Modelling the recommendation technique for achieving awareness in serious game for obesity

Obesity among children is increasing alarmingly. Therefore it is crucial to instill the awareness about the danger of being obese to the children. To instill the awareness is a challenge. A good approach is required for the message to be accepted and conceptualized by the children. Serious game has been an important mechanism to assist the achievement of many serious purposes other than for entertainment and enjoyment. This paper proposes the implementation of content-based recommendation technique in serious game for obesity awareness among children. Several recommendation techniques for awareness had been studied and the content-based recommendation technique is found to be suitable to be implemented in games. The game was developed according to game development approach and fulfilled the game characteristics. For this preliminary study, 10 children participated in the experiment to determine the effectiveness of the game. The participants were given a pre-and post test to answer before and after playing the game. The result of the test shows that participants achieved the obesity awareness after playing the game. The content-based recommendation technique is applicable to be adopted in serious games to instill awareness in the players

Do people's user types change over time? An exploratory study

In recent years, different studies have proposed and validated user models (e.g., Bartle, BrainHex, and Hexad) to represent the different user profiles in games and gamified settings. However, the results of applying these user models in practice (e.g., to personalize gamified systems) are still contradictory. One of the hypotheses for these results is that the user types can change over time (i.e., user types are dynamic). To start to understand whether user types can change over time, we conducted an exploratory study analyzing data from 74 participants to identify if their user type (Achiever, Philanthropist, Socialiser, Free Spirit, Player, and Disruptor) had changed over time (six months). The results indicate that there is a change in the dominant user type of the participants, as well as the average scores in the Hexad sub-scales. These results imply that all the scores should be considered when defining the Hexad's user type and that the user types are dynamic. Our results contribute with practical implications, indicating that the personalization currently made (generally static) may be insufficient to improve the users' experience, requiring user types to be analyzed continuously and personalization to be done dynamically.Comment: 5th International GamiFIN Conference 2021 (GamiFIN 2021), April 7-10, 2021, Finlan

Gamifikáció hatásának vizsgálata vállalati és oktatási közegben = Examination of the effect of gamification in corporate and educational field

Az utóbbi évtized egyik legnépszerűbb hívószava a gamifikáció, mely megpróbálja a „szürke”, „komoly” munkát és feladatot élvezetesebbé tenni. A gamifikáció a célszemélyek adott képességének fejlesztésére, a munkavállalói és hallgatói hozzáállás módosítására, valamint tudásátadásra is használható. Kutatások során a gamifikáció által nyújtott lehetőségek kiaknázását vizsgálja az értekezés vállalati, valamint oktatási közegben, ily módon a munkák két, egymástól eltérő területet fognak át. Az első témakör a vállalati közegben, céges környezetben alkalmazott és alkalmazható lehetőségek vizsgálatát öleli fel. Mivel egy szervezet számára lényeges szempont, hogy meg tudják-e tartani a munkaerőt középtávon, ezért a fő cél a munkavállalók munkahelyükkel való megelégedettségének vizsgálata volt. Emellett a munkavállalók összetettségének elemzése történik meg egy célszoftver segítségével, melyet viselkedéselemzés és viselkedés-becslés követ. A kutatások során bizonyosságot nyertek az alábbi megállapítások: • A vizsgált gamifikált csapatépítő szolgáltatás pozitív hatással bír az észlelt munkahelyi légkörre, a munkavállalók kapcsolati hálójának kiterjedtségére és minőségére, valamint a munkavállalók sportolási szokásaira. • A felhasználók viselkedése alapján AHC-típusú klaszterelemzést használván a felhasználók között a BrainHex modellbe illeszkedő 3 játékostípust lehetett meghatározni: „Győztes”, „Társasági” és „Teljesítő”. • Kimutatható a „szervezői” faktor hatása az általános szervezeti aktivitásra. • Előzetesen feltett kérdések alapján bizonyos viselkedésminták előrejelezhetővé váltak a vizsgált szolgáltatásban. Az oktatással kapcsolatos kutatások három részterületből tevődnek össze. Először az egyetemek széles körében használt Moodle-rendszer gamifikációs szempontú használhatóságát jellemzi az értekezés. Ezt követően egy nagylétszámú kurzusátalakítás lépéseinek, valamint eredményességének jellemzését teszi meg, s végül az e-learning rendszerből kilépve egy sajátfejlesztésű platform megvalósítását ismerteti a dolgozat: • Az értekezés bemutat egy javasolt struktúrát, mely alapján egy megfelelően gamifikált kurzus állítható fel a Moodle rendszer keretein belül. • Az „Informatika” kurzus átalakításának vizsgálatából leszűrhetővé vált a gamifikáció hatása és a részvételi hajlandóság növekedése. • A sajátfejlesztésű gamifikált oktatóplatform első prototípusát ismerteti, amely alkalmas különböző témakörű tananyagok implementációját követően azok átadására

Factors to Consider for Tailored Gamification

International audienceGamification is widely used to foster user motivation. Recent studies show that users can be more or less receptive to different game elements, based on their personality or player profile. Consequently, recent work on tailored gamification tries to identify links between user types and motivating game elements. However findings are very heterogeneous due to different contexts, different typologies to characterize users, and different implementations of game elements. Our work seeks to obtain more generalizable findings in order to identify the main factors that will support design choices when tailoring gamification to users' profiles and provide designers with concrete recommendations for designing tailored gamification systems. For this purpose, we ran a crowdsourced study with 300 participants to identify the motivational impact of game elements. Our study differs from previous work in three ways: first, it is independent from a specific user activity and domain; second, it considers three user typologies; and third, it clearly distinguishes motivational strategies and their implementation using multiple different game elements. Our results reveal that (1) different implementations of a same motivational strategy have different impacts on motivation, (2) dominant user type is not sufficient to differentiate users according to their preferences for game elements, (3) Hexad is the most appropriate user typology for tailored gamification and (4) the motiva-tional impact of certain game elements varies with the user activity or the domain of gamified systems

Gamification Strategies : A Characterization Using Formal Argumentation Theory

Gamified software applications are omnipresent in everyday life. The idea of using game design elements in non-game contexts to engage and motivate tasks has rapidly gained traction in the human–computer interaction and the psychology fields, but scarcely in the artificial intelligence (AI) research area. In this paper, we propose a software agent perspective of gamification elements to solve two specific problems: (1) a reactive perspective that gamification designers have for those gamified affordances, i.e. the visual cue (output) is only triggered by user interaction, and (2) a lack of formal treatment of gamified software, where strict characterization of software behavior as done in AI, guarantee that the information-based output follows the intended goal of the software. Our contributions presented in this paper are (1) two taxonomies of affordances based on the type of information that every element communicates, and the type of agency that is capable; (2) a framework to formalize the decision-making process for gamified software agents; and (3) a characterization of gamified stories using formal argumentation theory dialogues. We exemplify our contributions with two gamified platforms in the healthcare and financial literacy fields.© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Exploring Barriers and Enablers to Participatory Arts Engagement in Early Adolescence

Participatory arts engagement is argued to afford an array of prosocial and positive wellbeing outcomes across the lifespan. However, young people may face barriers to engagement that hinder access to the arts’ putative benefits. We explored the barriers to participatory arts engagement that early adolescents face and the extent to which wellbeing levels are associated with the perception of such barriers. We also explored associations between adolescents’ individual differences in personality, curiosity and wellbeing and their relative interest in different types of art activities. Participants completed questionnaires that measured their perceived barriers to engagement and their individual differences in personality, curiosity, and well-being. They also completed items measuring their interest in taking up a list of arts opportunities that varied in terms of affordance for solitary creativity, performing to an audience, or working with others in a group. Results showed a key barrier to arts engagement to be related to motivation. Specifically, participants reported relatively low levels of desire and drive to engage. Critically, however, we found a relationship between participants’ interest in taking up particular arts opportunities and their patterns of personality and curiosity. Finally, our data revealed low wellbeing to be associated with reduced interest in arts activities involving performing to an audience and working with others. Taken together, our results speak to the potential relevance - if art engagement’s putative benefits are to be exploited - of tailoring arts opportunities to young people’s personalities and interests, and of facilitating entry points for young people with poorer wellbeing

Understanding Personalization for Health Behavior Change Applications: A Review and Future Directions

Health behavior change (HBC) applications hold much promise for promoting healthy lifestyles, such as enhancing physical activity (PA), diet, and sleep. Incorporating personalization strategies is seen as key to designing effective HBC applications. However, researchers and application designers lack knowledge about the different kinds of personalization strategies, how to implement them, and what strategies work. Thus, we reviewed prior empirical studies on personalization for HBC applications and developed a framework to synthesize the prior studies we identified and to provide an integrative view of the personalization strategies, their inputs, and outcomes. Our findings suggest that researchers have much potential to conduct design research that employs demographic and contextual characteristics for personalization and that examines personalization strategies that target HBC applications’ interface and channels. In terms of implementation and adoption, we call for researchers to examine unaddressed issues such as low adherence and contextual barriers for these applications. We also suggest that researchers need to systematically examine the effects of specific personalization strategies on their efficacy. Other than providing an integrative view of extant studies, our study contributes by outlining key directions for future research in this area

Food Literacy while Shopping: Motivating Informed Food Purchasing Behaviour with a Situated Gameful App

Establishing healthy eating patterns early in life is critical and has implications for lifelong health. Situated interventions are a promising approach to improve eating patterns. How- ever, HCI research has emphasized calorie control and weight loss, potentially leading consumers to prioritize caloric in- take over healthy eating patterns. To support healthy eating more holistically, we designed a gameful app called Pirate Bri’s Grocery Adventure (PBGA) that seeks to improve food literacy—meaning the interconnected combination of food- related knowledge, skills, and behaviours that empower an individual to make informed food choices—through a situated approach to grocery shopping. Findings from our three-week field study revealed that PBGA was effective for improving players’ nutrition knowledge and motivation for healthier food choices and reducing their impulse purchases. Our findings highlight that nutrition apps should promote planning and shopping based on balance, variety, and moderation

Personalizing Persuasive Strategies in Gameful Systems to Gamification User Types

© Owners/Authors, 2018. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in CHI '18 Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174009Persuasive gameful systems are effective tools for motivating behaviour change. Research has shown that tailoring these systems to individuals can increase their efficacy; however, there is little knowledge on how to personalize them. We conducted a large-scale study of 543 participants to investigate how different gamification user types responded to ten persuasive strategies depicted in storyboards representing persuasive gameful health systems. Our results reveal that people’s gamification user types play significant roles in the perceived persuasiveness of different strategies. People scoring high in the ‘player’ user type tend to be motivated by competition, comparison, cooperation, and reward while ‘disruptors’ are likely to be demotivated by punishment, goal-setting, simulation, and self-monitoring. ‘Socialisers’ could be motivated using any of the strategies; they are the most responsive to persuasion overall. Finally, we contribute to CHI research and practice by offering design guidelines for tailoring persuasive gameful systems to each gamification user type.NSERC Banting CNPq, Brazil SSHRC || 895-2011-1014, IMMERSe NSERC || RGPIN-418622-2012 CFI || 35819 Mitacs || IT0725