TV show The Office. Bunchball customers have included Playboy, Chiquita, Bravo, and The USA Network. Badgeville, which offers gamification services, launched in late 2010, and raised $15 million in venture-capital funding in its first year of operation. Gamification as an educational and behavior modification tool reached the public sector by 2012, when the United States Department of Energy co-funded multiple research trials, including consumer behavior studies, adapting the format of Programmed learning into mobile microlearning to experiment with the impacts of gamification in reducing energy use. Cultural anthropologist Susan Mazur-Stommen published a business case for applying games to addressing climate change and sustainability, delivering research which "...took many forms including card-games (Cool Choices), videogames (Ludwig), and games for mobile devices such as smartphones (Ringorang) [p.9]." Gamification 2013, an event exploring the future of gamification, was held at the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus in October 2013. Legal restrictions Through gamification's growing adoption and its nature as a data aggregator, multiple legal restrictions may apply to gamification. Some refer to the use of virtual currencies and virtual assets, data privacy laws and data protection, or labor laws. The use of virtual currencies, in contrast to traditional payment systems, is not regulated. The legal uncertainty surrounding the virtual currency schemes might constitute a challenge for public authorities, as these schemes can be used by criminals, fraudsters and money launderers to perform their illegal activities. A March 2022 consultation paper by the Board of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) questions whether some gamification tactics should be banned. Criticism University of Hamburg researcher Sebastian Deterding has characterized the initial popular strategies for gamification as not being fun and creating an artificial sense of achievement. He also says that gamification can encourage unintended behaviours. Poorly designed gamification in the workplace has been compared to Taylorism, and is considered a form of micromanagement. In a review of 132 of the top health and fitness apps in the Apple app store, in 2014, using gamification as a method to modify behavior, the authors concluded that "Despite the inclusion of at least some components of gamification, the mean scores of integration of gamification components were still below 50 percent. This was also true for the inclusion of game elements and the use of health behavior theory constructs, thus showing a lack of following any clear industry standard of effective gaming, gamification, or behavioral theory in health