Gamification is bullshit.

I'm not being flip or glib or provocative. I'm speaking philosophically.

More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.

In June 2010, as the world waited for news on the release of Portal2, Valve announced that making games is hard.  Everyone inside the industry knows this, but to gamers and journalists alike this seemed to come as a surprise. Partly because of disappointment that a game they were looking forward to wasn’t coming out for a bit longer, and partly because Valve is an industry leader. For them to put their hands up and say “hey, this ain’t so easy” made people think: “if they find it hard, what about everybody else?”.

Well, yup, everybody else finds it hard as well. But why? Surely we just take the last game we made and stick some new levels and graphics in it? Or just sit around all day playing the game until one day we decide to release it?

Unfortunately, it’s not like that at all. But why not?

At the recent LOGIN conference, I was on a panel entitled "Wannabe Farmers replacing Pretend Mass-Murderers: Are Social Games a Fad?" To make the panel more interesting the panelists took extreme positions, and I was the solid "social (network) games are a fad" guy. Not that I believe that entirely, but it made for an entertaining panel discussion. (I'll post a link when the talk is posted online.)

But, I mentioned something that I think is very true: business works in cycles. And, by looking at previous cycles we can use them to divine the future of the current cycle. Let's take a closer look, shall we?

Sony’s huge PlayStation Network (PSN) has been down for a week now following the theft of ID and credit card data on some or all of the gaming and video entertainment network’s 77 million customer accounts. Readers have been asking for comment but I stay out of these things unless I have something new to contribute. That something finally comes a week into the crisis as gamers begin to wonder why the network is still not back in operation and speculate on what this all means to Sony? It’s a huge loss of face, if course, but beyond that the damage to Sony is minimal. And the upside for PSN members, including those involved in the many emerging class action lawsuits, is likely to be bupkes. Nothing.

Probably the single biggest thing that stands between the idea of making a great game and the reality of actually doing it is the cost.

Even with agile practices in place, games need a certain level of development before they start to show their potential. The game actions need to extend, the loops need to be in place, the dynamic needs to be coming together and the wins need to build toward something. It needs to develop an aesthetic voice and style, work on the user experience and finally have some level of testing. These things take time and money.

How much? It varies massively depending on what it is, but the bare minimum is $100,000. If you find yourself pitching well below that, it usually portends trouble