How successful is gamification? If you believe analyst company Gartner’s Brian Burke, “80 percent of current gamified applications will fail to meet business requirements.”

This is a catchy headline, that has led a lot of bloggers and media to put the stamp of failure on gamification. And it is the proof for the critics that gamification designers have no clue what they are doing. But when you listened to the Gartner webinar and read the report, the picture looks more diverse, and put into context to other technologies, the story is pretty much different.

Two of these technologies of the past ten years had undergone similar scorn and criticism: CRM and social media. A quick research on data and reports published about the failure (or success) rates for them will give you a déjà-vu moment. CRM failure statistics from analyst groups like Gartner, AMR Research, Butler, Forrester and others range between 18-70%, with still 49% failures in 2009, eight years after first statistical success data for CRM was published. And according to Gartner, “[t]hrough 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.“ Having attended a number of social media-related conferences in 2012 and before, I can tell you that many companies are still struggling with getting a working social media strategy in place.

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.