So I have some experience in this, having researched gamification quite heavily as part of my PhD thesis [1]. Note that I am going to talk about gamification as described by Zichermann and as used in this article, not about "gameful interfaces" as used by Jane McGonigal et al. after the "gamification" term was so thoroughly poisoned by gamification companies as mentioned in the OP.
The OP hits on two key points. The first is that employees know bullshit when they see it. The second is that the wrong metrics were often chosen, and that anything that didn't have a easy metric was thrown out.
These two points are symptomatic of the root issue at the heart of this: enterprise gamification companies don't, and never did, care about employee well-being. This was true of every gamification salesperson and author (Zichermann in particular) that I ever came across. They were all snake-oil salesmen selling stuff to CEOs who read about gamification in an airplane magazine. And to be fair to them, they were very good at it, and I guess the smartest ones also took the money and ran.
Gamification used buzzwords and metrics to provide feedback about employee productivity, but never provided any meaning because no deeper motivation was ever attempted to be tapped. Zichermann was infamous at misrepresenting or ignoring the psychological literature that ran counter to the nonsense he was spouting [2]. He particularly rejected intrinsic motivation, which is pretty much everything anyone ever wants out of their employees, in favor of the extrinsic motivators, which creates this arms race known as the hedonic treadmill [3], where employers would have to offer more and more motivators in order to keep interest. Note that paying people more is a classic extrinsic motivator.
So you have a whole bunch of points and badges and such, but to what end? What do they represent? What do they mean to those that hold them? The value of an Xbox 360 achievement, of a Boy Scout badge, of a Weight Watchers token, was never about the thing at the end, but about the meaningful trip they represented and reminded holders of. Gamification never bothered with that, and enterprise gamification, in particular, couldn't have cared any less. Making employees more productive was never the goal, it was selling stuff while the buzzwords were hot.
Gameful ideas can and do work when employed in a thoughtful, meaningful way that supports the intrinsic motivators of the given task. However, that's very tricky, as it's way too easy to misalign incentives (e.g. giving a badge for archiving email quickly, what's the result going to be?) which is why actual game designs take years to perfect before they are released. There are often simpler, quicker wins for improving employee motivation.
The OP hits on two key points. The first is that employees know bullshit when they see it. The second is that the wrong metrics were often chosen, and that anything that didn't have a easy metric was thrown out.
These two points are symptomatic of the root issue at the heart of this: enterprise gamification companies don't, and never did, care about employee well-being. This was true of every gamification salesperson and author (Zichermann in particular) that I ever came across. They were all snake-oil salesmen selling stuff to CEOs who read about gamification in an airplane magazine. And to be fair to them, they were very good at it, and I guess the smartest ones also took the money and ran.
Gamification used buzzwords and metrics to provide feedback about employee productivity, but never provided any meaning because no deeper motivation was ever attempted to be tapped. Zichermann was infamous at misrepresenting or ignoring the psychological literature that ran counter to the nonsense he was spouting [2]. He particularly rejected intrinsic motivation, which is pretty much everything anyone ever wants out of their employees, in favor of the extrinsic motivators, which creates this arms race known as the hedonic treadmill [3], where employers would have to offer more and more motivators in order to keep interest. Note that paying people more is a classic extrinsic motivator.
So you have a whole bunch of points and badges and such, but to what end? What do they represent? What do they mean to those that hold them? The value of an Xbox 360 achievement, of a Boy Scout badge, of a Weight Watchers token, was never about the thing at the end, but about the meaningful trip they represented and reminded holders of. Gamification never bothered with that, and enterprise gamification, in particular, couldn't have cared any less. Making employees more productive was never the goal, it was selling stuff while the buzzwords were hot.
Gameful ideas can and do work when employed in a thoughtful, meaningful way that supports the intrinsic motivators of the given task. However, that's very tricky, as it's way too easy to misalign incentives (e.g. giving a badge for archiving email quickly, what's the result going to be?) which is why actual game designs take years to perfect before they are released. There are often simpler, quicker wins for improving employee motivation.
[1] More easily digested book - http://www.amazon.com/Irresistible-Apps-Motivational-Web-bas...
Free dissertation - http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~ejw/dissertations/Christopher-Lewis...
[2] http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-cop...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill