The game I enjoy most on StackOverflow is the close-the-window game: Welcome back! If you found this question useful, don’t forget to vote both the question and the answers up"
I just want to brag here that I wrote this comment in July 2009, more than a year before Wikipedia’s article on gamification was started and a year and a half before Reality is Broken was published. So I am clearly super awesome.
Relevant text: “SO is a webgame, like all these generic productions where you click on things repetitively to level up and whatever, except you accumulate XP – oh, I mean rep – by helping people solve problems and contributing to the sum of public technical knowledge in the world. Taking the hoarding impulse, surrogate power drive, and general OCD that make people play computer RPGs and harnessing it for the forces of good, and moreover productivity, is SO’s great innovation and victory.”
Oh, and by the way, the most infuriating thing about a forum thread is when it ends with a command to “use the search” or a link to lmgtfy… and the first result is that thread.
facepalm
Jeff, we should compare counter-strike scripts sometime!
I also went through a counter-strike phase, part of the fun being the ability to program my controls.
But I’m a gamer from way back, self taught programming in grade school using those ‘basic computer games’ books, still have a few. By the time I had my first ‘programming’ class in the 8th grade in the brand new Apple IIe lab I was teaching the teacher.
Beyond that though I really geek’d it up as a books-an-dice role player, going so far ultimately as to write and run my own games. Even managed to get one published, not that anyone would ever had heard of the title.
Anyway, I ramble; I have come to the conclusion that the experiences with playing, running and writing RPGs has been invaluable in my career as a software developer.
The type of creative imagination at work when designing a game system isn’t so very different from the thought process necessary to translate business rules into code.
Glad I’m not the only one who recognizes this.
Good article, helps explain why I do find more answers @ SO than any other single source.
now back to the bugs…
“The lost space” on the example forum are ads. They are not there to help the reader, but to help other stakeholders.
The most intruding are user’s signatures. Some users configure avatars and signatures as if they were trying to put up an aggressive ad for themselves. Not to get sales or traffic, but as an attempt to boost their self-image by drawing attention.
We came to accept this state of things because we got used to the reality of ads on the web on any useful content that we get for free. Stack Overflow looks great because it managed to avoid introducing or allowing this kind of intrusive ad placement and size.
What’s funny is that the gamification on StackExchange ends up adding cruft to the interface. Like how every single user’s score and badge count is shown to every other user, along with a significant amount of screen space being dedicated to question and answer and comment scores and the arrows to change them.
But SO is only good if you know what you’re looking for. It’s not a site where you can learn about something you SHOULD know. Right now I have tons of sites in my rss reader that I have to sort through to find good information on new technologies, best practices, etc. For example, if I’ve never heard of SQL injection how would I know to protect my site from it? I wish SO had more wiki style bundling of good information together to inform users as well as a quick stop for problems I am having trouble with.
Huh, until today I would have said, no, I’m not a gamer. Never have been. Probably never will be. Any way, gotta get back to my StackExchange topics…
No mention of bbpress or Vanilla? Some of the cleanest form software currently out there.
I’m with Matthew Kane. The gamification drives me away from the SO based websites. The vast majority of forums are terrible, but I’m not sure SO has solved the problem, and certainly people like myself and Matthew stay away. It remains to be seen whether we are such a small minority.
Hey, Jeff,
I am having great benefit with the sites you and the whole Stack Exchange community have been creating… Stack Overflow, Ask Ubuntu, Server Fault, etc… and I am pleased to see the evolution of all these.
But… wtf is this?
http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/8624/is-max-cut-apx-complete-on-triangle-free-graphs
I think it’s better stop. You went too far! 
Why all the forum hate? SE sites are great for Q&A, which was their design goal, but they’re awful for discussion. Forums are for discussion. Use the right tool for the job.
Not all forums are horrible looking. My own forum - http://talk.notthetalk.com - is designed to be very clean and easy to read. Moreover, it was built with the help of the user community and is based on the late 90s design of the now defunct Guardian Unlimited.
No gamification either.
Woohoo!! I used to own those two books (BASIC Computer Games and More BASIC Computer Games). Those were good times.
Rely too much on Gamification will make a bad result. It the field, it’s called Pointsification, not Gamification. However, there are some good study cases, such as Duolingo, or Foursquare. I’d like to discuss more about Gamification, may I link your post to my Gamification blog here?
P.s: your comment plugin is amazing, may I have the plugin’s name ??
Thank.
A lot of my high school students recently have shown great interest in learning about programming and the such. As a science teacher, I do not have much to offer them but love to embrace their want for more technology in the classroom. We already utilize a very active Microsoft Classroom that incorporates their own personal devices or allows for use of school technology. How else could you maybe think that programming/coding can be incorporated for my science students?
Logically, some significant percentage of moderators would be those individuals most susceptible to gamification, and also potentially with other questionable motives. Should those individuals be responsible for censoring the public Internet? And who should be moderating these moderators?
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This is a fun one
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