More than 1000 copies of the Zip It Up! app have been downloaded in the week since Adelaide-based People's Choice Credit Union launched the smartphone games app which rewards winners with up to $300 a week."Gamification" has been used since around 2002 as a way to influence online and real world behaviour. Software applications or mobile apps encourage people to do a variety of things - sometimes play games, sometimes respond to particular stimuli or situations - and reward them for exhibiting the "right" behaviours. The education and financial sectors have been enthusiastic early adopters.In Australia the Commonwealth Bank created Investorville back in 2011. This was a property investment simulator that allowed people to play "what if" with the property market. That tool no longer exists, although many of its functions are available on the CBA's MyWealth website.In a report into enterprise gamification, PricewaterhouseCoopers said that in the first nine months of use Investorville attracted 23,000 users, 12 per cent of whom went on to visit the CBA's home loans web page.National Australia Bank has used gamification to train its bankers to deal with customers who use the SmartStore - the bank's high tech branches where customers are invited to use self-service technology to meet their banking needs.Not everyone is convinced gamification is much more than a gimmick. Technology analyst Gartner has predicted that most attempts to gamify corporate activities will fail because of poor design.But for limited campaigns like that at People's Choice, where there is no attempt to influence long term behaviours, just give a marketing push to a digital product, games apps may well attract new customers and boost the brand among a certain demographic.To play the Zip it Up! game people move a wallet back and forth to "catch" cash and coins as they drop down the screen and avoid fluff, buttons and paperclips which can lose them points.While the game can be played for fun, people with a People's Choice online-only Zip account can sign up to a leaders' board to track their scores. For six weeks the player with the highest total will receive the amount they collected in their wallet - to a maximum of $300. The second placed player scores $100 and third $50. The money will be paid into their Zip accounts.People's Choice spokesperson Stuart Symons said that, although the game will work indefinitely, the cash campaign was limited to six weeks and a maximum prize pool of just $2,700. He acknowledged that the games app, which was developed by Fusion which also developed People's Choice's mobile banking app, was something of an experiment to both engage with existing Zip account holders and encourage more people to sign up for an online account.The Zip online only account was launched in December, but Symons said it was a relatively soft launch and he was not able to say how many of the credit union's 350,000 members had so far signed up. "This is adding an incentive to get new members," he said.Dr