Is “gamification” the new marketing meme (a term used to describe a concept that spreads via the internet) for businesses, advertisers and entrepreneurs out to make a buck in the information age?In the last two columns I described some of the theory pushing gamification the use of gaming techniques and behaviour to help executives make strategic decisions to the fore as a set of tools in the business world.Gamification experts have identified four main types of gaming behaviour: achievers, socialisers, explorers and killers. The sweet spot for any game and by implication any business or viral marketing campaign is to appeal to all four.But are the types “real”, do they exist in the real world? And is gamification just another fad? Is it a means by which a whole new generation of consultants can latch on to a set of fresh terms for their sales pitch and give desperate executives swill made out as a silk purse?Perhaps. But experts such as Gabe Zichermann, author of Game-Based Marketing, claim that digital gaming is providing information and statistics on behaviour that has never before been available in such quality and quantity. This information can help transpose the gaming framework into other realms to achieve desirable behaviours.In other words, gamification may be based on research, aggregate statistics from millions of users and could move beyond an interesting metaphor for marketing to a more complete understanding of consumer behaviour.All games provide codes and rules that shapes conduct and what you can do to other players whether it's board games such as Risk or digital games, which provide a more complex, complete, and more challenging world.The biggest hits immerse their customers such as the massively multiplayer online role-playing universes created by World of Warcraft and by Farmville (which combines role playing with social networking).Gamification is not about turning your hotel or clothing company into a game designer. It can apply to make your business more appealing to consumers or provide techniques to motivate your workers, the experts claim.The aim is to get users to a state akin to “in the zone”, Zichermann says. This is a state of flow that game designers hope to achieve. It is a state between the anxiety/frustration of a badly designed challenge and the boredom of a too-easy task.It's the opposite of web design, he jokes. Web designers try to remove friction, get people to the information or task as quickly and easily as possible. That's taking out all the fun. In appropriate cases websites can be designed differently, he suggests.Once flow is achieved the player keeps playing with maximum engagement, learning and satisfaction. The challenge is a progression to mastery of a complex world created by the designers. That's the concept being applied by Salesforce.com's chief scientist JP Rangaswami, who described the “gamification of the enterprise” in a talk at a US conference last week. Gamification has been shaping our workplaces for a long time, but it has reached a tipping point with the rise of social gaming, he said.The work must be inherently rewarding, exciting, for the player, er, worker to begin with. Game mechanics over a bad workplace is “like putting lipstick of gamification on the pig of work”.That can be done, but the techniques soon turn the rewards and recognition into a diminishing return, and the inherently rewarding work becomes a “pig”. Inner motivation, such as the pleasure in the achievement of learning a new skill, diminish Instead, gamification helps understand how to harness the “non-linear” peaks and troughs of work by “knowledge workers” in a service economy.Most downtime at work is wasted at meetings. Instead it should be used in games to upgrade the skills of workers in a non-threatening environment, or for encouraging creativity.The generation of workers growing up with the video games and now entering the workforce are used to this environment in the multiplayer online world. Such notions will not be strange to them.Large corporations can use “tools that are going to allow for a significant paradigm shift from hierarchical, linear, top-down decision making work to non-linear, networked, personally selected teams, tasks, and outcomes. We are nearly there, but this change is going to require us to learn a lot of new things, and what games can teach us is a smarter way of being able to extract those learnings and bring them to the enterprise.”Watch his talk at www.livestream.com/readwriteweb.That's it for this three-part series on gamification, based on my admittedly surface knowledge of the subject. But it's a start at understanding the new workplace, and the generation growing up with the complex digital worlds they are spending more and more time within.Send any comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com.