Everyone wants me to play games. Foursquare, GetGlue, and a half a million other services want me to use them not because their service has value, but to earn some reward. All of this was well and fine. Games are important for learning. Games can be fun. I like games.

Recently, however, games have entered into my world in ways I could never have imagined and I really don’t like. A few weeks back a venture capitalist I admire tweeted that he was giving people 30 minutes of his time, so I hurried to find out how I could earn an uninterrupted half hour with him. I was shocked when I discovered what he wanted, and frankly a little bit depressed.

In order to be blessed with his time, I had to “earn” ten thousand imaginary “dollars” on his website. The only way to do it was to comment on his blog, retweet his tweets, repost his posts, link to his website, etc. That’s right, in order to get 30 minutes with a respected, nationally-known VC to pitch my startup, I had to work my butt off to make him even more prominent than he already is. Sounds familiar...

Maybe I’m too old to understand the way the world works these days, but I thought that the way you earned time with a VC was by working your butt off to turn a great idea into a great business. Not so, according to this guy. He expected me to make promoting him a top priority.

Needless to say, I didn’t bother. I have a business to build and a family to support. They are my top priorities, and will remain so.

Let’s fast-forward a week or two. As I was getting ready to head to Austin for SXSWi I received an email from a friend. He’d nominated WatchParty for “TechStars Startup Madness”, a ThisOrThat contest modeled after the NCAA Basketball Championship, sponsored by the TechStars accelerator program. Sixty-four startups go head-to-head in a single elimination bracketed contest, in which the winner would win $25,000 in prizes.

It was very kind of my friend to have nominated us, so I went to the site and completed the information necessary to enter. Then I promptly forgot about the whole thing. 

A few days later, in Austin, I noticed a few tweets from folks saying they had voted for WatchParty in the contest. So, I emailed a few friends and posted to Twitter and Facebook asking people to vote for us. I spent maybe 10 minutes on the effort. WatchParty won Round 1 with 54%.

When Round 2 started I tweeted and posted again, but didn’t have the time to send an email. With about 12 hours left to go WatchParty was up 64% on Sunday night. I went to bed.

Monday morning we were down to 27%. I went into CEO action mode: Facebook updates, emails, tweets - everything I could think of to try to save us. I commiserated with other startups in the contest who had also seen their commanding leads turn into insurmountable spreads overnight (nearly half of contestants experienced this). I spent a couple of hours focused on a contest I hadn’t cared about a few days earlier.
 

More fool me.

I still don’t know what happened. ThisOrThat is looking into it. But I don’t really care anymore. We didn’t start WatchParty to win stupid online popularity contests, we created it so people could have more fun watching TV. UPDATE: ThisOrThat confirmed that vote-fixing was occurring, and adjusted vote totals. WatchParty did win Round 2 and is continuing with the contest.

What’s really important here is the danger that this whole notion of “game mechanics” and “incentives” represents. Alfie Kohn, the progressive author and lecturer on education, argued over a decade ago in his book Punished by Rewards that people’s work is actually worse when they are enticed with incentives, and programs that use rewards to change people's behavior are ineffective over the long run. According to Kohn, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people the more they lose interest in what we're bribing them to do. I think he is right.

I’m not arguing that the ideas like competition and completion have no place in services and applications. Things like progress bars and even badges can be very useful to get users to do what you want them to do - at first. Eventually they are just fluff (unless your service or app actually is a game).

The problem I’m addressing is what I see as a movement to make everything a game, even things like startup funding and business development. When everything we do becomes a card from SCVNGR’s game mechanics playdeck we all become nothing more than Pavlovian lab rats. Every action we take becomes nothing but a reaction to an external stimulus created by someone somewhere to get what they want.

When VCs and incubators - and any other non-game businesses for that matter - use rewards and punishments to get people to act they may get short-term results, but in the long run they’ll be left scratching their heads when people stop pressing the bar to get a badge or to keep from getting shocked. People participate in life because of the joy life brings, and entrepreneurs turn ideas into businesses because of the thrill it brings. No one loves their kids because an app gives them a badge for it. No entrepreneur should expend effort on winning anywhere but the marketplace.