Here's how you can infuse new technology into peer support through gamification.

No, awarding points is possible, but not a worthwhile way to enable collaboration. With such an approach, the user is conditioned to collect points instead of focusing on becoming part of a team with their skills (as we know it in games). PBLs would be the most short-living approach to trigger behavior. Good luck with that. Therefore, a powerful way to gamify peer support is to set (qualifying) conditions that enable you to contribute to a team in the first place. Peer groups consist of roles. These roles are in turn defined by the tasks you take on and the skills you need for them. Building these up in advance is the gamification approach. Do not reward with points. Instead, give earned access to responsibilities within peer groups.

It is proven by science that the chase for extrinsic rewards like PBLs, is not leading to long term engagement. That is a huge myth within the Gamification industry. This also doesn't lead (in the long term) to a sense of pride and accomplishment, encouraging continued participation and peer-to-peer encouragement but instead, leads to the behavior to search for the easiest ways to get the badges. This in turn leads directly to a perceived devaluation of the badges earned. And so the introduction of a points system has even led to the demotivation of participation. Stack Overflow can tell you a thing or two about this, as can a well-known sporting goods manufacturer from Germany, which disengaged an internal community in this way.

A challenge chain can be a great approach to guide individuals and peer groups to long-term engagement. We have found out that especially the challenge against your former self (as an individual) combined with the challenge to diminish a quantifiable problem works amazingly well. Of course that depends on the context, the participants, the measurement, and the runtime. But this is always a good way to start and tweak it from there.

It will probably always remain a mystery to me why people want to promote peer behaviour with a mechanism that stands for a zero-sum game like no other. No matter how much a team goal stands above everything else in the end, the ranking screams even more: But I'm above you. Simply by visualising the data in a ranking list, a hierarchy is communicated indirectly. With or without prizes. If, as shown here, it is about the desire to visualise progress, then please focus on the individual possibility of recognising progress in the qualitative expansion of your own role in the team. The better you get at this, the more valuable your subsequent contribution to the team will be. This is a non-zero-sum game.