having a secondary currency of “materials” that were awarded more sparingly, solely on the completion of missions, to discourage players from running unhealthily long durations in order to win.
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