Re: Gamification
Ditto here on the outsourced cartoons. The best part (since they were outsourced) was the disclaimer at the start of each video, saying that the requirements given in the upcoming video may be different than the ones applicable in your company and/or region. On a compliance video. SMH, does anyone in charge actually watch these things? Oh, well, got my badges (one for each video watched, IIRC). Now that it has been mentioned, I do recall something about a "leaderboard" and competing against your fellow employees. But...you only got these compliance videos ever so often, so I'm not clear how (or why) you could do more of them than you were told to do...
And the videos we were required to complete seemed to vary every year. Some years, we had sexual harassment (avoiding, not how-to) training, some years not. Every now and then, we got videos required that were clearly meant for software people (I was a hardware engineer), and I just gave up on them...all about requirements for building software, which process to use, etc. Greek to me. Never heard a word more about it. Did not get a badge for that one.
HR once ran a contest for badges. I kid you not, and I have screen grabs to prove it, which I will not post here. The contest was to see who could award the most badges to fellow employees as recognition for whatever they were being recognised for. It ran for a while and then the HR people running the contest posted the names of the winners. Apparently, these people either worked with a LOT of high energy contributors, or they were really into giving and collecting (virtual, mind you) badges.
One of our guys once tried to create a badge for something relevant to our small development group (might have been Outstanding Effort on a Project That Was Cancelled, or some such). They submitted it to "Badge Central" and got a note saying it would not be approved. Apparently there are standards and this one didn't meet them.
This badge stuff went on as long as I was there. Totally bizarre, it was like getting a gold star on a grade school essay, but virtual. Somehow the number and types of badges you had factored into your promotability (in a way that, natch, was not disclosed). As I was already at the highest non-management level, that didn't matter to me.