An excerpt from http://www.sitepoint.com/lego-made-problem-worse-gamifying/, by @alexmwalker
Bathroom walls, bus shelters, and book margins. Give people a pen and a small percentage of them will always draw a ‘dong’.
Why? We don’t know, but archaeological evidence from the Greek islands to Pompeii to Egypt shows us it’s been happening for thousands of years across cultures. While the creation tools might have become more sophisticated, it seems the dong remains the same.
Former LEGO Universe designer Megan Fox recently gave us an interesting insight into how the problem impacts an online product.
LEGO Universe was LEGO’s attempt to compete in the ludicrously successful virtual building block game space spawned by Minecraft.
However, when these ‘anatomical sculptures’ began to appear, LEGO snapped into action, believing their position of trust with parents to be under threat. Hundreds of hours of coding went into designing software that secretly analyzed every new LEGO construction from multiple angles, and flagged questionable artwork for a team of real human moderators to assess.
Unfortunately for Lego, anatomically obsessed artists took this as a fun challenge, and set about devising new and ingenious designs that could only be ‘appreciated’ from particular angles.
Without meaning to, LEGO had ‘gamified’ a process they were trying to stop.