As an anthropologist, it’s easy for me to see how people generate rituals and rules in their everyday interactions to encourage or hinder particular behaviors—essentially, we’re aware of our own psychology and sometimes we end up finding ways to game it. Point-in-fact, that’s exactly what “gamification” happens to be: making things that aren’t otherwise games into games. To put it cynically, it seems like “filling up bars” is what humans do best—not convinced? Just look at how popular MMORPGs like World of Warcraft are, games that revolve almost entirely around filling out achievements, accolades, and…you guessed it: bars.

So when I stumbled upon a video of JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist of Salesforce.com, over at ReadWriteWeb speaking about how gamification is the future I found myself agreeing with his assessments.

This type of gaming convention is familiar to the new generation of workers, most of which are digital natives who, even if they’re not gamers, have dealt with game mechanics in social media and other aspects of their lives.

Knowledge work is inherently “lumpy,” as Rangaswami described it. In other words, rather than being steady and consistent as it was on assembly lines, modern work has peaks and valleys of intensity and workers are more easily able to shift gears between tasks. All to often, the gaps are filled with what Rangaswami called “this 20th century mechanism called meetings.” Instead, they could be filled in part by conventions borrowed from games.

He also goes on to warn that gamification of work won’t make up for tedious and boring work. Again, point-in-fact, some aspects of MMORPG and social games that players often shy away from happen to be the true busywork without any reward except for the accolade or achievement. In the end, gamification works because people enjoy games and being able to show off their badges and they also delight that their badge relates something positive about their experience. There are few people who really want to wear the badge that says that they wasted hundreds of hours doing something that changed absolutely nothing.

Jon Radoff pointed out many of these aspects and pitfalls in his book Game On: Energize Your Business with Social Games; however, he speaks mostly to an audience looking to engage their customers rather than their workers. In fact, one might point out that across venues, gamification is a common method for making customers into workers. In fact, gamification greatly facilitates crowdsourcing and recognizing customers of a product for their involvement in the product provides the perfect fertile field to generate badges, accolades, and bars for them to fill up.

Working for Salesforce.com does make Rangaswami a person to listen to as the company has been doing extremely well with its business model. By the end of July they will have acquired Radian6—a social media monitoring platform. Social media is arguably the origin of the sheer popularization of gamification to impel audiences to work with a product rather than just walk away with it. Salesforce.com has also reached deeper into the cloud with their SaaS product, Cloud Extend, launched only a few months ago in April. As a corporation built around social media, the Internet, and energizing customers, it has become a major player in these theaters.

Pardon me, I must go get my badge for my 1,000^th  written editorial about the tech industry and wear it proudly on my geek vest. What have you done today?