Augmenting the Task of Exercise Gamification: An Expert View on the Adoption of a New Technology for Deploying Existing Virtual Environments in Virtual Urban Exergames

Exergames commonly denote serious games and gamified systems that were developed for the sake of improving health and exercise adherence. One of the recent trends in exergaming are urban games. They are defined as “highly interdisciplinary digital games which root in such diverse fields as architecture and urban planning, healthcare sciences, and serious games research” (Knoell et al., 2014). Besides having various ‘physical benefits’, such as promoting movement patterns, urban exergames have the core task of psychologically motivating players to exercise more and inspire them to be physically active. While offering an innovative and an immersive way to exercise, urban games come also with the typical drawbacks which outdoor exercising generally has (e.g. being dependent on good weather and intimidation problems for obese people). A possible solution would be simulating urban games for indoor exercise. On top of augmenting the sedentary game input to a motion-based one, designing and developing 3D environments for virtual urban games is not an obvious task and it takes a vast amount of knowledge, time and budget to create a realistic world with a “tremendous appeal and a powerful attraction”. To bypass this challenge, we introduce in this work a new technology for accessing and gamifying existing game environments. Furthermore, we validate our approach by presenting the results of a qualitative research that we have conducted with the help of gamification experts and exergame designers

Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

Physical activity is very important to public health and exergames represent one potential way to enact it. The promotion of physical activity through gamification and enhanced anticipated affect also holds promise to aid in exercise adherence beyond more traditional educational and social cognitive approaches. This paper reviews empirical studies on gamified systems and serious games for exercising. In order to gain a better understanding of these systems, this review examines the types and aims (e.g. controlling body weight, enjoying indoor jogging…) of the corresponding studies as well as their psychological and physical outcomes. This paper particularly reviews the deployed motivational affordances and the effectiveness of incorporating gamification features in exergames. The review shows overall positive psychological outcomes (e.g. enjoying exercise) as well as behavioral ones (e.g. decreasing sedentariness) about exergames. Its findings inform about the current state of the research on the topic, based on which, suggestions for further research are outlined.</p

Gamification’s impact on the intrinsic motivation for physical activity

Abstract. In the modern days physical activity among the children and adolescents have generally decreased and, in turn, increased the prevalence of obesity and different health issues caused by obesity. There have been several attempts to motivate the young to start exercising and having a healthier lifestyle by making it more engaging and fun. One of the methods of inspiring the young people to get moving stems from video games. Gamification has been trendy in the last century and it is still talked about. The primary objective of the gamification is to decrease the threshold of doing something and repeating it by implementing different gamifying elements like point scoring. There have been many different attempts to implement gamifying elements into various activities. But in some cases the motivation to exercise wanes once the user’s interest towards the game itself decreases. In this paper I explore the cases of using gamification to improve peoples’ physical activity and promote better health. The objective of this paper is to use a systematic literature review to find out and map the amount of research that has been done about gamification and its impact on the intrinsic motivation for physical activity

Serious Gaming for Behaviour Change: A Systematic Review

Over the years, there has been a significant increase in the adoption of game-based interventions for behaviour change associated with many fields such as health, education, and psychology. This is due to the significance of the players’ intrinsic motivation that is naturally generated to play games and the substantial impact they can have on players. Many review papers measure the effectiveness of the use of gaming on changing behaviours; however, these studies neglect the game features involved in the game design process, which have an impact of stimulating behaviour change. Therefore, this paper aimed to identify game design mechanics and features that are reported to commonly influence behaviour change during and/or after the interventions. This paper identified key theories of behaviour change that inform the game design process, providing insights that can be adopted by game designers for informing considerations on the use of game features for moderating behaviour in their own games

Gamified Digital Services: How Gameful Experiences Drive Continued Service Usage

Recently, many digital service providers started to gamify their services to promote continued service usage. Although gamification has drawn attention in both practice and research, it remains unclear how users experience gamified services and how these gameful experiences may increase service usage. This research adopts a user-centered perspective to reveal the underlying gameful experience dimensions during gamified service usage and how they drive continued service usage. Findings from Study 1 - a survey with 148 app-users - reveal four essential gameful experience dimensions (skill development, social comparison, social connectedness, and expressive freedom) and how they relate to game mechanics. Study 2, which is based on a survey among 821 app-users, shows that gameful experiences trigger continued service usage through two different types of motivation, namely autonomous and controlled motivation

An interdisciplinary perspective on gamification: Mechanics, psychological mediators and outcomes

As gamification literature has matured, the gap between how different domains apply the theory has widened. This has positioned gamification as being more dependent on context, rather than being an independent theory per se. To address this notion, three concepts are identified as being central for how a gamificator, the one responsible for gamifying, gamifies a process. These are mechanics, mental mediators and desired outcomes. Following this logic, a review was conducted using 77 (n) articles across seven disciplines, namely health and wellness, crowdsourcing, sustainability, computer science, software development, business, and tourism. The findings highlighted potentially causal and correlational relationships between several concepts when gamifying a situation, context, service or/and process. This research presents an alternative and uniform perspective on the broad gamification research to better understand how gamification functions and can be employed to impact various outcomes. Furthermore, this research contributes to this rather eclectic domain, presenting a more categorized view in showing domain-specific mechanics and how these can be employed for empirical testing. Lastly, the conceptual model can be modified, employed and adjusted to investigate various effects of gamification on outcomes