Ask YC: Where to find practical guide on gamifying?

I'd suggest you follow the Lean path in applying gamification:

1. Determine what behavior you want to enforce (Measure)

2. Determine how you will enforce this behavior (Plan)

3. Build the functionality required for the above (Build)

You should also decide where to draw the line; i.e. are you building a game or are you gamifying features to enforce certain behaviors.

You should definitely read Jeff Atwood's post on gamification here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/the-gamification.ht...

Here are some good examples of gamification:

http://www.stackoverflow.com/

http://www.codeschool.com/

http://tryruby.org/levels/1/challenges/0

There aren't any answers because it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter how many levels you have, nor how many points things are assigned. There aren't any formulas for how they add up, either, because either they add up, or they don't.

Gamification isn't something you install, add some hooks in at appropriate points, and magically have user engagement. It's not logging.

It's applied psychology.

There aren't answers to how many levels you have because levels are shorthand for recognition of accomplishment. Points are proxies for the player's sense of self-worth. How do you define accomplishment in your system? What are reasonable, logical, or emotionally meaningful ways to break that up? How do you break that down into learnable tasks and efforts within those systems?

Those aren't rhetorical questions. I'm asking you those questions. The first two establish your levels, the third establishes things that are worth points. Maybe you earn points and those let you progress through levels. Maybe they're independent. It's whatever makes sense for incentivizing your system.

I ran some design workshops a while back, and one of them was on applied gamification. Out of five or six groups of 2-3 designer/developers, only one really "got" it, and applied game mechanics in a way that might actually be meaningful to users.

The rest applied it superficially and if they had been real products, they would have failed.

http://vi.to/workshop/20100426/ has my write-up of the workshop and the exercise they did, and http://vi.to/gmnotes has my notes, including the handouts and my references. I'd start with those.

Oh, and if one of the "famous books on gamification" is the O'Reilly one, I'd forget everything you read there. That book is atrocious. http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-cop... is a good example of some of the negative coverage it received, and I never recommend it. Read books by psychologists, by people who have designed and launched video games, and by academics who do actual research and testing of their theories.

All of the reasons are entirely arbitrary based on your application. It doesn't matter because they are manifestations of psychological principles. You could have levels, or you could have ducks. You could have points, or you could have dogs. Every time you hit Submit in your app you get a dog, and every six dogs you get a parrot, and every three parrots you get a duck, and you need to email that duck to support@yourapp to unlock a new feature, or you can paint that duck a particular color and save it in your right sidebar, but you can't do both.

It doesn't matter, because it's not a recipe or a formula. They are representations of attributes to poke a person's psychology to tell them they are making progress (dogs to parrots), to reassure them (ducks being emailed), to give them investment (ducks being painted), etc.

You need to understand the psychological principles involved before any of it will make sense. The questions you're asking have no answers because they're ultimately nonsensical questions.

Gabe Zichermann's book is crap, and maybe that's why this doesn't make sense to you. None of those books you listed are by psychologists, mainstream video game designers, or research academics.