Excerpt:

Author and game designer Jane McGonigal popularized the notion of gamification, in which players can get points, badges, or other rewards for ordinarily mundane tasks. According to McGonigal and others like Ian Bogost, gamification can motivate us to recover from personal setbacks including injury, depression, or distress, and improve our lives by forming new habits or skills. For example, Duolingo allows people to learn a language online while translating online documents and websites. Students earn skill points as they complete lessons or translate web content, and the complexity of sentences increases as the user progresses. Other games use competition and peer pressure among neighbors to reduce electricity consumption when appeals to saving money and the environment don’t work.

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