A new post on Cisco Systems' Virtual Worlds blog identifies the key motivations for online gaming behavior in order to highlight how they can be used for collaborative professional environments. It's a slightly different approach than Shufflebrain's Amy Jo Kim took when she laid out her "Five Commandments of Gaming" (Collecting, Points, Feedback, Exchanges and Customizations). Cisco's list, and comments, are in this following excerpt:

1) Achievement - provides goals, challenge, reward, analysis of complex problems, and status
2) Competition - provides challenge, success, reputation, ego and status
3) Socialization - provides a way to help others, create friendships/relationships, collaboration, group-wide enthusiasm for a task, communication channels
4) Exploration - allows discovery of new information/ideas, distraction and escapism
5) Immersion - allows customization of the user or environment, allows personalized style

When we look at most corporate collaboration environments, they often lack many of these elements. The problem is that adding many of these elements are often deemed to potentially invade privacy or require too much input from end-users that may not feel properly motivated to participate.

So the challenge is finding creative ways to incorporate motivational factors into our Collaborative Environments such that users feel a need to engage with them and clearly understand the benefit they get (and the company gets) from their participation.

[Via Clickable Culture]