I just want to brag here that I wrote this comment in July 2009, more than a year before Wikipedia's article on gamification was started and a year and a half before Reality is Broken was published. So I am clearly super awesome. Relevant text: "SO is a webgame, like all these generic productions where you click on things repetitively to level up and whatever, except you accumulate XP -- oh, I mean rep -- by helping people solve problems and contributing to the sum of public technical knowledge in the world. Taking the hoarding impulse, surrogate power drive, and general OCD that make people play computer RPGs and harnessing it for the forces of good, and moreover productivity, is SO's great innovation and victory."