Can using structured gaming elements improve management or education processes? For example, can gamification contribute to a firm’s new product development process? Gaming elements include: awarding points, giving participants opportunities to move up to higher levels, comparing participants’ performances using leaderboards, developing ideas collaboratively, using stories, enabling participants to assume a virtual identity, and collecting badges or other rare items. Gaming is different from playing because of its clear structure.

The first part of the book reviews fundamentals such as motivation and analytics. Two relevant ideas from motivation theory are the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivators and the notion of “flow,” where people are totally immersed in what they are doing.

The second part of the book is based on present uses of gamification and the software currently available. As noted above, gamification can be used to create more and better ideas for product development. One approach is to involve customers in a virtual online community. Game elements keep the community together. Within a company, gamification may increase the engagement of stakeholders in developing new product requirements. Gamification can also promote an innovation-friendly corporate environment. In another use, a so-called “serious game” gives insight into a purchaser’s decision-making process, complementing focus groups or other traditional research techniques. Gamification techniques have been employed to encourage children to read by interacting with the text; ten such programs are compared. A chapter describes how a master’s-level management course is augmented by game mechanics. One observational result is that the educational efficiency of the course improved; students learned more. Both the students and the faculty, however, reported that gamification greatly increased workload. Other notable observations about gamification follow. One chapter concludes no fully useful analytics tool for gamification is currently available and reviews tools that are partially helpful. Three challenges to using gamification are: game elements can be distracting or even disturbing; game rewards can become unduly important; and gaming emphasizes extrinsic rewards to the detriment of intrinsic rewards. A chapter addresses how to reduce fraud by making the rules less transparent and making the true identity of users more accessible. Although gamification can be a vehicle for increasing employee use of communications software, one needs third-party plug-ins to use gamification techniques with major social software programs. Such plug-ins are evaluated.

The book is a collection of papers, so it is probably inevitable that basic material will be repeated in several places. The writing is straightforward but hardly lively, which is surprising in a book that discusses the fun element of using games. I am not familiar with another source of information and inspiration about using gaming elements, so recommend this book. The subject is certainly important.