As I came to the end to the end of my daily vocabulary exercises, I clicked on the little icon that said 'Ranking' on the side of the screen. It had become a sort of habit -- you might say a guilty pleasure -- to check my progress against others learning languages on the same website. There had been a certain satisfaction when I first spotted my name amongst the top ten of users who had started at the same time as me, or the moment when my overall ranking passed from the ten thousands to a mere four figures. It was meaningless, of course. There was no prize for winning and no-one would be impressed by my progress up the charts. It was just one of the little rituals that somehow made the process of improving my French more compelling.
On this occasion, however, upon clicking and redirecting, I was greeted by something quite different to what I had expected. No charts, no leaderboard, but a polite notice in an unassuming sans-serif. "Regrettably," it began, "we have had to temporarily disable leaderboards on Memrise after extensive cheating has been brought to our attention, some of which has been slowing down the site for the whole community."
By: Robert Barry, Edited by: Olivia Solon
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via Wired.co.uk
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-11/12/gamification-of-learning
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