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Mary Poppins sang that "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," meaning that boring household chores can be turned into fun activities. Being a nanny of exceptional ability, she delivered on her promise. The children had fun, and they completed their chores.
Gamification makes the same promise – it's essentially a system for turning real world activities into games, by adding challenges, prizes, leaderboards and all that. But as game designer Adrian Hon argues in his entertaining book "You've Been Played (How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All)", the key difference between Mary Poppins and many gamification applications, is that Poppins was interested in improving the lives of her charges, while most of the companies behind gamification apps are emphatically not interested in the wellbeing of their users.
source https://www.gamesindustry.biz/gamification-is-broken
