Footnotes

ⁱ: Some commentary and quotations from interviews that appear in this report have been edited for length and readability.

ⁱⁱ: As of this report’s publication, only a few websites retain any remnant of a badge structure. The Huffington Post dropped its badges in favor of using Facebook comments. BuzzFeed still retains its user badges but has not updated them. BuzzFeed’s editorial director Jack Shepherd commented, “I think the lessons that I learned from reading about games that were valuable were totally different from that. It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s have more awards.’ It was more kind of about the sense of play, just in general.”