With gamification of the workplace in particular, there seems to be a repeating cycle. Each cycle does come with some shifts in focus, but it seems mostly implicit ones, without a lot of reflection.

I've been doing some preliminary research trying to track down each of the cycles and how they relate, but the fact that so much of it is ephemeral and buzzword-heavy, and the studies are done by self-interested people with poor documentation of results, makes it a bit difficult.

As far as I can tell, the earliest proposals for using game-like processes to motivate and engage workers came in the Soviet Union, for the obvious reason that they needed a replacement for monetary motivation ASAP. Lenin called it "socialist competition", and had this vision of friendly, game/play-like competition as a replacement for cutthroat, loser-ends-up-homeless capitalist competition. I wrote a little about that here, though it's more like a preliminary collection of sources than a proper history at the moment: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html

Then sometime in the 1980s and especially the 1990s and 2000s, the idea of the power of games and play started becoming a huge thing in management. There was even a hilarious consulting job title for a while, "funsultant", someone who would come into a company and help make it more "fun" and "gamelike". I suspect there are similarities between today's "gamification consultants" and 1990s "funsultants", with the main shift being less focus on play and fun, and a bigger focus on reward/feedback loops. In effect the '90s game/play management techniques are merging with the much older behaviorist-reinforcement management techniques. I wrote a bit about the funsultants and some of the reactions to them as well (Office Space's flair scene is probably the most memorable example of a backlash to mandatory fun): http://www.kmjn.org/notes/funsultants_and_gamification.html

So I guess what I'm mostly missing from gamification advocates is a clearer picture of what's new here and how it relates to previous approaches. How much of it is about Skinner-style behavior-loop reinforcement? How much of it is about fun? About competition? How do the new approaches, whether we call them "game mechanics" or something else, relate to existing research findings on how effective each of these things are? As far as I can tell nobody actually wants to mention any of those things, instead presenting it as something totally new: game mechanics used to be used only for entertainment, but in the 2010s we realized they could be used to motivate non-entertainment things as well. But I don't think it just fell from the sky with no relationship to previous attempts.

I believe this phenomenon it's characteristic of highly interdiciplinary areas, mostly practical and technical but with a strong component of humanism.

The people that want to do work in industry tend to gravitate to some specific fields. And half a decade in managment or engineering school can't teach you the history of philosophy, anthropology, sociology or psychology. I believe this to be the reason why "design" is a big hit nowdays, "managers" and "engineers" are looking at humanism, and the practical humanists: the "designers", for a competetitive advantage.

In the case of gamification, there were people interested not in humanism per se, but in building games. They found the power of some buried ideas for social control either by getting to identify the problem and searching for the answer in the field's body of knowledge, or by rediscovering it themselves, bypassing the field's historical intelectual debate. Some wanted to "sell it", so they needed an "angle" related to their profession.

I think that's definitely part of it, but I think there may be a bit of deliberate amnesia as well, out of a desire to portray something as totally new, and perhaps to avoid any unwanted historical baggage.

You also see this in "serious games" and its variants. Even Al Gore was recently talking about how the future of videogames is that maybe they'll be used for things like education, too, not just entertainment. Sure, I even buy that. But that's what everyone was saying in the Apple ][ era also! It's not just about credit, but I think we lose something from the amnesia: some of the Apple ][ games were actually better uses of game mechanics for education than much of the fairly shallow stuff being promoted more recently, and we can even learn something from the examples that were more mixed successes (though admittedly there was a lot of bad "edutainment", too).

That's true, the process doesn't need to be 100% "conscious".

PS: Great insight on the article about soviet "gamification", I never thought abut that in that way, thanks.

Well put.

Gamification does indeed work. It is a marketing tactic that translates well to a certain type of product. Once the dust settles we will see gamification in a lot of unusual places, such as our work. I can imagine a world where everything is either upvoted or downvoted (although I'm not saying it migh be pleasant).