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According to this article, as of 2011, there were a little over 200 users with 3-digit UIDs who had posted in the past year (i.e. 2010-2011). Not too bad a percentage considering those accounts would all have been about 14 years old by that point. Wonder what it is now. Probably a bit lower.

Hey man, the Soviets gamified work and it became a worker's paradise as a result!

GP is correct: it is a degenerate case of Soviet gamification, or "socialist competition"(*), where you treat almost everyone like shit, but provide a reward to one or two lucky top dogs. Everyone else pushes themselves for no reward in the inevitably empty hope of reaching the top.

It is necessary in primitive pioneer economies but is unsustainable - a market either moves to permanent, waged labour or falls apart, as it cannot compete with systems which nurture and build on the experience of their workforce. In the short term it's merely exploitative and makes use of the casual labour of precisely the "amateur" developers you denigrate.

(*) The name's misleading, as Lenin's experiment was really in state capitalism, not socialism, where an employee cannot find a better employer.

I agree that the word "creative" is usually questionable, but in my mind procedural generation of game content (levels, characters, dialog, trees, ...) versus procedural generation of game rules is an interesting difference. There is definitely some gray area between them, but I think they aren't identical either.

One practical difference is that doing rule-generation well seems harder. There are some very good level generators, but I have yet to see a truly impressive rule-generation system. There are a number of attempts, of which the most successful to date is probably Ludi, a system that successfully designed a board game that seems to be considered legit in the community of people that play that particular type of board game. But that's a far cry from full game design.

I guess calling it "socialist competition" is no longer fashionable...

It's a kind of zombie that never dies. Charles Fourier, utopian socialist, proposed in the 1850s that in the future, productive play could replace work. Vladimir Lenin, glorious leader of the revolution, thought in the 1920s that internal competitions were a good way of motivating production. Since then a dozen hack management consultants have been reinventing the ideas of work-as-play, productive play, etc every 10 years or so. Someone coined the word "playbour", if "gamification" wasn't obscene enough for you.

On the contrary, comrade, gamification is scientifically correct, as proven by Lenin and Stalin themselves! With its spirit roused by brotherly competition, there is no end to what the proletariat may joyfully achieve in its struggle to build socialism!

Hell, even the Soviets had already done it, and it didn't work very well. And then in the 1990s there was a whole wave of "make work like play" management books, which didn't do much either, except perhaps inspire the "flair" scene in Office Space. Not sure we need another go at it.

I used to think gamification was an interesting idea which might lead somewhere: especially when dealt with as kudos, since monetary rewards so easily can lead to really counterproductive behaviours. Then I realized it had already been tried: in Soviet Russia, no less, under names such as 'socialist competition'. http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html

Now, the fact that the idea is not new is not an automatic rejection of the idea; but its history should be carefully considered to avoid replicating failure. Can gamification be managed so as to 1) reward both short and long term objectives, 2) avoid acting at cross purposes to monetary rewards 3) make it serious enough to affect sufficient numbers of employees, and 4) still be fun? I don't think I'm smart enough to setup such a system. Good luck to those who try: it'll be interesting to see any results.