I see these kind of things as a sad commentary on how out of touch our lives have become that we need to invent a false sense of accomplishment to do anything. Imagining some poor office worker bored out their minds from data entry, trying to trick themselves into continuing, 'j-just one more pomadora and i get de magical, bing-bing yah-who! i-i hav only 344444 bingamons left 2 win da prize.' Yeah, gonna say, this is sad as hell. Time to touch grass.
I think it's just the nature of our evolutionary incentive system. Survival is king for evolution, and ensuring survival with incentives is actually fairly simple; make damage feel bad (pain) make hunger/thirst feel bad and fullness feel good, make sex feel good(but not required for it to work), socializing gives good brain buzzes, danger and fear keep us awake and alert, etc.
The relevant one is that success feels good and failure feels bad. However, all of these systems rely on raising or lowering your feelings in response to stimulation. That is inherently short term and works best with very direct feedback and short 'loops'.
Humans are simply terrible at long term success(compared to short term) because it is a process of incentive that lives entirely in the logic part of the mind, with very little animal input. And the people/organizations that reliably achieve long term successes already hijack these short term systems to achieve those successes.
This is just a tool to do that, at the end of the day. Games are designed around that animal system, mega optimized, so it makes sense to use them as a format for a productivity tool.
That's especially important now, because so many large organizations have workers that are completely detached from the final product, making the feedback EVEN WORSE.
There was a time when I thought this sort of gamification might turn out to be a good idea for me to try. Then I realized I have a hard enough time wrestling my brain into a state where I can enjoy games purely for fun in my free time.
This would be immediately labeled a distraction from real work in my mind and would have no effectiveness whatsoever. I'm also not motivated by competitions between teams to achieve various stats for silly rewards. Just show me what needs to be done to make progress on the company's actual goals and let me figure out what I think is the best way for me to help.
unfortunately there's no way to "opt out" of the hell we've created for ourselves so coping mechanisms which make it even slightly bearable are the only thing we can hope for at this point
