I'm always intrigued -- maybe too intrigued sometimes - when I find a whole new sub-industry that has popped up without my ever having heard of it before. So it is with Gamification which is defined as adapting game play mechanics to non-game scenarios. Lots of marketing scenarios for this come to mind. And the web and consumer applications that are typically the object of gamification interest are called 'funware.' Kind of cool. I always thought Second Life was silly and the Facebook games are typically annoying and scary ('Click here to give us access to all your personal data and your friends list!'). But I expect some pretty interesting applications of Gamification to show up sometime in the not too distant that we'll all be surprised by.

http://www.amiando.com/gamificationsummit.html