I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, one of the key pitfalls of applying something like gamification is not knowing what the problem really is or why you are applying gamification in the first place!
A simple tool I like to use is this sentence,
I am ________, because ________.
You start by describing what you are doing or going to do, then you describe why you are doing it and what you hope to achieve by doing it!
I am adding a leaderboard, because the feedback I had from the users was that they wanted to be able to compare their performance to their peers.