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When looking at this question, I was asking myself: Where are conceptual differences? Except that Gamification is a Game added to a serious topic, while a serious game approaches it from the opposite perspective?
Edit: As an example, would you call the famous Piano stairs Gamification or serious game, or both?
These are extremely similar ideas, with broad, fuzzy definitions, which make it tricky to answer with certainty.
Serious Games (coined in 2002 by Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars): is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment.
Gamification (origin uncertain, became popular in 2010): applying game design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging. (ref 2)
Both terms have been used for a whole variety of things, and, broadly speaking, are really just different terms for leveraging game techniques in non-traditional ways.
In practice, the two terms tend to be used in different contexts, in slightly different ways, for slightly different purposes.But these differences are not strictly adhered to.
A key difference in the definitions is that a Serious Game “is a game” and Gamification is applying “game design thinking”. This supports my understanding that serious games are usually complete games, whereas a gamification example is less likely to look like a game, and may just have a few game-like elements (think on eBay or Stack Exchange or the admin side of Wikipedia).
Serious Games arose from an academic organization with policy goals, and they tended to emphasize positive social outcomes; whereas gamification has tended to be used in business and marketing as a tool for improving profits.
There shouldn't be a difference, but there is one because of how gamification is currently used. In other answers I've written that gamification is a buzzword; I won't go into that too much here but the fact that it can be classified as a buzzword explains the difference.
Many people don't approach gamification from a game design point of view; they approach it with the idea that if they add "game mechanics" to their application, they'll increase some kind of metric (like stickiness or user loyalty, or whatever). So right now, for many people, gamification is just a layer you add to make your app more fun. It's superficial.
Serious games, on the other hand, are generally approached as games from day one. When you set out to make a "serious game", you're likely going to be solving a problem with an entirely different mindset. From that point on you can investigate a game design that helps you achieve that, and game mechanics are a natural consideration.
References:
Note how each of these references mentions that gamification is about "adding a layer" to existing services. Which is my point.
They are different concepts. A serious game is a first and foremost a game, in a particular genre, with a serious subject and 'serious' goals (such as teaching workers a certain job procedure). Gamification on the other hand describes a process.
For the piano stairs example, I'd say that gamification is a better fit than serious gaming. What they did there is turn a boring object into something fun, with a feedback mechanism that rewards people when they choose the stairs. But it doesn't teach people how to use the stairs, or educate them about health benefits, and it doesn't help them learn to play the piano either (which are all possible objectives for a serious game).
