Every year the digital hucksters brandish a sickening new buzzword. Right now that’s gamification, sickening not because it’s such an ugly word but for what the concept itself says about the world view of those hyping it.

Gamification is the application of the reward mechanisms used in games to non-game activities. Things like awarding points for completed activities that lead to achievement levels and badges and, frequently, virtual currencies for in-game trading of virtual goods.

It’s all about motivating user behaviour, said Rajat Paharia, founder and chief product officer of gamification platform provider Bunchball. Like most gamification promoters, he speaks in terms of taking advantage of our human need for recognition, our psychological predilection to compete when challenged.

Speaking at the Digital Directions 2011 conference in March – you can still watch his presentation at Fairfax Digital – Paharia explained it as the third leg of optimising a website. Along with search engine optimisation to attract the customers and content optimisation to satisfy them, gamification is “user optimisation” to “influence” the customers to visit more frequently, stay longer and do whatever it is you want them to do.

At Starbucks, for example, customers are rewarded if they check in using Foursquare – that is, report their location so it’s then automatically displayed in the Facebook and Twitter status. Check into five different Starbucks stores and you unlock the barista badge.

“There’s no monetary value associated with any of this,” Paharia said. “They’re just using fun and reward and status and achievement to drive you in to the physical location, where you’ll then spend more money.”

As I listened to this, I couldn’t help but think that if the “rewards” and “status” we seek are about how many times we visited a coffee shop, then as a species we’re doomed.

Gamification is also being used in corporate contexts, where employees can earn points for dealing with boring tasks such as updating documentation. Gartner even claims that more than 50 per cent of organisations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes by 2015.

Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but I thought that doing your job actually involved doing your job, and there was no requirement for it to be fun.

“The purpose of ‘gamification’ seems to be to cover up some manual and tedious process in an effort to make it more ‘fun’ (that word makes me double suspicious)," wrote enterprise software specialist and Thingamy founder Sig Rinde at Enterprise Irregulars. “But what about checking the original assumptions and see if not the tedious and manual part could be removed instead of being hidden under a new ‘fun’ layer? Try the soap before the perfume so to speak?”

It’s easy to understand why gamification is attracting attention, though. Everyone’s seen how Zynga turned FarmVille, the world’s most boring computer game, into a $US5 billion company, so everyone wants to invest in game-related tech businesses. And it allows businesses to more effectively crowdsource their grunt work, gaining free labour in exchange for a few coloured pixels or a temporary slot on a leader board – as Facebook now does instead of paying staff to respond to users’ support emails.

I’ve never been a fan of unpaid labour. It strikes me as unethical. But gamification takes it further by preying on people’s weaknesses to attract that labour.

“Basically game mechanics are a way to get consumers addicted to things,” Tim Chang, a principal at Norwest Venture Partners and the man who coined the word gamification, told Advertising Age last year.

Jane McGonigal, author of Reality Is Broken: How Games Can Change Us and Make the World a Better Place and perhaps gamification’s most passionate advocate, also uses the word “addictive” as a positive. Not that I’ve read her book. Edward Champion’s vitriolic review told me everything I needed to know: 'Jane McGonigal’s Mind Is Broken'.

The problem with gamification isn’t just that it gets users and customers addicted to increase business profits, it also gets the businesses themselves addicted to gamification. Instead of providing customers with more satisfying products, customer service or prices, or employees with more satisfying work – things of real value – it provides a simulation. A short-term gimmick that’ll soon become tired.

Back in March, as Paharia explained how gamification would solve so many problems, if only we took advantage of human psychology, my despair and sense of moral outrage increased.

“If ‘driving business value’ by tapping human desires is all we value, then let’s just start selling crack to children tomorrow, right?” I eventually tweeted.

Paharia saw that tweet, and asked to be introduced. He told me he liked my sense of humour, and offered coffee next time I was in San Francisco. But, Mr Paharia, I wasn’t joking.

Stilgherrian is a writer, broadcaster and consultant covering the intersection of technology, politics and the media. He majored in computing science, has used online services heavily since the mid-1980s, and has worked as a network administrator.