As the 21st century approached, luxury automakers faced a technical design challenge: an increasing array of new in-car devices--phone, GPS navigation, digital radio, satellite radio, CD changers, Internet access, television, emergency notification, side and rearview cameras, and driving system settings--was turning dashboards into an unfathomable mess. Automakers were forced to rethink how drivers interface with cars.

I recently attended a talk by a gamification proponent who presented a fragmented and ill structured theory on what gamification can bring to a product. He arrived at the right conclusions, but due to the long and winded road he took there. the audience was generally unwilling to accept the fine finale of his talk. In the end, he dismissed gamification as the surface-scratching marketing tool that it currently is, proposing a focus on “game thinking” instead. Because he failed to come up with a convincing definition of that phrase, I thought I should step in and deliver one. Mine is based on “design thinking”[1], a term popular in design theory. I’m quite familiar with design theory because it was the foundation of all our research at the university department I researched, taught and worked at before entering the exciting world of the games industry.