The Game of Life

One of the oldest tricks in the marketing textbook is getting people to do something boring or laborious but necessary by making it seem desirable, or fun...or a game.

It goes right back to Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, or those tricks that Mary Poppins used to make clearing up fun. And generations of inventive parents who have turned the washing up or the weeding into an army to be defeated.

Leaps in technology have enabled the gamification of many mundane tasks, including a fascinating example from Cambridge Consultants, the T-Haler. It's a way of helping asthma sufferers get the optimum dose of the drug they need from their inhaler.

Using wireless technology, information is sent to a computer loaded with a "get the ball in the hole" game, so that inhaler users can optimise their behaviour to get the correct dosage.

In this case, a spoonful of sugar, in the form of a game, really can help the medicine go down.