Time is money: foster engagement through online compensation and gamification mechanisms

ope

Rethinking gamification

Gamification marks a major change to everyday life. It describes the permeation of economic, political, and social contexts by game-elements such as awards, rule structures, and interfaces that are inspired by video games. Sometimes the term is reduced to the implementation of points, badges, and leaderboards as incentives and motivations to be productive. Sometimes it is envisioned as a universal remedy to deeply transform society toward more humane and playful ends. Despite its use by corporations to manage brand communities and personnel, however, gamification is more than just a marketing buzzword. States are beginning to use it as a new tool for governing populations more effectively. It promises to fix what is wrong with reality by making every single one of us fitter, happier, and healthier. Indeed, it seems like all of society is up for being transformed into one massive game.The contributions in this book offer a candid assessment of the gamification hype. They trace back the historical roots of the phenomenon and explore novel design practices and methods. They critically discuss its social implications and even present artistic tactics for resistance. It is time to rethink gamification

Integrating knowledge tracing and item response theory: A tale of two frameworks

Traditionally, the assessment and learning science commu-nities rely on different paradigms to model student performance. The assessment community uses Item Response Theory which allows modeling different student abilities and problem difficulties, while the learning science community uses Knowledge Tracing, which captures skill acquisition. These two paradigms are complementary - IRT cannot be used to model student learning, while Knowledge Tracing assumes all students and problems are the same. Recently, two highly related models based on a principled synthesis of IRT and Knowledge Tracing were introduced. However, these two models were evaluated on different data sets, using different evaluation metrics and with different ways of splitting the data into training and testing sets. In this paper we reconcile the models' results by presenting a unified view of the two models, and by evaluating the models under a common evaluation metric. We find that both models are equivalent and only differ in their training procedure. Our results show that the combined IRT and Knowledge Tracing models offer the best of assessment and learning sciences - high prediction accuracy like the IRT model, and the ability to model student learning like Knowledge Tracing

Big Data in Organizations and the Role of Human Resource Management

Big data are changing the way we work. This book conveys a theoretical understanding of big data and the related interactions on a socio-technological level as well as on the organizational level. Big data challenge the human resource department to take a new role. An organization’s new competitive advantage is its employees augmented by big data

Customer engagement through gamification marketing in China: a focus on the luxury market.

ope

DESIGN FOR BEHAVIOUR CHANGE: A MODEL-DRIVEN APPROACH FOR TAILORING PERSUASIVE TECHNOLOGIES

People generally want to engage in a healthy lifestyle, to live in harmony with the environment, to contribute to social causes, and to avoid behaviours that are harmful for themselves and others. However, people often find it difficult to motivate themselves to engage in these beneficial behaviours. Even adopting a healthy lifestyle, such as healthy eating, physical activity, or smoking cessation, is hard despite being aware of the benefits. The increasing adoption and integration of technologies into our daily lives present unique opportunities to assist individuals to adopt healthy behaviours using technology. As a result, research on how to use technology to motivate health behaviour change has attracted the attention of both researchers and health practitioners. Technology designed for the purpose of bringing about desirable behaviour and attitude changes is referred to as Persuasive Technology (PT). Over the past decade, several PTs have been developed to motivate healthy behaviour, including helping people with addictive behaviour such as substance abuse, assisting individuals to achieve personal wellness, helping people manage diseases, and engaging people in preventive behaviours. Most of these PTs take a one-size-fits-all design approach. However, people differ in their motivation and beliefs about health and what constitutes a healthy life. A technology that motivates one type of person to change her behaviour may actually deter behaviour change for another type of person. As a result, existing PTs that are based on the one-size-fits-all approach may not be effective for promoting healthy behaviour change for most people. Because of the motivational pull that games offer, many PTs deliver their intervention in the form of games. This type of game-based PTs are referred to as persuasive games. Considering the increasing interest in delivering PT as a game, this dissertation uses persuasive games as a case study to illustrate the danger of applying the one-size-fits-all approach, the value and importance of tailoring PT, and to propose an approach for tailoring PTs to increase their efficacy. To address the problem that most existing PTs employ the one-size-fits-all design approach, I developed the Model-driven Persuasive Technology (MPT) design approach for tailoring PTs to various user types. The MPT is based on studying and modelling user’s behaviour with respect to their motivations. I developed the MPT approach in two preliminary studies (N = 221, N = 554) that model the determinants of healthy eating for people from different cultures, of different ages, and of both genders. I then applied the MPT approach in two large-scale studies to develop models for tailoring persuasive games to various gamer types. In the first study (N = 642), I examine eating behaviours and associated determinants, using the Health Belief Model. Using data from the study, I modelled the determinants of healthy eating behaviour for various gamer types. In the second study (N = 1108), I examined the persuasiveness of PT design strategies and developed models for tailoring the strategies to various gamer types. Behavioural determinants and PT design strategies are the two fundamental building blocks that drive PT interventions. The models revealed that some strategies were more effective for particular gamer types, thus, providing guidelines for tailoring persuasive games to various gamer types. To show the feasibility of the MPT design approach, I applied the model to design and develop two versions of a Model-driven Persuasive Game (MPG) targeting two distinct gamer types. To demonstrate the importance of tailoring persuasive games using the MPG approach, I conducted a large-scale evaluation (N = 802) of the two versions of the game and compared the efficacy of the tailored, contra-tailored, and the one-size-fits-all persuasive games condition with respect to their ability to promote positive changes in attitude, self-efficacy, and intention. To also demonstrate that the tailored MPG games inspire better play experience than the one-size-fits-all and the contra-tailored persuasive games, I measure the gamers’ perceived enjoyment and competence under the different game conditions. The results of the evaluation showed that while PTs can be effective for promoting healthy behaviour in terms of attitude, self-efficacy, and intention, the effectiveness of persuasion depends on using the right choice of persuasive strategy for each gamer type. The results showed that one size does not fit all and answered my overarching research question of whether there is a value in tailoring PT to an individual or group. The answer is that persuasive health interventions are more effective if they are tailored to the user types under consideration and that not tailoring PTs could be detrimental to behaviour change

The Design of Creative Crowdwork – From Tools for Empowerment to Platform Capitalism

The thesis investigates the methods used in the contemporary crowdsourcing of creative crowdwork and in particular the succession of conflicting ideas and concepts that led to the development of dedi- cated, profit-oriented, online platforms after 2005 for the outsourcing of cognitive tasks and creative labour to a large and unspecified group of people via open calls on the internet. It traces the historic trajectory of the notion of the crowd as well as the development of tech- nologies for online collaboration, with a focus on the accompanying narratives in the form of a dis- course analysis. One focus of the thesis is the clash between the narrative of the empowerment of the individual user through digital tools and the reinvention of the concept of the crowd as a way to refer to users of online platforms in their aggregate form. The thesis argues that the revivification of the notion of the crowd is indicative of a power shift that has diminished the agency of the individual user and empowered the commercial platform providers who, in turn, take unfair advantage of the crowdworker. The thesis examines the workings and the rhetoric of these platforms by comparing the way they address the masses today with historic notions of the crowd, formed by authors like Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti. Today’s practice of crowdwork is also juxtaposed with older, arguably more humanist, visions of distributed online collaboration, collective intelligence, free soft- ware and commons-based peer production. The study is a history of ideas, taking some of the utopian concepts of early online history as a vantage point from which to view current and, at times, dystopian applications of crowdsourced creative labour online. The goal is to better understand the social mech- anisms employed by the platforms to motivate and control the crowds they gather, and to uncover the parameters that define their structure as well as the scope for their potential redesign. At its core, the thesis offers a comparison of Amazon Mechanical Turk (2005), the most prominent and infamous example for so-called microtasking or cognitive piecework, with the design of platforms for contest-based creative crowdwork, in particular with Jovoto (2007) and 99designs (2008). The crowdsourcing of design work is organised in decidedly differently ways to other forms of digital labour and the question is why should that be so? What does this tell us about changes in the practice and commissioning of design and what are its effects on design as a profession? However, the thesis is not just about the crowdsourcing of design work: it is also about the design of crowdsourcing as a system. It is about the ethics of these human-made, contingent social systems that are promoted as the future of work. The question underlying the entire thesis is: can crowdsourcing be designed in a way that is fair and sustainable to all stakeholders? The analysis is based on an extensive study of literature from Design Studies, Media and Cul- ture Studies, Business Studies and Human-Computer Interaction, combined with participant observa- tion within several crowdsourcing platforms for design and a series of interviews with different stake- holders

The Impact of Community Involvement on Game Life-Cycle: Evidence based on Gaming Platform Steam

Later stages of the product life-cycle are characterized by diminishing sales and declining prices. Especially firms with substantial product development costs, as is the case in the video game industry, are dependent on long product life-cycles to amortize initial costs. This confronts firms with the fundamental challenge of maintaining the value of their product from the consumer’s perspective and thus delaying the natural price decline. We investigate whether product features that facilitate community involvement and interaction are an effective means to keep the product stimulating and relevant in the long run. Using extensive data from the PC video game market, we show that the inclusion of interactive, community-engaging features allows firms to both charge higher prices and delay the natural price decline of their product. However, for one of the investigated features we find the opposite effect, which we explain by subsequent analysis. Thereby, we gain valuable insights into the importance of robustly designed incentive systems in community-focused features. Our findings could help firms in their efforts to design attractive and economically viable products with prolonged life-cycles. Keywords: Product life-cycle; digital goods pricing; user communities; co-creation; digital gaming platforms.Later stages of the product life-cycle are characterized by diminishing sales and declining prices. Especially firms with substantial product development costs, as is the case in the video game industry, are dependent on long product life-cycles to amortize initial costs. This confronts firms with the fundamental challenge of maintaining the value of their product from the consumer’s perspective and thus delaying the natural price decline. We investigate whether product features that facilitate community involvement and interaction are an effective means to keep the product stimulating and relevant in the long run. Using extensive data from the PC video game market, we show that the inclusion of interactive, community-engaging features allows firms to both charge higher prices and delay the natural price decline of their product. However, for one of the investigated features we find the opposite effect, which we explain by subsequent analysis. Thereby, we gain valuable insights into the importance of robustly designed incentive systems in community-focused features. Our findings could help firms in their efforts to design attractive and economically viable products with prolonged life-cycles. Keywords: Product life-cycle; digital goods pricing; user communities; co-creation; digital gaming platforms