The ‘game layer’ is definitely something worth learning a lot about, and happily there’s an interesting TED Talk which was posted fairly recently, featuring SCVNGR founder Seth Priebatsch.
You probably don’t need to ask why gaming layers are important if you’ve ever played Farmville, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Empire Avenue, Foursquare, or board games, roleplaying games or so much more…
But the fact that it’s being explicitly studied, adapted and utilised formally in a wider range of business practices means that you’re going to encounter it a lot more as a consumer and as a professional. You’ll need to be able to recognise when you’re succumbing to it, and when you might want to escape. And to be able to identify the good and bad parts elements of the gaming mechanic, just as increasingly we’re learning to identify the good and bad parts of social networking and interaction to keep improving.
And when you’ve got internet gaming, mobile gaming, social gaming and console gaming all converging in terms of cross-platform compatibility and networks, and more and more people attempting to extract value (financial, data or otherwise) from those participating, you know it’s going to happen more, and more, and more…