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Episode Summary

Rob breaks down Gartner’s prediction that 40% of large warehouse operations will adopt gamification by 2028, showing why the definition attached to that number (points, badges, leaderboards, and rewards) is the setup for the White Hat to Black Hat drift rather than a win for the field. He covers the frontline cases already on record, from Disney’s 2011 “electronic whip” laundry leaderboard to Amazon’s FC Games and Tae Wan Kim’s 2026 Carnegie Mellon paper on gamifying meaningful work, then walks through Aperam’s safety training project with The Octalysis Group as the counter-example built on Core Drives 2, 3, and 5. Listeners learn how to spot extractive gamification and how to test a system by asking what would be left if the leaderboard disappeared tomorrow.

About the Host

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

Key Takeaways

• Gartner predicts 40% of large warehouse operations will adopt gamification by 2028, and defines it as points, badges, leaderboards, and rewards, which is the most extrinsic and most drift-prone stack available for work that runs on a multi-year horizon.
• The White Hat to Black Hat drift is dangerous on a warehouse floor in a way it is not in a consumer app, because a frontline worker cannot uninstall the job. Instead of churn, the cost shows up as overwork, injury, or people pushed out of their living.
• Amazon’s FC Games offered warehouse workers virtual pets while injury rates ran above average, and workers publicly compared the program to the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits.”
• Carnegie Mellon business ethics professor Tae Wan Kim’s 2026 paper “When Work Becomes a Game” found that gamifying meaningful work can shift a worker’s reason for doing it from the purpose of the job to the points, a textbook over-justification effect measured on people at work.
• Aperam, one of the world’s largest stainless steel producers, ran its 2017 safety training project with The Octalysis Group on Core Drive 3 (Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback) and Core Drive 5 (Social Influence and Relatedness), giving workers a voice in safety improvements and turning safety into a group quest instead of a ranking.
• The Aperam results were strong adoption, workers requesting early downloads of safety material, and a significant reduction in workplace accidents, because the target metric was fewer injuries rather than time spent in the training.

Topics Covered

• 0:00 — The electronic whip and a 40% prediction
• 2:29 — What Gartner’s definition actually contains
• 3:27 — White Hat to Black Hat drift, and who pays
• 5:06 — Amazon FC Games and virtual pets
• 6:08 — Tae Wan Kim on gamifying meaningful work
• 7:28 — Over-justification and Gartner’s own warning
• 9:15 — Gamification can do this job well
• 10:06 — Aperam’s safety training with Octalysis Group
• 12:45 — Black Hat as an on-ramp, not the engine
• 13:18 — Fewer accidents, not more engagement
• 14:23 — Questions to ask before you buy
• 17:21 — Where you want to sit in 2028

Mentioned in This Episode

• Gartner: 40% of large warehouse operations will adopt gamification tools by 2028
• Federica Stufano, Gartner analyst behind the warehouse gamification prediction
• Tae Wan Kim, Carnegie Mellon business ethics professor, 2026 paper “When Work Becomes a Game”
• Amazon FC Games, the warehouse gamification program with virtual pets and arcade-style mini-games
• Disney’s 2011 hotel laundry leaderboard, known among workers as the “electronic whip”
• Aperam, one of the world’s largest stainless steel producers, and its safety training gamification project
• The Octalysis Group
• Core Drives in the Wild, the free Professor Game guide

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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you, Rob Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

The electronic whip and a 40% prediction

Rob Alvarez (00:00): So there’s this one rule that decides whether gamification empowers your workers or breaks them. And once you see it, there’s no way to unsee it. In 2011, hotel laundry workers were pushed to tears, skipping bathroom breaks to avoid a giant leaderboard that they coined the electronic whip. I’ve told this story before, but here is why it matters right now, because an entire industry, an entire sector is about to commit Rob Alvarez (00:29): the exact same mistake. Well, turns out that Gartner just predicted that by 2028, 40% of large warehouses will adopt gamification. Which for somebody like me in my sector, with all the friends I have in this sector, sounds like great news, but most of them will do so in the shallowest possible version with points, badges, and leaderboards on the warehouse floor. Rob Alvarez (00:52): That doesn’t just annoy them, it is potentially harmful. We already got a preview of this. Amazon’s warehouse games, the Disney laundry leaderboard that I talked about before. There’s a brand new research on what this does to workers. I’ll get to all of it during the episode. And who am I? Why am I speaking about this? I’m Rob. I’m the head of engagement strategy in Europe for the Octalysis Group, the prime behavioral design and gamification consultancy in the world where Rob Alvarez (01:19): we solve these kinds of problems. And I’ll have a case study from the Octalysis Group during this episode as well. We solve these kinds of problems for companies every single day. Because the thing is that when you do design it properly, the exact same framework, gamification in this case, or the way people see it, because you base it in behavioral science and real, deep, well-created gamification, in the hardest possible setting, Rob Alvarez (01:43): which is a safety training, safety in heavy industries. So let’s get to the plan. I’ll show you the shallow version, how it drifts into harm, what doing it right actually looks like, and a few questions that you all can also ask yourself before you buy this for your own factory floor or whatever honestly your setting actually is. And as you know, we’re always trying to offer more than what we give in our episodes. So if this is something, this kind of read on how the Core Drives and behavioral design motivation Rob Alvarez (02:12): are affecting the way you’re able to produce within your workers or how that’s affecting your customers, I put together a very quick guide which you can get by clicking on the link in the description, the Core Drives in the Wild guide. You can get it for free just clicking signing up, you get it in your inbox. Now let’s get into the episode.

What Gartner’s definition actually contains

Rob Alvarez (02:29): So l like I just said, 40% adoption for a gamification person like me. I’ve been in the industry for over a decade, sounds like a massive win. But look at what Gartner says is the definition of what will be implemented by 40% of those large warehouses by 2028. And you know, we’re midway through 2026 already. Points, badges, leaderboards, and it says rewards, but we also know that when people just talk about rewards that way and Rob Alvarez (02:57): not about the depth and how rewards can really be used, we know it’s a very shallow version of, you know, do this, get that. And that, by definition, is the shallowest, most extrinsic and Black Hat stack that you can build, although you’re thinking of using this for the long run. Yeah, you can stack up together extrinsic and Black Hat and get fantastic results when you do it right for the right moment. Rob Alvarez (03:19): The warehouse floor, which is a long game, definitely not the right tool for that task.

White Hat to Black Hat drift, and who pays

Rob Alvarez (03:27): It’s basically a setup for something we documented in a previous episode. And, you know, Yu-kai has talked about it before as well. White Hat to Black Hat drift. A system stands fine. It starts well. It has all the right elements, or you know, pretty decent elements, but starts sliding into Black Hat only, which is the opposite of what you want to do. Maybe you start with Black Hat to create some urgency and get people moving, Rob Alvarez (03:52): and then you start creating more White Hat motivation to be. More sustainable. Here you’re starting with sustainable motivation and gets into a healthy place, and then you start reverting into Black Hat, which is the opposite of what you want for the long term. And the thing is, when you face that kind of drift, during that reconstruction phase, when you’re starting to drift towards only Black Hat, most of the time you’ll be looking at some numbers and they will Rob Alvarez (04:16): be looking absolutely fantastic, which makes the problem, of course, a lot worse. If you’re just working on a consumer app, it starts drifting into this manipulation. The people stop liking it or eventually realize, and they just say, you know what? I’m done. I’m uninstalling. I’m just getting away with service. Rob Alvarez (04:35): You lose clients, it’s terrible. But people just do that. The cost in that case is basically churn. It’s a cost for the company, which is not great. But the problem is when you do that on the factory floor, where a worker could be doing potentially precarious work. Physical work and they cannot just say, I’m just gonna uninstall the app. They can’t. That’s their job. Rob Alvarez (04:56): They get overworked, they get injured, or eventually they get pushed out of their way of living.

Amazon FC Games and virtual pets

Rob Alvarez (05:06): Another example that we’ve seen and it’s actually pretty public right now, which is the Amazon’s FC Games. They offered warehouse workers virtual pets, Tamagotchi, basically. They’re injuring themselves at higher rates than average. There’s even somebody who started comparing it to the Black Mirror episode. I think the name was something like Fifteen Million Merits, I think that’s the name of it. Imagine comparing something real life to a Black Mirror episode. Rob Alvarez (05:34): That you know, that’s exactly the opposite of where you want to be. In the mind of the public. Another person reported that nothing distracts away from the pain. Imagine your company, your dream job, the place you create it yourself or you are a part of its mission, having people say something like that about it. That is definitely something you want to stay away from, not only for the public reaction to this, Rob Alvarez (05:58): but also because how it makes the people that are helping you achieve that mission, how it makes them feel, and how you will feel about how your company and what it is actually doing.

Tae Wan Kim on gamifying meaningful work

Rob Alvarez (06:08): A Carnegie Mellon, business ethics professor Tae Wan Kim, I’m butchering the name for sure. He published the paper in 2026 and it’s something called “When Work Becomes a Game”. His finding gamifying meaningful work, meaningful work can shift the worker’s reason for doing it. From the purpose of this meaningful job itself to the points and rewards. That’s kind of sad, right? Because if you were doing a meaningful job, meaningful work, it means you are doing it because you were really enjoying Rob Alvarez (06:44): intrinsically what you’re doing. And you stop feeling that intrinsic delight, that motivation, and start sliding into taking it to something very, very extrinsic. And even though the engagement numbers might be going up, people stop caring about the real mission. Imagine building an organization or being part of a purpose driven organization and having people not be there because of the purpose, but because how they are optimizing for their points and eventually for Rob Alvarez (07:12): the money as well, for something that is very, very extrinsic. You lose a part of that motivation which you already had if you don’t do this right. It’s literally instead of getting people to be more motivated, you are doing the over-justification almost on purpose.

Over-justification and Gartner’s own warning

Rob Alvarez (07:28): The over-justification effect, we talked about this as well, but you can look it up. It’s this effect where something that was intrinsically motivating, with extrinsic rewards, you’re pushing away the intrinsic motivation. And now people are motivated by the extrinsic rewards. And if you remove the extrinsic rewards, intrinsic motivation is not really coming back. And to complete the point, the pain of why this can be so terrible, Rob Alvarez (07:51): even though again, as a gamification person myself, for gamification and behavioral design person for the past over a decade now, this sounds like it’s a big win. But even Gartner’s own analyst, Federica Stufano, she warned that gamification must motivate rather than annoy or harm their workers, and only works. When the company stops treating the labor that they have as let me look Rob Alvarez (08:18): up the exact words as a fungible commodity. The market, in this case, seems to be going in the direction of ignoring their own experts. Federica is not specialized in gamification, she’s rather specialized, I think, is in supply chain. So this is an expert of the industry that does analysis on this and This prediction says, look, we know that this is going to happen, and we know that people are going to ignore that this thing thing is coming Rob Alvarez (08:44): up and it will still happen. And that’s why most of that gamification is not really going to be implemented, but not going to be implemented successfully. Maybe in the short term. Again, remember, we can’t look at just short termism and how the numbers look because that’s the Black Hat trap. You want to look at this, how it’s going to actually be helping you in the long term. You don’t want to be building to turning back into that previous episode we had. Rob Alvarez (09:07): You don’t want to be creating a greater behavioral debt. So, yes, it sounds like very apocalyptic and all that, and like this is not gonna work.

Gamification can do this job well

Rob Alvarez (09:15): So, Rob, what are we going to do? Well, let me tell you something. It is not that gamification is not able to do this job well. Gamification is very capable of doing this when it is implemented successfully and well with the right tools, thinking about the right motivation and looking at that balance overall. And honestly, that only comes from the experience of people who have been doing this for a long while, and based, of course, Rob Alvarez (09:39): on behavioral science, which is. We talk about the term gamification like it’s people just playing video games, and people feel that way sometimes about gamification. But the truth is that everything that we talk about, when again, when it is successful and when you’re thinking about it the right way, it all tracks back to behavioral science, implemented the right way so that you can design for people being motivated and changing real behavior. So there is a way to do this right.

Aperam’s safety training with Octalysis Group

Rob Alvarez (10:06): And let me bring you into the world of Aperam From 2017, it was one of it is one of the world’s largest stainless steel producers. And they ran the safety training. So I paused there for a second because I’m sure you heard safety training and you immediately felt a little bit more bored from what I’m saying. So hold on for a second. They ran the safety training gamification project with the Octalysis Group. This is high stakes, physical labor, frontline workers. Rob Alvarez (10:37): Of course. The shallow leaderboards were something that needed to be skipped entirely. Enter Core Drive 3 Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback. Workers got a real voice. They were able to suggest safety improvements, not just being measured on how well they were doing, but how to do it better. They were empowered. They were able to use their own human because all of us humans, we are all at least slightly motivated by that. Rob Alvarez (11:04): And typically that’s not something we tap into, much less frontline. Physical workers. Well, that is exactly what was done in this gamification project to very, very high success. We’ll talk about the results in a second. Enter, of course, Core Drive 5, Social Influence and Relatedness. The workers not only got that voice, safety became a collaborative group quest. Rob Alvarez (11:28): It was not a ranking to shame those that were be at the end of the line. It was all about achieving this together because if you think about it, safety training is not is actually meaningless. If you have a bunch of people performing really, really well and a few people performing bad, the overall factory is being measured by the people who are at the end of the line. So it makes no sense to get people to compete. You want everybody to help each other out and raise the standards. Rob Alvarez (11:56): Raise how well everything is going. So Core Drive 5 here, Social Influence and Relatedness is all about doing those group quests and getting there together. You see how this shifts and looks very different from I’m going to be at the top of the leaderboard, be the top performer. I do not care how others are doing, which goes actually against the business metrics that they probably set up at the start. Because what they want is not for more people Rob Alvarez (12:20): to be doing performing great, but for everybody to be raising the standards. And of course, you always have when it’s about training, you have Core Drive 2 Development and Accomplishment because people were genuinely mastering and progressing through the content itself to be able to use their creativity to do sorry about the microphone to do better things that they were able to do. And they were doing it together through Core Drive 5.

Black Hat as an on-ramp, not the engine

Rob Alvarez (12:45): Of course, some Black Hat needed to be introduced to get people going, to have that sense of urgency as well. And that’s where the Octalysis Group implemented a reward wheel, although of course this was done sparingly, This is just an on-ramp. It was not the engine of the motivation itself. It was just one of those things that was getting people going, especially at the start. if you look at how we talk about this case, Rob Alvarez (13:10): the team itself is warning about how you don’t want this to become something that is addicting this behavior that is gonna be running the whole show.

Fewer accidents, not more engagement

Rob Alvarez (13:18): So I mentioned that we were gonna look at the results of this. So the results, strong adoption, workers asking for early downloads of the material. Yeah, remember, safety training. That that makes absolutely no sense in most people’s head. It doesn’t just look like people are downloading it more, they’re very excited about it, but there were actually a significant reduction in workplace accidents, Rob Alvarez (13:47): which Again, if you think about it, safety training is not about people going through content. It’s about reducing the amount of accidents that you have in the warehouse floor. Doing gamification in this kind of context, it is not just about retention. In fact, retention is not what you’re aiming for. It doesn’t matter if people are being more on the app or on the training Rob Alvarez (14:07): or go through the whole training or not. You go through the training, you understand the materials, and you do these group quests because that is going to lead you to fewer people getting hurt. It is the exact opposite of the electronic whip.

Questions to ask before you buy

Rob Alvarez (14:23): So I wrote down a few questions that maybe you can ask yourself to see sort of in what kind of situation you’re at. And by the way, if this is something that sounds like it’s interesting for you and you want to start understanding how the Core Drives actually work, like in the cases that I mentioned, you want to start diving deeper into the this kind of thing. I have created a free guide called Core Drives in the Wild. It has to do with past episodes with industry people who have been implementing Rob Alvarez (14:48): gamification in the past. I look at what they did, you can listen to the episode. It’s linked right there in the email. And then of course I give you my consultant take into how a specific core drive was implemented successfully or unsuccessfully in that case that we’re discussing during that one. All you have to do is click on the link below, sign up, and you’ll get that guide day by day. We talk about the eight Core Drives, Rob Alvarez (15:09): again, the episode, some of the analysis that is there, and my consultant take. Click on the link below, subscribe, and go right for it. So as I said before, I Wrote a few questions that you can start asking yourself to start reflecting upon this. This is not going to solve the problem per se, but it’s going to give you a sense of where you’re at and what your direction are you taking in terms of gamification if you’re doing it in these kinds Rob Alvarez (15:32): of safety settings, in warehouse situations, or you know, if you ask me, this is very useful in almost any setting that you can be thinking of. So does this measure my people to help them get better or to rank and pressure them? You want your employees to be better. You want them to be able to do better job, not just see who is performing at the top. That sometimes has a reason and you want to introduce that motivation. But the main thing is that it’s not about how to pressure people. Rob Alvarez (16:00): It’s about how to get them to do better so that the company can perform better. So if you right now have some form of a leaderboard, ask yourself, what happens if tomorrow I disappear entirely the leaderboard? Would anything be left to help the worker master the job, feel ownership over what he’s doing, actually be motivated towards performing their tasks? Are you treating the worker as a human to develop or just another number to optimize? And this, you know, Rob Alvarez (16:30): there’s a human side to all this, which I think is important. But when you are catering for your workers to get better, they’re able to do a better job, and you, the company or your division is gonna benefit from them doing a better job. So if what you’re doing is just optimizing a number, you’re probably doing some version of the electronic whip with a nicer screen or a worse screen. It doesn’t really matter. Ask yourself that questions. Ask yourself these questions and Rob Alvarez (16:57): see where you’re standing. And of course, if there’s anything else that you would like to discuss, You can get the Core Drives in the Wild guide. You can get in contact with me and I will be happy to discuss what this could look like for your situation. Because remember, one thing is to look at this and say, Rob, that actually makes sense. But then fine, how do I get into this? Rob Alvarez (17:16): And I’d be happy to show you what the alternatives are for your case in particular.

Where you want to sit in 2028

Rob Alvarez (17:21): So once again, the prediction, if you ask me, it’ll definitely come true. 40% will adopt. Adoption was not the main question to be asked here. Yeah, for some people that’ll mean they get more work. But the big question here is whether the mechanics that are being sold right there are being used, it doesn’t matter if it’s a consultant selling you this or you just came up with it and you’re starting to implement. The question is if they are the ones that start you into drifting, Rob Alvarez (17:45): and in a warehouse, remember that the drift isn’t just about retention, losing users. It harms real people. And even if you don’t care about those people, that’s not gonna look good on your balance sheet. That’s not gonna look good for your PR. It is possible, and Aperam showed us that you can improve frontline work and can be safer and more engaging well by respecting that human that is in the loop. The rest of the market is about to rediscover this truth. Rob Alvarez (18:14): At industrial scale, so where do you want to sit at the industrial scale level of things? Do you want to be on the side of where this was successful, improve the numbers in the long run, or on those that maybe got some initial strong results and then actually got bit by this initiative. Ask yourself these questions and as always, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. End of transcription