A Story about Social Media
The landscape of gamification development must be viewed within a historical context to see why gamification mechanics themselves don’t ultimately lead to effective design. Let’s start by taking a look at social media6.
Due to the proliferation of blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, the versatile term “social media” overtook “social networking” in 2007 and became a new buzzword. When enough interest and excitement in an industry hits critical mass, there will always be people and agencies proclaiming themselves as experts, to capitalize on the trending buzz. It really doesn’t matter what the new buzzword is – SEO, SaaS, Cloud, Big Data, you name it - the terms are so new that while no one can truly be an expert, everyone is in the running to be considered as one.
And so these “experts” saw the growth in “social media...