Not motivated? Make a game of it

Similarly, this winter Vail Resorts is launching Epic Mix, a program to gamify skiing. A radio frequency chip inside your lift ticket is sensed by 90 gates spread across Vail's resorts, recording where you've skied and how many vertical feet you've racked up. The entire mountain becomes a game board on which you can earn points or surprise pins and share your achievements with Facebook friends.

"Passive consumers are a thing of the past, and you need to drive participation, engagement and loyalty," says Rajat Paharia, a founder of Bunchball, which has created games for companies such as USA Network and Victoria's Secret.

But how are virtual rewards able to motivate people? Who cares about some silly badge anyway?

Badges can be especially helpful in an area such as health and fitness, in which it's hard to see your body change with the naked eye. "What badges become are tangible things that represent small change," says Buster Benson, the Seattle-based developer who created Health Month. "It's the bridge that will help carry you through that dead zone where you're putting all this energy into something and not getting anything back immediately."

Yet not all games are good, especially ones that simply involve racking up pixilated pins for completing straightforward tasks. Good games offer a finely calibrated balance between difficulty and reward, with some uncertainty and surprise thrown in at the right moments.

Some psychologists argue that extrinsic motivation (when people are driven by rewards) can actually decrease people's intrinsic motivation.

One Stanford University study from 1973 involved preschool children who enjoyed drawing pictures. A group of those children was told that they'd get a "Good Player Award" for drawing more pictures, while other groups were given the award unexpectedly or given no award. Later, after the awards went away, the group that had been told about the award in advance became less interested in drawing pictures than the other groups did. This phenomenon, called the "over-justification effect," occurs because people pay more attention to the reward and less attention to their enjoyment.

Sebastian Deterding, a PhD student at the University of Hamburg who is studying gamification, notes that its proponents "believe virtual games are motivating because they dole our rewards. … Whereas everything we know about the psychological value of video games is that they're intrinsically motivating."

Still, if the power of games can be harnessed correctly, it has the potential to affect energy consumption, workplaces, government intelligence and other endeavors. Microsoft and Cisco, for instance, already use games to motivate their employees, and schools such as Quest to Learn in New York City are increasingly integrating video games into classrooms.

Byron Reeves, a professor of communications at Stanford who consults for businesses, says that in the last couple of years companies have begun to shed their allergy to combining work and fun. "When you're working in a call center, there is the stunning boredom of call after call," he says. "The pain and the value is incredibly significant. If you can keep those call center workers two more months, that would be huge. If you could change energy usage by 1% in households, that would be huge."