Category Archives: Gamification

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What gamification is not

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IllusionAlthough it is easy to concentrate on the merits of gamification, attention has to be made to the fact that it is not a panacea. Certainly it is not the cure for all problems.

Gamification is not a magic formula.

 

You can’t just create a generic method and apply it to everything and expect it to work with 100% efficiency and efficacy. Each experience is a different experience and requires a different approach. Like a tailored suit, which is built to fit the client and his needs, the gamification experience must also fit the needs and criteria of its target.

Gamification is more a placebo than a cure

 

Gamification can generally give you a different perspective on some experience, but will not solve the problem for you. You still have to have the will for that problem to be solved. If you have a very negative attitude towards the situation, even if gamification can help you a bit, you won’t see much of an improvement on the results. What gamification tries to do is to change your perspective and try to make you loath your tasks a lot less.

Gamification is not just points and badges

 

Despite being an important tool, points and badges are not the core engine of gamification. Points and badges alone can work well on their own, but not with much efficiency and not providing long lasting results. The negative traits they present sometimes are not even worth their use in a isolated way.

Both are an important way to measure success in a task, but that’s not what always happen. Sometimes those tools can be subverted by the players, creating a completely distorted perception of those metrics.

For example, consider a gamification app on the smartphone where you earn some points for just logging in to the app, and of course some more points for some player action inside the app. If player A only logs in everyday to collect the points, but player B actually uses the app but only uses the app from time to time, they might have a similar score, giving the idea that they have both a similar performance when that’s not really the truth.

We can’t understand the full extent of the gamification influence as of yet

 

We could consider that gamification is totally understood by now, and in it’s current form, we already have the capability to apply it at “full power”. However, the evolution of gamification directly depends on the evolution of technology and we can only try to guess how gamification will be used 20 years from now. Games are constantly evolving and testing new mechanics, which naturally will also make the jump to the gamification world sometime in the future.
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Communication and Information

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10881350856_21a5472674_kIn gamification we can have two settings regarding teamwork. The experience may be oriented to a specific group of people, for example a team of a company’s employees, or to a group formed by random people who want to play that experience with a common goal but without the faintest idea who the other people might be, for example what happens when people collaborate in an online game.

In either case, communication is essential for a successful experience, but each one requires a different approach. In the first case a hierarchy is already established and we can assume that guidelines already exist, so there is not much space for chaos to arise. In the second case the relationship between people is a bit more anarchic, and even if that group of people naturally tend to informally create a hierarchy, some experiences might not have the luxury of time and since it is not guaranteed that someone on that specific group has some kindof leadership traits, it could mean that the process of creation of order and purpose in that group could be in danger.

Communication is a nuclear part of most endeavors that require teamwork. As such, considerable time should be spent envisioning the way communication will take part in the gamification experience. Be it system-player, player-player or player-system.

 

System-Player and System-Player communication

 

An important part of communication is the relationship between the experience and the player. One of the first things the player must learn is the rules of the experience, closely followed by an explanation of the way the experience is supposed to be played. These are the crucial first steps of the experience, but later on, another kind of communication is needed, feedback on the player experience. Metrics on the way the player is accomplishing the experience are important for the player to assess his development at said experience. This metrics will even work as intrinsic reward as players see themselves beating their previous limits.

Satisfaction of the player regarding the experience is also important. An appraisal on the part of the player is essential to “keep the game going”, and that means a good user-system communication. This way the players can help to shape the experience to their needs, criticism (hopefully constructive) and requests are a good way to keep the the gamifiers informed of what the gamifees think about the environment.

 

Player-player communication

 

Another important thing is player-to-player communication.

There is not a team thatPlayer-Player Communication works well without the means to be able to communicate successfully. With a fluid communication system, the synergy between players is obviously maximized and the results will be also maximized.

Regarding the first case, of a company’s employees, it requires a structured communication system where the players have access to the needed information to fill their roles, while of course each team-manager will require all information regarding that department.

In a unstructured environment, all the players, despite their role, should have all the information available, at least that which is relevant to them. Players should be able to communicate openly with one another, but in this case, in which an informal leadership structure might not yet been implemented, it would be wise to implement some kind of dispute resolution mechanism in an effort to try to prevent problems that may arise in the mean time.

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Crowdsourcing – the future

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Crowdsourcing

Open Source

The open source movement has a lot of supporters, and not only because it gives you the possibility of making your own modifications to the software, so it suits your needs, but also because the large quantity of people that generally contribute and share, help to increase the speed of that product development.
But not only that. With so many people using and tweeking the software, it is harder for flaws to pass unnoticed. And if some flaw is there, as it is detected, soon enough someone will appear with a solution.

This way, larger challenges can be tackled in lesser time. Instead of having a company with a few dozens of developers working in some piece of software, you have thousands of developers working on that specific piece.

That’s the power of crowdsourcing. You get bigger and better, faster.

The Future

I actually believe that in the future, most companies will have a specific departament that deals with crowdsourcing, since it has so many benefits to the development of a product. I also believe that we will see some kind of temporary project-oriented companies that are created with the only intent of organizing crowdsourcers to develop specific projects in a defined time-frame.Future
In this kind of companies, freelancers from around the world join efforts to develop a project. As soon as the timeline is met and the project is finished, each of them move to another project. The maintenance, if needed, will be garanteed by crowdsourcers with  a more informal relation with the project.

Crowdsourcing is still in its childhood, it is still learning how to walk, however as the problems are growing in complexity, more sinergy has to be created to solve them. In the future we will probably feel the need of going beyond the notion of company as we have it today.

Probably the number of freelancers will grow in the upcoming years due to the current juncture, but instead of becoming more independent from each other, I believe we will have to rely more on each other to overcome the challenges ahead.

The notion of a market where companies, as a closed environment, compete to create the best product possible, will probably give place to a crowdsourcing effort where these products will be drawn from a “colective mind” effort.

We will probably see an evolution in the market way of thinking, from competitive to colaborative.

Of course that both will still exist, as it happens right now, but they will probably trade places in the perceived importance of each one.

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Reinforcement and Punishment – Positive and Negative

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Reinforcement - ChildrenOn a first note, I must warn you that I don’t have children of my own, this is just based on current theories of reward/punishment behavior. So, this is just a theoretical view with no related first hand knowledge on my end.

When children start to grow, often parents struggle with the need to discipline their kids. With discipline I mean both negative and positive reinforcement as long as punishment, in an effort to promote good behavior.

 

Positive Reinforcement

 

Positive reinforcement creates motivation for an individual to increase the likelihood they will engage in some specific behavior again.

– When a child has good grades at school he is rewarded with a visit to Disneyland. That hopes to reinforce in the child the idea that effort equals good things.

Negative Reinforcement

 

Negative reinforcement happens when an aversive stimulus is removed to increase the likelihood of that behavior occurring again.

– To avoid the reprimand of this mother of father, the child cleans his room. With good behavior (cleaning his room) the child has no aversive stimulus (reprimand)

Positive and negative reinforcement have the same objective, to encourage a specific behavior, yet with different kind of stimulus.

Then you have positive and negative punishment. Punishment is the action taken after bad behavior on the individual’s part, to prevent that behavior from happening again.

 

Positive Punishment

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Positive punishment presents a negative consequence to some specific behavior with the intend of diminishing the chance of that behavior happening again.

– When an individual gets a parking ticket, he has to pay a fine.

Negative Punishment

 

Negative punishment is used by suspending some stimulus that is considered positive by the individual with, again, the intent of reducing the likelihood of that behavior being repeated.

– When a child enjoys playing video-games, but forgets to do his homework, he is forbidden to play video-games.

In games most of them are already part of the game’s main mechanics:

-The reward systems, points, badges, etc act as positive reinforcement for specific actions.
-The temporary loss of particular skills due to bad in-game choices is a good example of negative punishment.
-The loss of in-game lives  is a good example of positive punishment.

This means that gamification can help in the education of one’s children. By understanding these mechanics but also all the other parts integrating the gamification theory, parents can create a different and more informed approach on a way of implementing a system which helps them teaching their children how to properly behave.

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Mind Games

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Mind Game

Have you ever heard about some controversial psychological experiences which, in some way, got out of hand? It’s not so hard to find some examples. In a quick search you can find rapidly something like this.

Psychology has fought for a long time to be considered a science. Since science generally requires proof by experimentation, and not only an hypothesis, it’s easy to understand why these experiments happened at all, despite all the controversy. I am not saying that I agree with these experiments, but I do understand the need felt by the investigators to put them in place. These experiments should be done nevertheless, but not in this way. They must be created inside a controlled environment, in a way that the test subjects don’t suffer harsh long term consequences.

We are now able to consider some relatively new technologies or philosophies that have developed considerably in the most recent years. With these novelties we are able to consider alternative methods to study the mind. We are able to gather much more information and even create simulations where the test subjects are virtual representations of the person. Avatars if you must.

 

Gamification

 

Gamification can be used in a way to study people’s behaviour regarding some stimulus inserted in the experience.

A lot of information can be gathered from the perspective of the individual user, according to their specific characteristics, but even more important is the sociological data that can be attained that way. Do you want to study how seriously the world is considering the consumption of healthy food, the reduction of salt and sugar on foods? Well, you can consider a cooking game where you observe the recipes chosen by the larger majority of people. Do you need another example? How about a gamification experience (not really important about what) in which at certain point you offer a reward to the players so they have to sabotage the game of other players. From this point on you can study the limits of corruption in modern society.

 

Serious Games

 

Another way of studying the mind is with serious games. This way you can engage in experiments that have their setting in a virtual world and where all the rules can be controlled (assuming that all exploits are prevented) by the investigator.

This way the consequences can be controlled and, at the same time, the investigator has the possibility of creating scenarios that probably would just not be possible to accomplish in the real world.

For example, if you wanted to create a study about the reaction of different people from different nationalities to the recent Ebola virus outbreak. It would probably be much easier and more secure to have an online game where these people from different countries would have avatars in the game and their objective would be to stay alive (just like in survival games) , but then they would be exposed to virtual entities infected with the Ebola virus. That way you could study their reaction without real consequences.

 

Mind Files

 

Earlier this year we had the opportunity to talk with Edwin Fennema from Sightes, a Dutch company that works with transreality. While we were talking, Edwin come up with something we had never heard about before: Mind Files.

After he explained to us what was it all about, we were just dumbfounded. It is a very interesting subject and with a concept so simple that we could not believe how we didn’t thought about that before, or at least how could we haven’t heard about that before.

Mind files are nothing more, nothing less, than a virtual representation of the person’s mind. OK, it’s far from being easy to attain, it needs a lot of work, but the idea of that being possible is outstanding.

Can you imagine all the possibilities? The number of studies and simulations that we could create. Conflicts that could be avoided by studying simulations. You could even rent your avatar for market analysis studies that would become very precise. When forming a team, everything could be simulated to prevent future conflicts between team members. Well, the possibilities are endless.

Just think about it!

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Curiosity – The Force Behind Evolution

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Curiosity Killed The Cat?
Curiosity killed the cat but thrilled the player.

 

Today’s topic is far from being an exclusive to games.

Curiosity is a motivational engine that lead the human species from the caves to the smartphone era and beyond. It’s something so powerful that by itself is enough to lead a person to make awesome discoveries as well as getting that same person in trouble.

The metaphor “Curiosity killed the cat” is probably something familiar to you and it is just one of the ways of warning someone against the risks of excessive curiosity. Despite the fact that it seems an exaggerated view on curiosity, when you consider the fact that curiosity is probably that one thing which makes you try something you’ve never tried before, from which you have no knowledge about and from which you don’t know what results to expect, it kind of makes sense.

Curiosity

In games, stories, movies and a lot of other media, curiosity is used and abused to keep the consumer focused on that same media. For example, when in a movie the character finds a mysterious device and the exact purpose of that device is not in some way immediately explained to the spectator, most people feel the desire to understand what is that all about. And it isn’t something that goes away easily, that piece of the puzzle must fit somewhere and you just need to understand where and why.

If you think about it, it’s not hard to remember a moment when you’ve asked yourself while watching a movie, playing a game or reading a story:

  •  “Who is that person? Does that person has something to do with what’s going on?”
  •  “What will happen if the character opens that door? What is behind that door?”
  • “What key is this? What will it open?”

And that keeps you going, makes you wait to complete the puzzle. And you wait.

Games tend to use this well, the good ones at least. However not only in games and movies you see curiosity used as a tool to attract people. In marketing, for example, this is often also the case.

Curiosity is a powerful tool. When building a gamification experience it must always be considered when it is possible to do so.

Curious DucksWhat curiosity compels us to do, is to wonder possible solutions to the puzzle that we are facing.

As a species, we are prepared to adapt to unexpected situations and problems, curiosity is just a way that our own nature has to make us adapt to those situations. We are constantly trying to solve every kind of problems around us, even if they are not an immediately perceived necessity. What triggers that behavior is usually the curiosity that we feel and which is one of the major drives in our one evolution as as a species.

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Desertification – Gamifying The Desert

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The game of countering desertification

Some time ago we were contacted by Andreas Buechel and he shared with us some of his creative ideas. This week’s post will be about one of his ideas, a gamified experience to counter desertification.

First of all let’s define what desertification is. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica :

“desertification, also called desertization, the process by which natural or human causes reduce the biological productivity of drylands (arid and semiarid lands). Declines in productivity may be the result of climate change, deforestation, overgrazing, poverty, political instability, unsustainable irrigation practices, or combinations of these factors. The concept does not refer to the physical expansion of existing deserts but rather to the various processes that threaten all dryland ecosystems, including deserts as well as grasslands and scrublands.“

 

Andreas had a pretty ambitious idea regarding this problem which uses robots and gamers to counter it. How, you might be asking? Well, a player could be at his home controlling a robot in a remote area, many miles aways, creating some kind of a personal garden in a desertified area.

This is the simple view on it.

Getting on, a lot more have to be thought of and Andreas helped with some more details.

Irrigation

No garden survives without water.

This has to be carefully planed in a way so that the player and the associated robot have the necessary materials to build an irrigation system.

Since the player probably doesn’t have much knowledge about irrigation systems, or the creation of a garden for the matter, a set of tutorials is necessary to teach them.

As the game has more players the more experienced ones could earn some resources like more terrain or different seeds according to their effort to teach the new players.

In some places where this strategy could be used is very difficult to gather enough water for a constant water supply. However there are systems used to obtain water directly from the atmosphere like this example which could provide the essential water supply.

Fertilizer

Andreas suggests once again a creative solution. Fertilizer could be obtained through micro-algae being grown in a solar-powered algae bioreactor. As a positive side effect this bioreactor would also help to reduce pollutants such as NOx and CO2 on the area.

The Deal

The countries where this game would be played would have to ensure that these zones would be treated as global biosphere reserves.

All of the equipment would also have to be guaranteed in the way of maintenance and security. In exchange, the technology could be used to help the local population taking in consideration however, that this could not interfere with the main purpose of the experience .

The costs

This experience could be monitored online through video by everyone in the world which would create a huge potential for the advertising market, being one of the possible financial sources of the project.

Another way of getting funds is asking from the players an initial fee to help cover the equipment expenses such as the robot, and a monthly fee to help maintaining it.

Keep up with the score

As in any other game, we need to be able to effectively check what the player’s score is. We have to consider two factors, the more objective and tangible one, the size of the area that the player is already having success on, and the more subjective and intangible evaluation of the amount of work developed in the garden and the relative success of it.

We have yet to consider the aesthetics and that could be easily attained by an online voting which would reward the best looking garden. Do you have some more ideas about this?

Share them with us.

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Simple to Complex – Different Players, Different Needs

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complexityOne thing to consider while building a gamification experience is the learning curve associated with it.

A lot of people are gamers, but inside the universe of gamers we find different levels of experience and knowledge about that said universe.

On one side you have the hardcore gamers which are people who know most of everything about the game universe and don’t have much difficulty to adapt to a new kind of game, even if the mechanic strands a bit from the usual.

On the other side, you have the soft-core gamers who mostly play casual games, like Candy Crush and Farmville, which are simpler and require less knowledge about the gaming universe.

In gamification we have to consider not only these types and the whole specter in between, but also those who have never played a game. Even so if they are a rarity nowadays.

The gamification experience must be able to reach all and effectively help all, so it’s important to consider several kinds of players in layers of game complexity and ways that the experience may need to transform so that fulfills the needs of all.

5320119828_11172c9af2_mIt’s not an easy thing to accomplish though. Instead of thinking about levels of difficulty like it’s normal in a video-game, in which you find something similar to, “beginner”, “regular” or “difficult”, but instead thinking about levels of complexity.

Lets think about a little example:

In the summer, forest fires are always a problem. A good strategy and the collaboration of the population from the outskirts is a fundamental factor to prevent this kind of disaster.

Thinking about gamification we can setup various levels of action so that everyone can help. In a simpler base, the player will be awarded points for each forest zone that he has helped clear out of any potential fuel – such as leaves, needles, grass, branches, and logs.

The more zones the player helps clearing the better his score is.

However, who is to define these zones? Well, maybe that’s the next level of complexity of the experience, the study of the area, division in zones and calculating the number of people and time needed to clear each specific zone, which will signify a different number of points for each specific zone according to the complexity of the area.

Competition between the “planners” is a must, and would probably be based in the size of the area attributed to each one, taking in consideration the time it took to clean all the area.

A jury would of course be needed to judge how well the work was done to avoid negligence from the teams.

So you don’t like this planning thing or the cleaning and scoring is not enough for you?

Well, a lot of fires are started by human hand. Are you ready to “recruit” collaborators and create schedules to watch over some area in times when the heat is at its worst? Maybe a system similar to that of the “planners” is advisable here.

Ensuring competition between security teams, but instead being evaluated by the number of patrols made.

It would be a challenge to get enough people to create security teams and even more to create shifts and ensure that those teams would actually go through with the surveillance program. This, of course, is just a simple example and was not profoundly planned.

A lot of things were not thought of and more planning would be needed before this experience could possibly be considered as having good enough potential to be a success, it was meant as simply an example.

Simple is not always the answer

1411702665_9d1a23f19b_oOne thing that you might be thinking: Why not create just a simple experience, simple enough for everyone to appreciate?

Some people crave for the complexity. Well, not exactly for the sake of it being complex, but for the possibility of choice, for the sensation of an “open world” where the evolution of the experience may have different results according to the decisions of the “player”. Free will if you must.

The experience feels like having endless possibilities and therefore giving a sense of freedom.

At the beginning everyone may be satisfied with the experience being simple, but soon enough a good portion of the “players” will feel bored and want move on to the next experience.

Just think about it, when you learn something new, if that is something that interests you, in the beginning the simpler tasks are a good thing, but as you master them, they become old news, fast.

If you don’t see a perspective of evolution you may even give up on the spot. You feel ready for the next level, but there are no more levels to master.

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10 Examples of Gamification

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10 Gamification Examples

 

In today’s post we will be showing 10 examples of gamification applied in different areas. These examples are displayed in no specific order.

Duolingo

We have talked about Duolingo before in our free report. Duolingo is a game for people who want to learn a new language. The different steps necessary to the process are well divided in levels increasing in complexity.

Microsoft CodeHunt

Codehunt is a somewhat recent game created by Microsoft which aims to teach programming either in C# or Java. The game has, for now, 14 levels of growing difficulty that aim to create a progressive learning process in software development.

Nike +

Nike+ (plus) app creates a gamification experience around the act of running. By setting challenges and keeping track of the runner’s results and improvement, it adds a motivational boost.

Zombies Run!

Zombies Run! is yet another running app, but in this case the approach is a little bit different. It creates a setting where the story is based on an invasion of zombies. The runner has missions that he has to accomplish and at the same time have the possibility of building his own base. More important than that, your have to run from those hungry zombies.

According to the app’s website, 800,000+ runners already use it.

Google Ingress

By itself, Google Ingress may look as just a game, an ARG (Alternative Reality Game) for the matter, but Google uses this game to gather precious data with the help of the players. Using augmented reality, the game divides players in two factions in a science fiction setting. The objective is to create “control fields” by capturing portals.

For more information you can visit this link.

America’s Army

America’s Army is a game that was developed by the USA Army as a recruitment tool. The game reproduces the essential activity of a soldier in the field and is meant to be closer to the real deal as possible.

The player starts by being evaluated in a bootcamp and only after positive results he can really start playing the game. To be able to access certain maps or classes (like sniper or medic), the player has to complete special courses.

Foldit

Solve puzzles for science.

Foldit is maybe the more scientific gamification experience of the all the examples. It is an online game about  folding proteins. Used in a crowdsourcing manner it helps scientists find solutions to solve “real-world” problems by targeting and eliminating diseases among other life-changing discoveries.

World Peace Game

The World Peace Game is a game created by John Hunter for his 4th grade students.

This game is a political simulation that is based on the economic, social and environmental crises and the threat of war that the world often faces.

The goal of the game is to achieve global prosperity with the least amount of military intervention. Students gain a greater understanding of the critical impact of information and find through their decisions and agreements between teams the path to create a better world.

Carrot

Carrot is a task list with an attitude. At least that is how it is presented.

It is a simple form of applying gamification in a way that tries to make people meet the goals they have set for themselves.

The Speed Camera Lottery

The Speed Camera Lottery is a gamification experience that have won the VW Fun Theory Contest. In this game, those who don’t obey the the speed limit pay a fine while those who respect that same limit will be automatically enrolled in a lottery. As you probably might already have guessed by now, the prize is the total of the fines paid by the offenders.

Honorable mentions:

Frequency 1550

This gamification example was created in the Netherlands in 2005 for students at the ages of 12 to 14 (HAVO+MAVO basic curriculum).

This mobile game experience had the goal of teaching the students about History while having some fun.

World Without Oil

This was another ARG which was created so people would start talking about, planning and engineering solutions to a possible and probable near-future global oil shortage.

The game started and ended in 2007. It was nominated in the games category for a 2008 Webby Awards.Won a Special Mention in the Environment category for its contribution to humanity in the 2008 Stockholm Challenge and won the award for Activism at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in March 2008.

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Exploits In The Gamification Experience

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Exploits in Gamification
The way of the exploit

 

One thing that we have mentioned before was the creation of rules necessary to the implementation of a good gamification environment! In video-games since the game-designers control the environment, it’s easier to enforce those rules.  For example, you can limit an area in a map creating by obstacles that the player just can’t get through, so you know that the player can only move in a specific area.

However there is a limit to the number of variables that human beings can foresee and prevent in complex environments. This brings to the table something called exploits. Exploits, in this setting, is taking advantage of a flaw in game design or a glitch, to the advantage of the exploiter.

Some exploit examples in games: 15 funniest, most unfair and memorable exploits .

For example in Skyrim you could use the enchanting skill to create a weapon that would give you a boost to your alchemy skill, which in turn could be used to create a potion that would boost your enchanting skill and so on, creating a loop in skill boosting until your skills were strong enough for you to be practically unbeatable.

In another example, in battlefield 3, a lot of experience points could be earned in multiplayer matches by having friendly engineers damaging the player’s EOD bots while the player would repair them. Doing this repeatedly, and, of course, taking turns on this exploit, both players would earn a lot of experience without even playing the game per se.

The possibility for exploits in gamification is also an important thing to consider. This behavior will most probably arise in the case where the reward assumes more meaning than the action by itself (overjustification effect). This kind of pavlovian behavior might even not be a problem if we’re talking about some task in which only the outcome matters independently of the way it happens. Of course we’re considering that, in this specific case, this behavior will not affect negatively another player or anyone for that matter.

An example on recycling

 

Lets consider a very simple gamification(so simple you could even argue that’s not gamification) experience regarding recycling.  The “player” would be rewarded with 10$ each time that he would send 100 plastic bottles to recycling. If the player contacted several companies which would normally throw away they used plastic bottles to the garbage bin and promised to pay them 5$ per 100 bottles that they would deliver to recycling, that would be obviously an exploit of the system, since that was not what was in mind when this incentive was created.

In practical terms this “player” would be earning half of the reward without doing what he was expected to do. He probably even only had a mind for the reward and not really for the action of recycling by itself. But in this case, the outcome of the experience is probably better than expected since those companies which otherwise would not probably even know about that initiative, are now contributing.

Of course that this is still ethically questionable and a good candidate for debate but we wont be judging that.

Some things can be done to try to prevent it

 

In the gamification process the gamifier must be ready to consider a lot of different approaches and ways of circumvent the rules already created to make sure that the experience is functional and still serves a purpose. It’s important to consider the relative value of the extrinsic reward in comparison with intrinsic value of the experience by itself, the latter should be higher or equivalent to the first. However even the intrinsic reward can pose a challenge to an exploit free environment.

If you consider competition, it is an effective motivational gimmick, but the higher the level of competition the more the person is prone to corruption, exploitation or cheating. You can even witness it in many worldwide scenarios, you just have to keep up with the News. At the end, it really depends on the type of person that we’re talking about. Here we’re talking about, of course, of the different types of psychological profiles different people present and how these profiles affect the way they behave in specific scenarios.

Cheating

 

Cheating, on the other hand(despite exploits can be considered cheating), is not a big deal in gamification for a very simple reason, the “player” unlike in a game is not merely searching for entertainment as is normally the case in game playing, but has an objective which he wishes to complete.
While cheating, he’s only fooling himself and probably his objective will remain unfinished, so I guess no “player” will conscientiously want to cheat. Unless, of course, there is some kind of multi-player competition where in fact one “player” has an unfair competitive advantage over another because of cheating, then there is a problem with which the gamifier has to deal.