Too late for an edit, but I wanted to note that this post does make mention of quality of interaction, I just forgot by the time I wrote the passage.
The first rater of a deal would get a bunch of points regardless of their rating of a deal, and so their rating didn’t matter. They would just spam (in the gamer-speak sense) the “10″ rating since it was closest to the next deal button, and do this hundreds of times without looking at the deal at all. Future voters would get points based on the crowd average, so the first voter would skew the points rating all of the deals in one sitting. It ended up that the ratings on the deals were not really accurate, thus undermining the crowdsourcing of the deals and thwarting our business goals. However, this example was more of an implementation failure than a failure of gamification in general.
I think the OP is too hard on himself here. It's very hard to imagine a game mechanic which would elicit the feedback you want: namely that you want people to give an honest opinion of something. How do you place value on an opinion? How can you tie in something so subjective to a mastery goal?
I was placed on a very similar task as part of some consulting I've been doing. I haven't found a solution, and I don't think a good one exists. The best I could come up with was that users had two interactions, not one. The first one was their honest opinion, the second one was a guess on what the prevailing opinion was. The OP only did the second, which is only going to result in a very quick convergence on groupthink. This was rejected by the company, as they didn't want to have two interactions instead of one, which is understandable. I sometimes think they truly believe that what they want is just waiting to be discovered, and I'm just not doing a good job of it.
The OP's passage highlights one of the most insidious aspects of gameification that I think often goes unsaid: it encourages you to find a holy land that may not exist, and in trying to get there, you accidentally do active harm to your goals. You lead your business down the road to hell with your gameification intentions, and your thinking gets so totally focused on this you don't see the other, probably better, options available. FWIW, I think the very same thing can be said about any company that uses the word "social" without actually backing it up with a real, compelling use case.
The first rater of a deal would get a bunch of points regardless of their rating of a deal, and so their rating didn’t matter. They would just spam (in the gamer-speak sense) the “10″ rating since it was closest to the next deal button, and do this hundreds of times without looking at the deal at all. Future voters would get points based on the crowd average, so the first voter would skew the points rating all of the deals in one sitting. It ended up that the ratings on the deals were not really accurate, thus undermining the crowdsourcing of the deals and thwarting our business goals. However, this example was more of an implementation failure than a failure of gamification in general.
I think the OP is too hard on himself here. It's very hard to imagine a game mechanic which would elicit the feedback you want: namely that you want people to give an honest opinion of something. How do you place value on an opinion? How can you tie in something so subjective to a mastery goal?
I was placed on a very similar task as part of some consulting I've been doing. I haven't found a solution, and I don't think a good one exists. The best I could come up with was that users had two interactions, not one. The first one was their honest opinion, the second one was a guess on what the prevailing opinion was. The OP only did the second, which is only going to result in a very quick convergence on groupthink. This was rejected by the company, as they didn't want to have two interactions instead of one, which is understandable. I sometimes think they truly believe that what they want is just waiting to be discovered, and I'm just not doing a good job of it.
The OP's passage highlights one of the most insidious aspects of gameification that I think often goes unsaid: it encourages you to find a holy land that may not exist, and in trying to get there, you accidentally do active harm to your goals. You lead your business down the road to hell with your gameification intentions, and your thinking gets so totally focused on this you don't see the other, probably better, options available. FWIW, I think the very same thing can be said about any company that uses the word "social" without actually backing it up with a real, compelling use case.