Brent Poole and Chris Hewett of Mindbloom (Dan Schlatter/PSBJ Photo)

When Brent Poole wants to monitor his progress toward his goals — whether it’s spending more time with his family or drinking more water every day — he checks the virtual tree on his computer screen.

If any one of the leaves is brown, he has work to do. If everything is green, he’s doing well, and over time he’ll receive points in the form of “seeds” that will allow him to “level up” and unlock new features.

If this sounds like something out of an arcade, it’s no coincidence. Poole is the CEO of Mindbloom, a Seattle startup whose “Life Game” reflects a rising trend in the tech industry: All the world’s a game. Or at least it’s starting to seem that way.

Tech companies, online publishers and even scientific researchers are increasingly using the principles of video games to keep their users more engaged, to help them accomplish goals, or to glean new insights into the world. Commonly known as “gamification” (pronounced “game-ification”), the movement is gaining steam.

“It’s something we’re seeing pop up in a lot of business plans,” said Kristina Hudson, director of the Washington Interactive Network, part of the enterpriseSeattle economic development group.

Hudson said she hasn’t yet decided if it’s a lasting phenomenon. But she said the region is uniquely positioned to capitalize on whatever it becomes, thanks to its large population of companies in traditional video-game sectors. If video-game features become the common mechanics of the broader online world, people here won’t need to look far for experts to help.

That was the case at Microsoft, where researchers in the company’s Office Labs prototyping group talked with members of the Xbox team as they created a game to help people discover and learn some of the lesser-known features of Microsoft Office.

The free plug-in, called Ribbon Hero, awards people points for everyday tasks, such as formatting a paragraph in a document, and for completing specific challenges, such as narrowing the margins of a document. The game provides hints to help users complete a challenge, and floats virtual balloons across the screen when a challenge is complete. Users can compare their scores against others on an online leaderboard.

Released last year, Ribbon Hero has been downloaded more than 150,000 times. Many people inside the company were skeptical about the idea, said Chris Pratley, the Microsoft Office general manager for technical strategy, who acknowledging that he was among the skeptics.

“We were all shocked, both that it turned out as good as it did and that it has gotten the reception it has,” he said.

It probably wouldn’t have been a surprise to Mindbloom’s Poole, an Amazon.com veteran who founded the company with Chris Hewett, formerly of the Monolith video-game company.

“Gaming mechanics do a nice job of addressing basic human wants and needs,” said Poole, explaining the phenomenon. “The reward center is triggered when we hear the ching-ching-ching of earning seeds. It’s some of the most primitive reactions of our brains.”

Mindbloom’s Life Game uses a tree as a visual metaphor, with different branches representing health, relationships, spirituality, finances and other aspects of a person’s life. It focuses on small steps that can add up over time. The game incorporates personalized music and photos, and allows users to invite friends.

Mindbloom offers a free version of the web-based Life Game for consumers. It also licenses the game to companies and institutions to use in their wellness and lifestyle programs. Customers include three undisclosed Fortune 100 companies involved in the health care industry. The 12-person company posted $500,000 in revenue in 2010 and is on track for $2 million in revenue this year, Poole said.

Another Seattle-area startup, Bobber Interactive, applies gaming principles to financial management. Its service is currently in beta.

Gaming principles are poised to become even more pervasive in society in the years ahead, predicted Matt Hulett, the head of RealNetworks' GameHouse division. “Gamification and things like that are just going to be an assumed part of what people experience in products and services,” he said.

One reason the trend is catching on is that game-style features dovetail easily with customer loyalty programs — giving companies and websites the ability to award points and reward frequent users for their comments, tweets and other “soft behaviors” that improve online communities, said Keith Smith, the CEO of Seattle-based BigDoor. The startup provides underlying technology for gamification on websites.

BigDoor is piloting a program that will let site users trade loyalty points for deals and free items. (See an example in the gamification bar at the bottom of the blog of Brad Feld, one of BigDoor's investors.)

The rise of gamification also owes a lot to the ubiquity of social networking, Smith said. The social element is key because badges, points and other virtual rewards aren’t as significant without the ability to boast about them to one’s Facebook friends.

“As a user or as a member of an online community, the idea that I can earn badges, gain rewards, and gain reputation -- that is much more meaningful to me if I can do it in the context of a community that I care about,” Smith said.

Another example of gamification is Foldit, a game developed by biochemists and computer scientists at the University of Washington. It taps the problem-solving ability of humans to figure out the best way to fold proteins — a scientific challenge that could lead to cures for disease. A study published by the researchers in the journal Nature concluded that the Foldit gamers were superior to supercomputers in some cases, particularly in situations that required bold moves or big risks.

Principal investigator Zoran Popovic, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering, that he’s working on ways of applying games to other areas, including challenges in nanotechnology.

“If you provide the right incentives, most people don’t really know all the fantastic things they’re capable of,” he said. “The promise of games is not that they will allow people do some task that’s relatively easy for them. It’s that they can adapt and solve problems that originally even the people themselves didn’t know they were capable of. A game is really a fantastic learning machine.”