Gamification at Work: Employee Motivations to Participate and Preference for Energy Conservation

Energy wastage, especially in public buildings, is one of the widely acknowledged issues that have to be addressed towards protecting the environment. Furthermore, affecting the occupants’ behaviour has been identified in the literature as an under-investigated means of conserving energy. In this research paper we report on the results from an investigation we conducted in three different workplaces, situated in different EU countries. In a survey of N=119 employees, we explore Employee Motivations to Participate in Gamification at work (EMPG) and identify the needs for (i)Self- Actualisation, (ii)Self-Regulation, (iii)Rewards & Recognition and (iv)Affiliation as most prominent. Additionally we examine the employees’ profiles, specific needs and preferences in game elements, towards participating in gamification aimed at conserving energy at the workplace. Correlations of the four types of EMPG with basic game elements and energy-saving actions at work are consequently explored and discussed. Ultimately, taking into consideration employees’ motivations and preferences, we derive and propose design guidelines for gamified applications providing personalised feedback towards saving energy at work

Encouraging Pro-Environmental Behaviour: Affordances and Institutional Logics in IS-enabled Organisational Sustainability Transformations

While many studies have addressed encouraging employees’ pro-environmental behaviour (PEB) in the workplace, the roles of structures and institutions have received little attention and thus re-main unclear. We draw on the concept of affordances as being enacted and embedded in institu-tional logics, which provide a frame of reference for individual and organisational behaviours. Given our emphasis on organisational sustainability transformations, we explain how organisa-tions can encourage their employees to act pro-environmentally in the workplace with the help of green information systems (Green IS). We address technological, organisational, and human fac-tors that strengthen PEB. Thus, we respond to the call to bring together institutional logics and affordance theory. We present preliminary findings of 55 semi structured interviews with inform-ants from 20 companies, along with internal and external documents. This allows us to develop a pro-environmental corporate logic, which guides employees’ PEB in our case companies. These preliminary findings allow us to develop a research agenda on the interplay of this institutional logic and motivational affordances. We conclude with an outlook on how to tackle the emerging research questions

DOES THE WINNER TAKE IT ALL? – TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF WHY THERE MIGHT BE NO ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL GAMIFICATION DESIGN

Despite the popularity of gamification, and the positive effects of games in daily life, many gamification projects fail. A possible explanation for this observation is that most projects follow a one-size-fits-all approach without considering what the intended users really want. Closely related to this, most approaches focus on the integration of competitive game structures even though several mechanisms are available. This applies especially for the learning context of the study. Consequently, we aim to investigate the effectiveness of multiple gamification configurations based on different underlying motivational structures of users. To achieve our goal, we combine social comparison and social interdependence theory. This integration of theories helps to identify reward structures. They serve to analyze differences in user needs concerning their motivation to learn. We develop hypotheses that expose four different reward structures: autonomous, competitive, cooperative, and co-competitive. Our research-in-progress paper closes with an outline of an upcoming experiment. Once our research is completed, we expect to be able to better understand how differences in the users’ motivational structures influence their motivation in the context of learning, and how gamification configurations can be adapted based on a user’s underlying motivational structures

Self-Control in Cyberspace: Applying Dual Systems Theory to a Review of Digital Self-Control Tools

Many people struggle to control their use of digital devices. However, our understanding of the design mechanisms that support user self-control remains limited. In this paper, we make two contributions to HCI research in this space: first, we analyse 367 apps and browser extensions from the Google Play, Chrome Web, and Apple App stores to identify common core design features and intervention strategies afforded by current tools for digital self-control. Second, we adapt and apply an integrative dual systems model of self-regulation as a framework for organising and evaluating the design features found. Our analysis aims to help the design of better tools in two ways: (i) by identifying how, through a well-established model of self-regulation, current tools overlap and differ in how they support self-control; and (ii) by using the model to reveal underexplored cognitive mechanisms that could aid the design of new tools.Comment: 11.5 pages (excl. references), 6 figures, 1 tabl

TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE INFLUENCES OF MEANINGFUL FRAMING ON USER PARTICIPATION IN A GAMIFIED INFORMATION SYSTEM

Gamification with meaningful framing is a diegetic gamification approach that goes beyond points, badges, and leaderboards. Diegesis – the notion of connecting elements of the game, including tasks, narratives and stories – can help to imbue even very work-centric games with fantasy and a meaning-ful framing. This study proposes to investigate the influences of such meaningful framing, including meaningful framing of the game and the meaningful framing of the task, on users’ participation in a gamified information system. We apply the S-O-R framework to construct interrelationships among a story-based game environment, user engagement, and player behaviors and propose a research model with hypotheses. We aim to uncover the role of story-based gamification in information systems re-search and encourage more research investigations in this direction

What’s in the Game? Developing a Taxonomy of Gamification Concepts for Health Apps

Gamification is a promising approach to tackle users’ infrequent and decreasing use of health apps. For this purpose, extant research provides developers of health apps with a vast number of different game elements. By abstracting from the implementation of single game elements and choosing a more holistic approach to gamification concepts, we iteratively develop a taxonomy of gamification concepts for health apps using inductive and deductive approaches and discuss its transferability to other gamification contexts. We contribute to a profound understanding of the main characteristics of gamification concepts and enable researchers and practitioners to classify and distinguish them. Our results provide interesting insights into the essential characteristics of health apps’ gamification concepts

Building a Better Game: A Theory of Gameful Learning & the Construction of Student Personas with Agency

Gameful course design creates learning environments that support student motivation, drawing inspiration from well-designed games. This dissertation establishes the theoretical framework on which gameful pedagogy is founded. One key piece of gameful course design is that the instructor creates opportunities for students to make decisions about how they will complete course work. Designing these opportunities requires instructors to reflect on how different types of students are likely to behave, and to decide what grade outcomes can be earned through different routes of action. The field of Human-Computer Interaction uses a design tool called personas to help software developers better understand target users and their respective goals as they build new technologies. This dissertation investigates what choices students made within a gameful course, with the intention of developing a method to systematically construct student personas, based on a combination of behavioral, performance, demographic, and psycho-social data. Such personas would ideally enable instructors to more finely tune gameful course structures to student needs. While this research succeeded in establishing a method to describe the pathways students took through the gameful course studied, it identified very little commonality in students’ choices at the assignment level: the 159 students studied took 158 unique pathways through the core assignment work. This finding speaks to the success of gameful course design in enabling students to have autonomy over their learning experience, but, in addition to a general lack of significant findings between basic student characteristics and assignment choice, did not allow for the creation of data-driven personas that felt cohesive and representative of the students they represented. Three goals for future research into data-driven personas are identified: First, to confirm in a larger and more diverse context that the characteristics examined in this study do not have strong relationships to assignment choice. Second, to re-evaluate whether characteristics like ethnicity and gender need to be included in learner personas at all if they do not offer a better understanding of how similar learners are likely to behave. And third, to investigate whether it is more valuable to iterative course design to focus on how different behavior patterns relate to each and impact each other rather than assuming that the patterns themselves will relate to any particular learner characteristic.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144070/1/cholma_1.pd