First, I dislike gamification on a personal level, but from a business level it makes huge sense. Trading a reinforcer(badges) of no real value for something of value(data) is smart.

Gamification may be the wrong way to look at this, I believe most of our behavior has rules and rewards much like most games. Gamification is just an explicit way of generating a desired behavior, look at the cliched "gold" star on the top of a students paper, or a badge.

From a business model(using badges as a simple example), what happens when the reinforcer loses value, ie everyone else has all the same badges? Do you invent a new set of badges that are more special than the old ones? Or if the community no longer cares what kind or how many badges a person has?

Disclosure: I do my house chores to avoid an angry spouse.