Playing Virtual Games as Serious Business

Useful findings.  We have seen these repeatedly in experiments. People are drawn by meaningless rewards, useless free offers, irrational propositions.  But is tricking them into participation OK?  If the ends are 'serious'?  Is that marketing?

" ... People like the seemingly pointless incentives they're given on services like Foursquare. And now we have, well, scientific proof backing the conclusion we'd all suspect: If you take aways such incentives on a business social network, people participate less ... That’s what researchers at IBM’s Center for Social Business discovered when they ran an experiment on some 30,000 IBMers who were using a business-centric IBM Facebook clone called Social Blue, a precursor to the company’s IBM Connections product. If you run a social network inside your business, workers are more likely to participate if you give them the game-like incentives you find on services like Foursquare ... "