Game on! A state-of-the-art overview of doing business with gamification

Gamification is the act of applying game-design elements to transform activities, products, services, and systems in a way that provides the kind of experiences similar to those offered by games. These elements include badges, points, and leaderboards to motivate and reward problem solving activities and processes. Both businesses and business researchers are increasingly interested in the application of gamification. In this regard, this review aims to offer a state-of-the-art overview of gamification in business, revealing its current trends and future directions. Using business research on gamification published in the last decade (2012–2022) found on Scopus and Web of Science, we conduct a performance analysis to illuminate the field's performance (publication productivity and impact) alongside its key contributors (journals, authors, and countries) as well as a science mapping using a co-citation analysis to locate knowledge foundations, and bibliographic coupling and keyword co-occurrence analysis to reveal major themes in business gamification. Our exploration has unearthed gamification's pervasive influence across business domains, from enhancing learning and fostering innovation to empowering marketing strategies and catalyzing transformation. Gamification has also made significant inroads into management practices, driving engagement, influencing behavioral outcomes, and ushering sustainability. Peering into the future, our density-centrality quadrant analysis casts light on emerging frontiers. Noteworthily, we expect the next wave of gamification to be shaped by the allure of video games and the metaverse, bespoke industry-specific designs, confluence with e-commerce trends, emphasis on sustainable development, expanded social responsibilities, innovations in virtual reality, intersections with human urbanism, and the rise of smart cities. As gamification continues to integrate and reshape myriad facets of the business world, it holds the promise of not only enriching current practices but also charting the course for the future of innovative, sustainable, and transformative business strategies

Creating Student Interaction Profiles for Adaptive Collaboration Gamification Design

Benefits of collaborative learning are established and gamification methods have been used to motivate students towards achieving course goals in educational settings. However, different users prefer different game elements and rewarding approaches and static gamification approaches can be inefficient. We present an evidence-based method and a case study where interaction analysis and k-means clustering are used to create gamification preference profiles. These profiles can be used to create adaptive gamification approaches for online learning or collaborative learning environments, improving on static gamification designs. Furthermore, we discuss possibilities for using our approach in collaborative online learning environments

Dynamic Personalization of Gameful Interactive Systems

Gameful design, the process of creating a system with affordances for gameful experiences, can be used to increase user engagement and enjoyment of digital interactive systems. It can also be used to create applications for behaviour change in areas such as health, wellness, education, customer loyalty, and employee management. However, existing research suggests that the qualities of users, such as their personality traits, preferences, or identification with a task, can influence gamification outcomes. It is important to understand how to personalize gameful systems, given how user qualities shape the gameful experience. Current evidence suggests that personalized gameful systems can lead to increased user engagement and be more effective in helping users achieve their goals than generic ones. However, to create these kinds of systems, designers need a specific method to guide them in personalizing the gameful experience to their target audience. To address this need, this thesis proposes a novel method for personalized gameful design divided into three steps: (1) classification of user preferences, (2) classification and selection of gameful design elements, and (3) heuristic evaluation of the design. Regarding the classification of user preferences, this thesis evaluates and validates the Hexad Gamification User Types Scale, which scores a person in six user types: philanthropist, socialiser, free spirit, achiever, player, and disruptor. Results show that the scale’s structural validity is acceptable for gamification studies through reliability analysis and factor analysis. For classification and selection of gameful design elements, this thesis presents a conceptual framework based on participants’ self-reported preferences, which classifies elements in eight groups organized into three categories: individual motivations (immersion and progression), external motivations (risk/reward, customization, and incentives), and social motivations (socialization, altruism, and assistance). And to evaluate the design of gameful applications, this thesis introduces a set of 28 gameful design heuristics, which are based on motivational theories and gameful design methods and enable user experience professionals to conduct a heuristic evaluation of a gameful application. Furthermore, this thesis describes the design, implementation, and pilot evaluation of a software platform for the study of personalized gameful design. It integrates nine gameful design elements built around a main instrumental task, enabling researchers to observe and study the gameful experience of participants. The platform is flexible so the instrumental task can be changed, game elements can be added or removed, and the level and type of personalization or customization can be controlled. This allows researchers to generate different experimental conditions to study a broad range of research questions. Our personalized gameful design method provides practical tools and clear guidelines to help designers effectively build personalized gameful systems