Gamification and Steem

This post is a reply to @noisy's post here. So I've been playing games since the beginning. From my first Commodor SX-64 all the way up to my Playstation 4 and dual GPU PC right now.

_{Where it all began for me}

I played competitively in Tekken making it to the National stage in Tekken 4, and even though I don't go to tournaments anymore, the people I play casually with still do, so I'm still up there. All of my full time professional career(minus freelance) has also been working in games and I teach in the game design department at a university(for art though, not design). So I've been on both ends of the spectrum, a consumer and a producer. I actually haven't read much about game theory, but I feel we could gamify the hell out of Steem and I think it would dramatically improve the user experience, but it would take a lot of coordinated work, and I think this might be an issue with a decentralized platform. There's SO MUCH that could be done though that I think a lot could be done just at the front-end level, while other stuff might be a bit more intense.

Off the top of my head.

• A Tutorial
  So not just a video that people watch or something, but an interactive tutorial with rewards. Typically in a lot of games there's some "thing" you're trying to sell to the user. You can reward them with that as they finish sections of the tutorial. On Steem we have STEEM, so we could literally reward people with STEEM for finishing the tutorial. This way new users are incentivised to actually learn what's going on here and they don't lurk around confused for months, as I've known plenty to do.
  We could even give people higher rewards for learning the more dry technical bits. We could even do tests to make sure they understand it. With this much information, if we were collecting analytics we could see where people typically stop the tutorial and drop off to tweak how it flows. This is getting a bit complex obviously, but it might even be a good way for new users to get the original seed money to fund their account, while simultaneously educating them on why that's necessary.

• Badges
  So we already have badges by @steemitboard, but having to go to a different website just to see your badges pretty much makes this (unfortunately) not that engaging. If it was another page on a frontend I think it would be a lot better.

• More Granular Ranks
  Right now the ranks depending which system you're looking at is plankton/redfish, minnows, dolphins, orcas, and whales. My first and only feature request of SteemPlus was that they add levels between those levels(which they awesomely implemented :D) So now if you're using the SteemPlus extension, you see that you're a Minnow 1, or dolphin 2 etc depending on which icons you have displayed. I like to use the ones that are bronze, silver, and gold. I think if it can be communicated visually it should be, those numbers don't say as much as everyone's mental association of bronze, silver, and gold. That relationship is international and instantly understandable.
  I'd say we break these down with even more levels, currently each level is roughly 10x the previous one, once I hit dolphin from minnow, I can't even see orca, it's way too far away, so the drive to hit the next level dissipates. When the STEEM price crashed and people started to power up, where did they typically stop? Minnows tried to get to dolphin, and dolphins tried to get to orca, we need that carrot just out of our reach, if it's too far, we stop paying attention to it.

• More clear ways of showing the world how awesome you are
  This is a bit tongue in cheek, but now we're getting into the more psychologically manipulative stuff, but in case you didn't know, THAT'S WHAT GAMES ARE! :p So if someone goes to your profile and is using the SteemPlus extension, they can see what fish rank you are. If they're in the know they can look at your wallet. Neither of those is ideal. Ideally, this information would follow you. If I were designing it, I'd make it subtle, like the color of your name. I wouldn't beat people over the head with it, but lets say there's a comment thread. plankton=white name, minnow=red name, dolphin = bronze name, orca = silver name and whale = gold name.
  If people are talking about some Steem related issue and some white name writes "Steem is a ponzi scheme!" People would rightfully probably laugh and troll them. But then a gold name says "There's actually some truth to that." People would probably take that a lot more seriously. You might not want that, a sort of tier of importance, but I think it might increase engagement as well as incentivising people to "level up".

• Bounties/Quests
  With this I basically mean a set of tasks for users to perform where they get rewarded along the way. It could be things like, leave ten thoughtful comments, upvote five posts under the #art tag, onboard a user, and speaking of this one, we need a referral program here, you've all had a friend annoyingly repeat invite you to some crappy game on Facebook. Well WE could be that crappy game! :D

I could go on, but this is in tldr territory for me. So in summary, yes I think gamification could dramatically increase the UX here, hopefully we'll see more of it in the future. What do you all think?

Thanks for looking!