Gamification for Software Development Processes – Relevant Affordances and Design Principles

A Gamified Information System (GIS) implements game concepts and elements, such as affordances and game design principles to motivate people. Based on the idea to develop a GIS to increase the motivation of software developers to perform software quality tasks, the research work at hand aims at investigating relevant requirements from that target group. Therefore, 14 interviews with software development experts are conducted and analyzed. According to the results, software developers prefer the affordances points, narrative storytelling in a multiplayer and a round-based setting. Furthermore, six design principles for the development of a GIS are derived

Leveling Up by Gamifying Freshman Engineering Clinic

This Work-In-Progress paper describes the development of a gamification platform for the Freshman Engineering Clinic II course at a North Eastern university and its proposed assessment strategy. Freshman Engineering Clinic II is a course designed to teach engineering students about multidisciplinary project design, with special focus on developing skills associated with teamwork, software application, and ethics. An important part of learning is receiving feedback as part of the learning cycle and studies have shown that increased feedback can be helpful in supporting student reflection and developing the intrinsic motivation necessary for mastering a task. One method of encouraging students to master material is by providing students with immediate feedback through gamification platforms. The gamification platform being employed in this implementation uses interactive learning techniques to provide students with clear cut goals as well as immediate feedback as an indicator of the student’s performance. Gamification transforms the traditional homework layout into an entirely new entity. Students can work to earn badges by completing assignments that interest them within the platform. Students also have the power to learn at their own pace and mechanics such as experience points, badges, leaderboards, and achievements can be used as motivating factors to encourage student completion of activities. In addition, the system acts as a scaffold for the students starting with activities that are easier and become progressively more challenging as their knowledge increases, while allowing them to repeat tasks as necessary to encourage mastery of course material. The effectiveness of this platform will be assessed by a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures. Student activity completion, accrual of badges and achievements, and the process through which students select the activities to pursue will all be monitored. Students will also complete the College and University Classroom Environment Inventory (CUCEI) to measure their perception of the classroom environment with the addition of the gamification platform. Qualitative feedback from students will be collected through open ended survey questions to gain a better appreciation for how the gamification platform impacted their course experience

“Who cares about fireworks?” – A Study on Digital Coaching, Gamification and Exercise Motivation

Digital coaching systems offer users support in their physical training through insights and advice based on the individual’s activity data. Often these systems utilize gamification mechanisms to motivate users. In this study we conduct interviews with digital coaching users to understand how digital coaching systems are used to motivate physical activity, what kind of a role gamification plays, and how digital coaching systems should be developed further to better motivate users. We find that data itself is more motivating than gamification mechanisms, that players use data to play their own, internal games; and that data is also used for social purposes. We find that the benefits from digital coaches today are limited and mainly related to accurate exercise tracking and visualization of user data. Gamified elements are used on a low level and not perceived as value-adding by the users; deeper understanding of motivation theory and promoting intrinsic motivation is needed

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

Research Commentary: Setting a Definition, Context, and Theory-Based Research Agenda for the Gamification of Non-Gaming Applications

As a nascent area of study, gamification has attracted the interest of researchers in several fields, but such researchers have scarcely focused on creating a theoretical foundation for gamification research. Gamification involves using game-like features in non-game contexts to motivate users and improve performance outcomes. As a boundary-spanning subject by nature, gamification has drawn the interest of scholars from diverse communities, such as information systems, education, marketing, computer science, and business administration. To establish a theoretical foundation, we need to clearly define and explain gamification in comparison with similar concepts and areas of research. Likewise, we need to define the scope of the domain and develop a research agenda that explicitly considers theory’s important role. In this review paper, we set forth the pre-theoretical structures necessary for theory building in this area. Accordingly, we engaged an interdisciplinary group of discussants to evaluate and select the most relevant theories for gamification. Moreover, we developed exemplary research questions to help create a research agenda for gamification. We conclude that using a multi-theoretical perspective in creating a research agenda should help and encourage IS researchers to take a lead role in this promising and emerging area

Gamification for servitization

The study described in this paper has set out to explore gamification from a servitization perspective to understand the opportunities and research challenges. A systematic literature review has been conducted to capture key characteristics of differing forms of gamification processes in a servitization context. The findings of our study focus on two area: (1) structural, organization’s physical bricksand-mortar attribute and (2) infrastructural, policies and practices in how structural aspects of servitization are to be managed. Six key findings are presented and collectively these contribute to our understanding of the broader gamification technologies that can help to transform servitization. The contribution of our research is twofold. First it captures a set of theoretical framework for analysing gamification in servitization context. Second, it provide an in-depth roadmap in how gamification can be applied to target major challenges in servitization

Utilizing a Modular Approach to Gamification to Improve Nutrition and Fitness in Children

Obesity is a worldwide epidemic that affects adults and children, impacts over 30% of the population in several states of the U.S., damages national economies, and is a factor in four out of the six of the leading causes of death, including diabetes and heart disease. Obesity is preventable: solution approaches include better education, more exercise, better nutrition, and changing eating habits. Still, it is difficult for many people to remain interested enough to educate themselves and to learn new behaviors to change their eating and exercise habits. Gamification is a relatively new research area that involves using video game mechanisms to make applications such as work, education, and behavior change seem less like a job and more like entertainment. The objective of this thesis is to develop a system for gamifying the process of education and behavior change aimed at reducing obesity in children. The approach involved identifying requirements, developing a methodology, implementing a suite of games, developing a common application program interface and integration framework so that metrics from the games could form a user progress model that is securely sharable with parents, educators, and health professionals. The idea is that as users get better at playing the game, they will get healthier. We specified the following requirements for the framework and suite of games: large domain coverage in the areas of nutrition and fitness; extensibility and scalability; user diversity; measurability and metrics; and security and privacy. A working prototype at http://www.edufitment.com demonstrates the framework and the games developed so far. Future work will involve refining the game content coverage with the help of domain experts, adding more games, and deploying and testing the framework on the Internet