One of these things that was left out in the book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” is the one about everything poo and loo and the differences between men and women in that regard. I remember those innocent days as a boy, when we tried to outrange the other boys peeing, or writing our names in the snow (yes, with what you are thinking). It seems that ever since this was the normal way of boys. Girls of course had to fail, due to a small but crucial  missing piece. Psychologists referred to that later as “penis-envy.“

Technology has taken that a step further. A take on that was done with the installation of special urinals at the Amsterdam Schiphol airport in the 1990s (watch closely to see the fly in Figure 126). Dutch maintenance man Jos Van Bedoff remembered that back then in the Dutch army somebody had put small, discrete red dots in the barrack urinals, which dramatically reduced “ misaiming”. Van Bedoff suggested to do that for the airport, and plastic flies were embossed In the ceramic urinals. They helped reduce "spillage" (and cleaning costs) by 80%.

Ethymologist can actually trace that back way longer. First “insects” – bees – where seeing sported in British bathrooms in the 1890s. It didn’t stop there. Soccer fans today enjoy “scoring” goals with the “SoccerWee” by the appropriately named “The Wee Urinal Games Company.“

"Can gamification help us fly to Mars? Does gamification cure AIDS and cancer? If not, then this concept doesn't make sense."

That was the reaction of a colleague (if you must ask, Yes, it was a German colleague) when I started evangelizing gamification. While he didn't apply the same logic to anything he created, or any other product that came across his path, for whatever reason he felt compelled to set that standard for gamification. Back then, I felt this was kind of a hypocritical double-standard.

Having this in my mind all the time, with Foldit – the game that allowed scientists to solve the folding-problem of protein structures with the help of gamers, a task which the researchers had failed for 15 years to accomplish with mathematical and computational methods -  the contribution of gamification to AIDS and cancer science finally got a check mark.

A few weeks ago the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians again went hot. From an outside perspective you keep just wondering why they cannot seem to get a break? I typically read the sad news, hope that everything will stop soon, think of friends in the region that I have and hope that they and their families are fine. That's about it, because if I as Austrian start to lecture of what I think is wrong, I won't be heard: after all it was an Austrian (Hitler was Austrian born) who paved the path to the most atrocious ideology and war crimes at this time.And I can't change the conflict anyways, or can I?

With gamification turning from an obscure to a strategically important concept in the corporate world, it becomes necessary to look at the legal aspects of gamification. Especially for global corporations, but also for smaller ones, there are a surprising number of regulations to consider. Labor laws, data privacy, banking laws, but also basic constitutional rights can be pretty quickly violated through a sloppy gamification implementation and result in severe punishments. If this were not enough, many compliance requirements add to the complexity of what can or must be done.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and whatever legal issues I raise here is based on my own research and many conversations with co-workers, project members, corporate data privacy representatives, members of the workers’ council, and lawyers who were confronted with or are responsible for these areas.

Where criticism comes from

The most ardent criticism is often phrased from people that come from the gaming-side. Be they passionate gamers or game-designers or both. They breath games, they love games, they spend a lot of time playing. And only recently it has become safe for them to disclose publicly (outside their gamer- and game-design-communities) that they in fact love games. There has been a cultural shift in the perception of games, not least through the advent of gamification, education games, serious games, etc.