I'm not sure what the recent hype about gamification is. It's an old, established practice. From your rewards card at the grocery store, to skymiles, coupons in the Sunday newspaper and all the little tricks in infomercials on TV. At least those are about actual money instead of bits and bytes. Then again, who knows, since prices could be artificially inflated to make discounts look good.
Well there are two concepts in play here, one is like the old S&H Greenstamps, which is to take an activity that is normally a process to achieve a goal (say shopping for groceries so you can eat) into something that is itself a goal (do enough shopping and you can get a new toaster). The airlines created 'milers' who are folks who spend time figuring out ways to keep their executive memberships current by having enough miles.
The second is the notion of awards and 'achievements' which provide ego reinforcement for folks who might otherwise be appalled at how much time they are spending on an activity. This provides a convienient rationalization path so that folks don't say "I just wasted three hours on the TMZ site, instead they got three 'oscars' for finding all the Paula Abdul stories in under three hours."[1] Its a rationalization that they 'achieved' something by investing that time.
Affinity programs, (such as airline miles, green stamps, etc) are pretty straight forward since they give information that the customer has done a certain volume of business with you, you can afford to give them a discount (post facto) by discounting stuff with affinity 'points.' Achievement / Titles type programs are a way to tap into the human rationalization engine and generally only make the consumer feel better (or less bad) about the poor value they have received.
[1] Its an entirely fictitious example, only the web site, TMZ, is real and it really is a complete waste of anyone's time :-)
I think the lack of "actual money instead of bits and bytes" is the primary difference, though. Gamification is about trying to use gameplay as something that incentivizes just by being played, without requiring actual transfer of monetary incentives like rebates, discounts, or vouchers. If that works, the appeal is obvious, because why pay users to achieve some goal when you can incentivize them via gameplay, which is free? (In addition, advocates argue that it may engage in ways that money doesn't, by pulling people into an activity they feel part of.)
As an alternative to incentivizing via payment, it might actually be more related to Soviet attempts to use achievements and game-type competitions in factories to up production and build community/engagement, albeit obviously less coercive: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html
