As an idea, how about decoupling which business logic events you care about from how you account for them as points, badges, levels to a user? So that you can implement in one place nutty stuff like a Ball Buzz badge for buying coffee on three consecutive Mondays during a football season.
Conceptually, think of passing a message for all potentially interesting transactions and interactions to this Awards module, which encapsulates (and hides from accountants) this fun functionality.
Upon further review of SO, there has been substantial discussion of the subject matter already.
Particularly notable are "Best way to store Badge criteria" covering events notification and "Database Architecture for “Badge” System" with overall architecture discussion.
There has been discussion of relative merits of relational vs. nosql / Mongodb databases for such a feature, as well as partitioning business logic into stored procedures.
It appears to me that there is a lot of reinventing the wheel going on. Anybody aware of OSS frameworks or Github projects emerging in this area? Also, any worthwhile papers or articles on the subject of badges specifically and gamification generally?
