Work, meet fun. Fun, work.

I was thinking about games at work earlier this year. I think Saul Kaplan gets at the heart of why productive gaming is worth pursuing:

Organizations have a lot of experience with goal setting, rules, and incentives. What we haven’t figured out is how to align work with personal passion and commitment.

There are many opportunities to introduce productive gaming, even in large corporate factories. Prediction markets, for one.

The key, I think, is to figure out how to tap the enormous amount of passionate, pent-up energy a normal human employee carries around. What if even a few ounces of that energy could be aimed at a goal common to the employee and employer? What if money wasn't the only thing that motivated your employees to come in every day?