Two prominent informatics examples of gamification are in bioinformatics. Two groups of researchers have created games users play to help them solve their research problems. The oldest is
FoldIt where users "fold" proteins. The user with the highest score wins (and has helped the researchers find the best 3D structure corresponding to a particular protein). So there's crowdsourcing going on here, too.
Another example is
Phylo where users help the researchers perform multiple sequence alignments (MSAs). A lot of bioinformatics reduces down to aligning or pairing up symbols that stand for different things (amino acids in protein folding like FoldIt, nucleic acid in Phylo). In fact, the intro to the Phylo game (the onboarding part) is a really good tutorial on sequence alignment. It's easy for the computer to align 2 sequences by matching up symbols to maximize a score. It gets tougher for MSAs b/c the computer needs a good set of heuristics (or simplified rules) to make the problem solvable quickly. People can try to out-do the computer on an MSA since people aren't bound by the heuristics. They can spot patterns or try to solve the problem differently.
Both of these examples are full-blown games that use computing to solve a biology problem. That can be gamification, but gamification doesn't require that something be turned into a full-blown game. It only requires that game elements be incorporated.
This last example (I finally got some Freakonomics content into this course) is a blog post illustrating the gamification of identifying objects in pictures. We've seen that computers are not very good at this problem but people are. One approach we saw for solving this was to make it an MTurk HIT and pay someone to do it. Here, we see that just adding a score essentially gets people to solve the problem for free. That's gamification.
(I'll sneak in one last link.
Here's how one website gamified itself.)
