Recently I've seen startup, where you were earning XP points for quickly closing customer support tickets, and earning badges...

A college buddy worked at a place like that. But it wasn't a startup, it was a long-established company.

It was also 1996, and he learned that closing deals on copies of Windows 95 was worth twice as many points as other software, so he focused all his efforts on that so he could do half the work of his "teammates" in his cubicle farm.