Gamification, Agility, SMs, etc.

Yesterday I came across someone who said  “…So it's my responsibility to gather all scrum masters and make them to play virtual games, anything simple on agile, scrum or SAFe…” 

Yes “make them play”,  that is what he said.
Doesn’t it say a lot?  

Gamification is helpful, but as they say… “Everything in a context”, gamification is also helpful in some contexts.

Small kids have little interest in learning addition, multiplication, and division. But their teachers know that kids are not mature enough to understand that they cannot make a good living without knowing arithmetic. So, to teach them arithmetic their teacher uses gamification.

Can we say the same thing about software building teams that they do not understand the importance of agility in software building? And someone (typically a SM) should use gamification to teach them agility? I just hope it is not the case with your team.

Solving any business problem by building software in itself is creative, exciting & satisfying process. Being agile is simply a sensible way to increase your chances of making that process commercially rewarding too.

If a team needs gamification for learning agility, the picture is not promising to me. I was wondering if I am alone in thinking this way.  Apparently, not.
Some believe that Gamification is simply a manifestation of the paternalistic style of management and some go a step ahead and say that it encourages Taylorism in Software Development.
I doubt whether any team would strive for that.  Particularly a team which aspires to be 'self-managed'.

I have also encountered Agility games, which were solely rewarding rote learning the new vocabulary. Now such games are not only just useless, but they are actively damaging. Damaging because they instill a wrong and dangerous belief in team members that agility is about learning new terminology.

Some teams trying to “Be Agile” get drifted towards acquiring more and more vocabulary and searching for new trends. In the process, they lose focus on their End-Objective. Some teams even start their journey of “Being Agile” w/o any common agreement on their End-Objective.
What can be more damaging than that?

Coming back to that “make them play” stuff.

Sometimes we come across “checkmark features” in a product. 

Is this gamification stuff also becoming a “checkmark activity” for SMs?