Michael Meder

DAIKnow: A Gamified Enterprise Bookmarking System

One of the core ideas of gamification in an enterprise setting is to engage employees, i.e., to motivate them to fulfil boring, but necessary tasks. In this demo paper, we present a gamified enterprise bookmarking system which incorporates points, badges and a leaderboard. Preliminary studies indicate that these gamification methods result in an increased user engagement.

Data-driven gamification design

Gamification has been attracted much interest, not only in the HCI community, in the last few years. However, there is still a lack of insights and theory on the relationships between game design elements, motivation, domain context and user behavior. In this workshop we want to discover the potentials of data-driven gamification design optimization, e.g. by the application of machine learning techniques on user interaction data in a certain domain.

Third International Workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval (GamifIR'16)

Stronger engagement and greater participation is often crucial to reach a goal or to solve an issue. Issues like the emerging employee engagement crisis, insufficient knowledge sharing, and chronic procrastination. In many cases we need and search for tools to beat procrastination or to change peoples habits. Gamification is the approach to learn from often fun, creative and engaging games. In principle, it is about understanding games and applying game design elements in a non-gaming environments. This offers possibilities for wide area improvements. For example more accurate work, better retention rates and more cost effective solutions by relating motivations for participating as more intrinsic than conventional methods. In the context of Information Retrieval (IR) it is not hard to imagine that many tasks could benefit from gamification techniques. Besides several manual annotation tasks of data sets for IR research, user participation is important in order to gather implicit or even explicit feedback to feed the algorithms. Gamification, however, comes with its own challenges and its adoption in IR is still in its infancy. Given the enormous response to the first and second GamifIR workshops that were both co-located with ECIR, and the broad range of topics discussed, we now organized the third workshop at SIGIR 2016 to address a range of emerging challenges and opportunities.

Second international workshop on gamification for information retrieval (GamifIR’15)

Gamification is a popular methodology describing the trend of applying game design principles and elements, such as feedback loops, points, badges or leader boards in non-gaming environments. Gamification can have several different objectives. Besides just increasing the fun factor, these could be, for example, to achieve more accurate work, better retention rates and more cost effective solutions by relating motivations for participating as more intrinsic than conventional methods. In the context of Information Retrieval (IR), there are various tasks that can benefit from gamification techniques such as the manual annotation of documents in IR evaluation or participation in user studies to tackle interactive IR challenges. Gamification, however, comes with its own challenges and its adoption in IR is still in its infancy. Given the enormous response to the first GamifIR workshop at ECIR 2014 and the broad range of topics discussed it seemed timely and appropriate to organise a follow-up workshop.

Gamification in E-Commerce: Tangible vs. Intangible Rewards

Increasing user participation or changing behavior are key goals when applying gamification. Existing studies in domains such as education, health, and enterprise show that gamification can have a positive impact on meeting these goals. However, there is still a lack of detailed insights into how certain game design elements affect user behavior and motivation. To gain further insight, this paper presents a user study in the field with 20, 000 participants of a mobile e-commerce application over a one-month time period to analyze the impact of gamification in the e-commerce domain and to compare the effectiveness of tangible versus intangible rewards. Results show that gamification has a positive impact in the e-commerce domain. The study also reveals that tangible rewards increase the user activity substantially more than intangible rewards. We further show how tangible rewards affect certain user types and provide a first discussion on the lastingness of these rewards.

GamifIR 2016: SIGIR 2016 Workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval

The third workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval (GamifIR) took place on the 21th of July 2016 in conjunction with SIGIR 2016 in Pisa, Italy. It was the first GamifIR held in conjunction with the SIGIR, the first and second GamifIR workshops were both colocated with ECIR. The workshop program included one invited keynote presentation, seven paper presentations and a discussion session. The keynote presentation stated the necessity of proper theory for gamification design and resulting opportunities. The paper presentation covered studies on diverse areas and approaches for the application of gamification.

Gamification of workplace activities

Gamification—taking game design patterns and principles out of video games to apply them in non-game environments has become a popular idea in the last 4 years. It has also successfully been applied to workplace environments, but it still remains unclear how employees really feel about the introduction of a gamified system. We address this matter by comparing the employees’ subjective perception of gamification with their actual usage behavior in an enterprise application software. As a result of the experiment, we find there is a strong relationship visible. Following up on this observation, we pose the gamification design problem under the assumptions that (i) gamification consists of various types of users that experience game design elements differently; and (ii) gamification is deployed in order to achieve some goals in the broadest sense, as the problem of assigning each user a game design element that maximizes their expected contribution to achieve these goals. We show that this problem can be reduced to a statistical learning problem and suggest matrix factorization as one solution when user interaction data is given. The hypothesis is that predictive models as intelligent tools for supporting users in decision-making may have the potential to support the design process in gamification.