In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb described a notion he called the ludic fallacy.
It can be summarized as the tendency to misuse simple games (dice) to model real-life situations and to apply naïve and simplified statistical models in complex domains.
In tech, we currently have a similar fallacy, implying that every service can easily be improved by using simple game mechanics.
The term coined to represent this is gamification.
And while I (and possibly many behavioral economists) agree that game mechanics can be of great use, using points, progress bars and badges hardly constitutes something as being a game.
