My fear with gamification is that even professional game designers end up putting out games that are fundamentally broken from time to time. Great examples: Look up the Halifax Hammer from the board game A Few Acres of Snow,; banned cards from any given collectable card game; emergency patches delivered to various video games because of unintended interactions. These are, again, professionals who have a lot of time and teams of playtesters giving oodles of feedback – yet stuff still gets missed.

Gamification has to be used so carefully since it brings the risk of accidentally teaching no lesson at all, or worse the wrong lesson. And when you fail with it and have to go back and fix it, you’ll find it’s damaged trust, which is just a killer. I saw this happen firsthand with an incentive plan (itself a gamification system) at one career stop.

The second example you give is a good way to attempt it ‘correctly’. It makes me think of the old NES game “Punch-Out”, where you progressively ramp up in difficulty and therefore required skill/understanding to succeed. I think that works and hits a sweet spot. Too simple and the game can be defeated by rote. Too complex and the systems may be exploitable. Gotta be somewhere in the middle!