"If you're a good developer but you can't read and comment on a ticket, than we can't work with you," declares Brian Alvey, former cofounder of Weblogs, Inc. and the current head of Crowd Fusion, which makes content managements systems for a range of deep-pocketed clients.

As he sits perched on the edge of his chair in the bedroom of the only "office" that Crowd Fusion has—an apartment near Times Square that feels more like a hotel room than a place of business—Alvey explains how he built a company that is almost entirely virtual. He's got coders and support staff in a half dozen time zones, and except for occasional get-togethers in which everyone is flown in to get some face time, all of them work at home.

Employees who never see the inside of an office must possess skills that aren't necessarily resident in many workers: A high degree of self motivation, and the ability to communicate almost entirely through e-mail and chat clients.

Crowd Fusion has one group Campfire chat for each customer, plus one for the entire company and for each piece of infrastructure the company maintains.

"They've just got to live in those [group chats]," says Alvey. "If they can't work that way, they're not going to last."

The unusual work culture of Crowd Fusion occasionally clashes with its clients' expectations. In one instance, a sizable client asked how many cubicles Alvey's team would need during a period of intense collaboration. He had to tell them that one of the key developers was in New Zealand and they'd never even see his face.

Alvey describes his distributed workforce as a "human cloud," and thinks of it just as he would the provisioning of cloud resources for computational tasks.

"If I could just badge everybody with their skills and hand them work according to their abilities, you could just run it like a cloud," says Alvey. "Like: 'I need three more people with design skills this week.' "

One result of this flexible platform for collaboration is that Crowd Fusion can draw from anywhere in the world when seeking talent. On the other hand, some smart coders are disqualified—namely, those that aren't comfortable outside a traditional work environment.

RedCritter is a Dallas-based startup that is succeeding at the gamification of software development in a way that no one else is. But this is just the beginning, RedCritter CEO Mike Beaty told me last week when I wrote about his company here on Technology Review.

Beaty was able to reveal that the next products he plans on rolling out will gamify customer relations management and sales -- which is how the now-mighty Salesforce.com got started. He also hinted that the future could hold much more. In general, he implied, there is no reason that gamification can't be expanded to countless areas of white-collar work.

The methods are straightforward: Anything that can be tracked can be gamified. Since almost all work consists of discrete tasks that must be completed in an orderly, timely and somewhat repetitive fashion, tracking software like Harvest is already helping workers become more productive.

RedCritter Tracker, RedCritter's package for software development, simply adds game elements to this tracking process, such as badges, points and a rewards store.

Now, there is plenty of debate about how well gamification will work. If we're not motivated to do our jobs already, is the juvenilization of our toil through the addition of gold stars for good behavior going to improve things? But RedCritter Tracker is already being used, apparently to great effect, by a number of software development studios.

The secret to its success, I gathered from the developers I interviewed, is that by adding transparency to everyone's productivity, they're able to figure out how to improve. The game elements are therefore just a way to make the process playful and morale-boosting rather than intrusive.

The reason all this works is that companies like RedCritter aren't starting from scratch -- they have decades of trial and error by game designers on which to build.

"I have that mentality of an Xbox gamer or code monkey," says Beaty. "That's why we started our first product as software development service. It's something we use and understand intimately."

Beaty's influences include FourSquare, Twitter, and World of Warcraft, from which he seems to have lifted not just elements like public records of your accomplishments but also a general aesthetic of team building and cooperative rather than competitive play.

Absent team play, World of Warcraft, is about grinding through levels. Or in other words, a particularly toilsome kind of work. So if the developers at Blizzard could figure out how to turn killing the same enemies over and over again and farming for gold into tasks people will actually pay money for, who is to say that companies like RedCritter can't do it for tasks that are a good deal more engaging, like (hopefully) our jobs?