Games aren’t just for kids anymore. Thanks to a handful of startups, including the much hyped Foursquare, people are using game mechanics to actually accomplish real-life goals.

Rudimentary game elements such as sweepstakes, punch cards, and even Pepsi Points have been successfully used by traditional businesses for decades, but with today’s online environment, we’re seeing some increasingly sophisticated stuff. Ever since location sharing services such as Foursquare introduced game elements; rewarding users with badges and titles; online startups have embraced game mechanics as a way to engage users.

The idea of rewarding users with badges or titles for participation online is not new. Nearly every Web forum platform comes with a built-in ranking system that rewards users for posting in discussion threads. Foursquare simply built it into a business model. Others are following suit.

The Huffington Post introduced badges in April as rewards for user actions on its news site. And in October, the Philadelphia Inquirer began providing badges and rewards on Philly.com using a system from Badgeville, a company founded in January 2010 to provide game-based user engagement systems to existing businesses. Similar third-party “gamification” startups include Bunchball and BigDoor Media.

Badgeville was also used by Silicon Valley fashion boutique Moxsie, which added badges in December.

Game mechanics aren’t limited to badges either. Intuit’s personal finance site Mint.com added “goals” this past summer as a way to help its users pay off debt or save for large purchases.

Mobile app Epic Win from game studios Supermono and Rexbox turns the boring old to-do list into an epic role playing game, where tasks become “quests,” and doing your chores levels up your character.

And Health Month, which launched in June, turns nutrition and behavioral goals into a social game.

The LA Times has more details about how game elements motivate people.

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“Free users won’t convert or tell others if they can’t get past first wall,” Muller said, adding, “Support needs to be embedded in the product. It actually needs to be a consideration in product development. Freemium only works if customers are delighted.”

According to Muller, most application providers follow the support strategy of starting out ad hoc, followed by implementing a help desk, forums, and social support (social engagement, communities of interest, word of mouth).

He added that Mint.com took its support model public and not only dropped weekly support tickets from 6,500 to 1,500, but picked up more than 50,000 ideas on how to improve its products. Yola, meanwhile, created a customer community and placed it front and center, which was good, but the company actually responded too quickly at first and wasn’t giving customers the ability to respond to each other.

“Is it worth supporting free customers?” Muller asked. “If it isn’t worth it and you don’t make a change, then you end up creating a customer slum.”

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How do you start a small online business in a sector with ginormous competitors, one of whom is Microsoft, and then flip it for $170 million dollars just three years later? Just ask Aaron Patzer, founder of financial management service Mint.

Patzer founded Mint when he was 25 in 2006, charging head-first into a field dominated by Microsoft Money and Intuit’s Quicken. He later sold the company to Intuit for a hefty sum. The name of the game for Patzer was simplicity.

“Mint was born of a personal frustration of using personal finance tools which entailed way too much work. Maybe there was a problem when you have to go through 50 screens of setup,” said Patzer in an interview with Pluggd.in, AKA the “TechCrunch of India.”

Patzer’s startup began gathering customers before the service even launched. About 9 months before launching, the Mint team began writing a simple personal finance blog. They used it to collect 20,000 email addresses, which they then used to get people to place Mind badges on their own sites. Essentially free banner ads. The company also got a publicity boost by launching at the TechCrunch40 conference.

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Emerging from its beta test phase, Mint.com also has a lot to be thankful for this holiday season. The company has been selected as a Technology Pioneer 2009, by the World Economic Forum. The requirements for such a globally recognized award include having an impact on business as well as society. As a result of being a select company for the forum, Mint.com will be participating in the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland next month.
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