Gamification

This introductory article provides basic definitions, concepts and theories surrounding gamification that are used throughout the remainder of this book. It distinguishes gamification from other research areas, such as gameful design and serious games. It then goes on to introduce common game mechanics, achievement systems, game dynamics and aesthetics. The second part of the article focusses on underlying theories. It examines the influence of motivation theory, achievement goal theory and flow theory on gamification. The article also describes different player archetypes.

Gamification is applied as a tool to encourage behavioural change and promote desired attitudes in many fields. However, people with different backgrounds are influenced by gamification in different ways. This suggests that cultural influence can also impact the way gamification is best implemented within a particular context. This chapter starts by discussing how behaviour can be influenced by gamification. It then considers how culture in its different manifestations influences behaviour. The chapter then discusses motivation and its role in gamification. Finally, the key issue of the behavioural change capabilities of gamification combined with an understanding of behavioural change methods, the individual and the cultural and social context are discussed.

Gamification analytics describe methods and tools that help to monitor the success of gamification projects, to understand a user’s behaviour, and to adapt gamification designs. Even though experts agree on the importance of these activities, concrete processes and software tools have not been investigated yet. This chapter advocates and introduces gamification analytics related activities based on the findings of a study with gamification experts and illustrates them in a hypothetical gamification scenario. In the following, we identify and assess tools regarding their applicability for the presented analytical activities. This chapter helps practitioners to implement a data-driven monitoring and adaptation process within gamification projects and supports them in corresponding technology-decisions. The conclusion provides researchers with a basis for further research in the gamification analytics domain.

Companies today seek to deepen their relationships with customers. As a very demanding concept we observe collaboration with customers and the integration of customers in firm’s value chain activities. Also companies increasingly bank on introducing game mechanisms in order to motivate common interactions. In this chapter we take Open Customer Innovation (OCI) as an example for customer relations. Starting with the problems that can be observed, we deduce possibly successful effects of gamification. Finally we introduce game mechanisms that can potentially save OCI from negative consequences and moreover serve as a guide for a serious approach to successful customer relationship management.

Virtual idea communities (VIC) are a relatively new phenomenon in business. These communities, in which distributed groups of individual customers focus on voluntarily sharing and elaborating innovation ideas, are used by firms to integrate customers into the ideation for new product development rooted in Chesbrough’s (2003) open innovation paradigm. Developers and decision makers realised especially within the last decade that games or game-like appeals could serve as appropriate gamifications to attract people to participate in VICs. Therefore, gamification gained momentum and has been widely implemented into VICs. The use of gamification does, however, not lead to the intended positive outcomes per se. Because of that, obstacles and challenges in the use of gamification have to be considered, but these have often been neglected in practice. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to address this topic and to describe major obstacles and challenges in the use of gamification in VICs.

Over the past decade, systems that are used to support the early phases of the innovation process have evolved from simple suggestion boxes to sophisticated social media platforms for the development and refinement of ideas. Organisations who want to profit from the use of these platforms face the following two significant and interconnected challenges: First, organisations have to motivate (groups of) individuals to participate, and they must place them in a state of high involvement and flow. Second, organisations must inspire individuals in order to generate creative output. One activity that leads to high motivation, to a feeling of flow and involvement, and to creative output, is play. This chapter focuses on the question of how to design social media based on open innovation tools to harness the potential of play by applying game mechanics to innovation management. It is argued that there are two possibilities: either enriching open innovation tools with game mechanics (gamification) or adjusting a multiplayer online game to the purpose of ideation (online ideation game). This chapter sheds light on these two possibilities and gives practical implications for implementation. The first section of this chapter describes how specific game mechanics can be implemented in social media based on open innovation tools. The second section of this chapter illustrates a number of online ideation games that have recently been applied and shows how the previous described game mechanics can also serve as building blocks for those games. The third section of this chapter gives managers key lessons at hand who strive to apply game mechanics to innovation management. The key lessons relate to (1) the planning and design phase and (2) the introduction and operation phase of a gamified open innovation tool or an online ideation game.

Despite the fact that enterprise social software solutions such as IBM Connections and Microsoft Sharepoint are able to increase the communication as well as the collaboration among employees, companies are constantly confronted with the necessity to improve their employees’ motivation to interact with the system. Since gamification has been identified as an effective tool to enhance user acceptance, software developers adopt an increasing number of gamification elements to take advantage of it. Based on an in-depth analysis of the international market leaders in enterprise social software solutions, this chapter examines the implementation of gamification elements and critically reflects on how well they fit with the current insights of flow research in motivational psychology. We argue that current gamification elements predominately aim at the augmentation of the users’ extrinsic motivation whereas intrinsic motivation has mostly been ignored. Furthermore, we identify a trend in which gamification solutions primarily focus on rewarding quantitative improvement of work activities, neglecting qualitative performance. Subsequently, current solutions do not match recent findings in research and ignore risks that can lower the employees’ motivation and work performance in the long run.

Over the past few years games, and gamification have become increasingly widespread in numerous business sectors. The serious game introduced in this chapter is designed as a qualitative market research method, thereby showing a comparatively new field of application for games. It can be used in place of classical qualitative methods, such as focus groups or interviews. It reduces the weaknesses of such techniques, whilst simultaneously using the advantages of game thinking. The game maps the information search during a purchase decision process and enables the probands to play their individual information search process. During this procedure, they reveal valuable insights into their needs. These insights could help organisations to influence their customers at the relevant touch points during the decision process.

Requirements engineering (RE) is a discipline that focuses on obtaining a specification for a system that fulfils the expectations of the stakeholders. Unfortunately, the current state of the practice reveals that only a few stakeholders are involved—mostly key clients and lead designers—while active stakeholders are not highly engaged. This lowers the chances of obtaining a system that fully fulfils the stakeholders’ wishes. Gamification is an opportunity to increase the engagement of stakeholders in RE by establishing feedback loops that reward the useful participants, i.e., those who provide valuable contributions (requirements) for the system being designed. The related trend of crowdsourcing can be employed to maximise the number of participating stakeholders, by making RE a participatory activity where current and prospective users, developers, clients and analysts are involved. This chapter introduces the Crowd-Centric Requirements Engineering (CCRE) method that guides software producing organisations (SPOs) by involving a crowd of engaged stakeholders in RE. CCRE uses the REfine tool, a gamified platform for eliciting and refining requirements. In addition to presenting the method and its application in a case study, we define research challenges for the field.

Gamified e-books extend invitations for young and adult readers to revisit classical literary worlds. We examine ten e-books to discover distinctive rhetorical resources used to enhance the reading experience and achieve convergence with the original literary world. We distinguish between attempts to focus attention on the material world, to create empathy with characters through perception, choice and emotions and, last but not least, to shape the reader’s journey through the medium of text. Our proposed inventory may guide designers in creating gamified e-books that bring literary worlds and characters to life even more vividly.

Gamification has become a major aspect in many fields of academia. Motivating people to participate and engage more intensively in order to increase the outcome with the help of game mechanics has already been applied in the field of education. With our approach of gamification of university teaching, we seek to improve the learning efficiency, motivation, fun and participation by constructing GamEducation. We implemented GamEducation in a master’s level course, conducted it twice over two years and conducted several evaluations to validate our hypothesis. We found that GamEducation improves major fields of university teaching such as motivation, fun, participation and learning efficiency. However, GamEducation increases the workload for both students and teaching staff.