More than Just a Game: Ethical Issues in Gamification

Gamification is the use of elements and techniques from video game design in non-game contexts. Amid the rapid growth of this practice, normative questions have been under-explored. The primary goal of this article is to develop a normatively sophisticated and descriptively rich account for appropriately addressing major ethical considerations associated with gamification. The framework suggests that practitioners and designers should be precautious about, primarily, but not limited to, whether or not their use of gamification practices: (1) takes unfair advantage of workers (e.g., exploitation); (2) infringes any involved workers’ or customers’ autonomy (e.g., manipulation); (3) intentionally or unintentionally harms workers and other involved parties; or (4) has a negative effect on the moral character of involved parties

Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games

Gamification ethics refers to the study and understanding of right and wrong conducts by or with gamified solutions. As gamification taps into the natural playfulness of human beings, ethical issues are prevalent and must be considered by the developers.</p

Gamification and Scholarly Ethical Perspectives on Industries, A Bibliometric Analysis

Gamification applications are rapidly growing within industries, firms, and institutions as well as in consumer populations since the past decade. While this phenomenon is still in the early stages of development and diffusion, critics are voicing concerns over ethical and social responsibility issues underlying the intent and effects of questionable gamification uses with consumers, students, and employees. Results from this exploratory bibliometric analysis during this nascent period identifies occurrences of scholarly articles that used ethics perspectives related to gamification in particular industries. Our findings raise the following questions regarding ethics research and articles across industries, “Which industries have shown the most and least scholarly, academic publications using ethical perspectives? Is ethics research trending upward with the growth of gamification applications or not? Why, and should it?

Platforming Gamification as a Means of Engagement in Employee Recruitment and Onboarding

Gamification, generally understood as the application of game elements and design concepts in non-game contexts, is a field of academic study and multibillion-dollar business tool whose popularity is growing as a means of employee engagement, education and training, and talent selection. While there are companies that attempt to gamify separate processes within the employee life cycle, no company exists that gamifies the stages surrounding talent selection: attraction and recruitment of applicants and onboarding of final candidates. To this end, this thesis proposes a software and consulting company, GameON Business Solutions, that will work with small and medium enterprises to expand and diversify the talent pool and prepare new employees for working at the company

You Can\u27t Lose a Game If You Don\u27t Play the Game: Exploring the Ethics of Gamification in Education

Gamification has been hailed as a meaningful solution to the perennial challenge of sustaining student attention in class. It uses facets of gameplay in an educational context, including things such as points, leaderboards and badges. These are clearly efforts to make the student experience more entertaining and engaging, but nonetheless, they are also clearly digital nudges and attempts to change the students’ behaviours and attitudes to a specific set of concepts, and in which case they must, and should, be subject to the same ethical scrutiny as any other form of persuasion technique, as they may be unintentionally eroding the choices that students feel they have. This research therefore discusses some of the key ethical considerations and concerns associated with gamification, and presents a new framework that incorporates ethical tests into each stage of a pre-existing model of instructional design, that can be used when introducing gamification into an educational process

The ethics of gamification in a marketing context

Gamification is an increasingly common marketing tool. Yet, to date, there has been little examination of its ethical implications. In light of the potential implications of this type of stealth marketing for consumer welfare, this paper discusses the ethical dilemmas raised by the use of gamified approaches to marketing. The paper draws on different schools of ethics to examine gamification as an overall system, as well as its constituent parts. This discussion leads to a rationale and suggestions for how gamification could be regulated and/or controlled by more informal codes of conduct. The paper ends by outlining a practical framework which businesses can use to evaluate the potential ethical implications raised by their own gamified marketing techniques

Ethical Considerations in Gamified Interactive Marketing Praxis

Gamification with various designs is becoming a mainstay of interactive marketing, used to pervasively and holistically to in value-creating marketing practices. Beyond marketing, gamification is commonly seen as a technology, the effects of which are benevolent and which is often employed for sustainable ends such as the improvement of wellbeing, health, and sustainable work. However, as gamification commonly, either more or less directly, is related to attempts at affecting customers’ psychological states and continued engagement, a critical reflection of the ethical ramifications of gamification is crucial. Hazards such as manipulation, exploitation, psychological distress, and conflicts with cultural norms are considered as potential challenges that should be observed. Nevertheless, there is a current lack of examination of gamification’s ethical implications in the marketing context. In this chapter, the authors explore the ethical concerns related to using gamification as an interactive marketing tool, and examine how consumers shape their ethical judgement towards gamification. The authors also suggest various ways to help marketers, designers, and policymakers to minimize the unethical consequences of gamification, and ensure that companies will use gamification to compete both ethically and responsibly.© The Author(s) 2023, corrected publication 2024. C. L. Wang (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Interactive Marketing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14961-0_41fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

KidRec: Children & Recommender Systems: Workshop Co-Located with ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2017)

The 1st Workshop on Children and Recommender Systems (KidRec) is taking place in Como, Italy August 27th, 2017 in conjunction with the ACM RecSys 2017 conference. The goals of the workshop are threefold: (1) discuss and identify issues related to recommender systems used by children including specific challenges and limitations, (2) discuss possible solutions to the identified challenges and plan for future research, and (3) build a community to directly work on these important issues

Conceptualising Gamification Risks to Teamwork within Enterprise

Gamification in businesses refers to the use of technology-assisted solutions to boost or change staff attitude, perception and behaviour, in relation to certain business goals and tasks, individually or collectively. Previous research indicated that gamification techniques can introduce risks to the business environment, and not only fail to make a positive change, but also raise concerns in relation to ethics, quality of work, and well-being at a workplace. Although the problem is already recognised in principle, there is still a need to clarify and concretise those risks, their factors and their relation to the gamification dynamics and mechanics. To address this, we conducted multi-staged empirical research, including two months’ observation and interview study, in two large-scale businesses using gamification in their workplace. In this paper, we focus on gamification risks related to teamwork within the enterprise. We outline various risk mitigation strategies and map them to primary types of gamification risks. By accomplishing such conceptualisation, we pave the way towards methods to model, detect and predict gamification risks on teamwork and recommend and design practices and strategies to tackle them