Sebastian Deterding

Gamification: designing for motivation

Social Mediator is a forum exploring the ways that HCI research and principles interact---or might interact---with practices in the social media world.<br /><b><i>Joe McCarthy, Editor</i></b>

The Lens of Intrinsic Skill Atoms: A Method for Gameful Design

The idea that game design can inspire the design of motivating, enjoyable interactive systems has a long history in human-computer interaction. It currently experiences a renaissance as gameful design, often implemented through gamification, the use of game design elements in nongame contexts. Yet there is little research-based guidance on designing gameful systems. This article therefore reviews existing methods and identifies challenges and requirements for gameful design. It introduces a gameful design method that uses skill atoms and design lenses to identify challenges inherent in a user’s goal pursuit and restructure them to afford gameplay-characteristic motivating, enjoyable experiences. Two case studies illustrate the method. The article closes by outlining how gameful design might inform experience-driven design more generally.

Gamification for health and wellbeing: A systematic review of the literature

Background Compared to traditional persuasive technology and health games, gamification is posited to offer several advantages for motivating behaviour change for health and well-being, and increasingly used. Yet little is known about its effectiveness. Aims We aimed to assess the amount and quality of empirical support for the advantages and effectiveness of gamification applied to health and well-being. Methods We identified seven potential advantages of gamification from existing research and conducted a systematic literature review of empirical studies on gamification for health and well-being, assessing quality of evidence, effect type, and application domain. Results We identified 19 papers that report empirical evidence on the effect of gamification on health and well-being. 59% reported positive, 41% mixed effects, with mostly moderate or lower quality of evidence provided. Results were clear for health-related behaviours, but mixed for cognitive outcomes. Conclusions The current state of evidence supports that gamification can have a positive impact in health and wellbeing, particularly for health behaviours. However several studies report mixed or neutral effect. Findings need to be interpreted with caution due to the relatively small number of studies and methodological limitations of many studies (e.g., a lack of comparison of gamified interventions to non-gamified versions of the intervention).

Designing gamification: creating gameful and playful experiences

In recent years, gamification - the use of game design elements in non-game contexts - has seen rapid adoption in the software industry, as well as a growing body of research on its uses and effects. However, little is known about the effective design of such gameful systems, including whether their evaluation requires special approaches. This workshop therefore convenes researchers and industry practitioners to identify current practices, challenges, and open research questions in the design of gameful systems.

The maturing of gamification research

Throughout history, many have championed the use of play, games, and game-inspired design to improve the human condition. In the mid-2000s, the confluence of web technologies, digital business models, and online and location-based gaming gave rise to the most recent manifestation of this basic idea. Mobile applications like foursquare and websites like StackOverflow borrowed design elements like point scores, badges, or leaderboards from social network games and meta-gaming systems like Xbox Live to motivate user activity. This industry practice quickly became known as gamification, which can be defined as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011). Many startups and design agencies emerged to offer gamification design or software-as-a-service (SaaS) packages, and large organisations (e.g., Oracle and SAP) across the globe began exploring gamification as a way to motivate people and improve the user experience. Applications reach from education and training to health, self-management, innovation, employee engagement, heritage, crowdsourcing, civic engagement, and marketing (Seaborn & Fels, 2015). Today, gamification is an established practice and industry segment, by some estimates poised to grow to over US

Engagement effects of player rating system-based matchmaking for level ordering in human computation games

11 billion by 2020 (Markets and Markets, 2016). A key enabler of this groundswell has been now-ubiquitous sensor and computing technology: smart cities, smartphones, and wearables are increasingly tracking and processing our every step, effectively turning our life-world into a digital game in waiting. In parallel, we see a shift to post-material values of selfexpression and experience, catered to by a dematerialized ‘experience economy’ and a new profession and practice of experience designers, as well as the growth of digital games into a dominant cultural form, complete with a whole ‘gamer generation’ socialised into them. Economically, we can observe the transformation of business models and market differentiators towards innovation, user experience, customer relations, and the tight integration of customers into value chains with user-led innovation,

The Pyrrhic Victory of Game Studies Assessing the Past, Present, and Future of Interdisciplinary Game Research

Human computation games lack established ways of balancing the difficulty of tasks or levels served to players, potentially contributing to their low engagement rates. Traditional player rating systems have been suggested as a potential solution: using them to rate both players and tasks could estimate player skill and task difficulty and fuel player-task matchmaking. However, neither the effect of difficulty balancing on engagement in human computation games nor the use of player rating systems for this purpose has been empirically tested. We therefore examined the engagement effects of using the Glicko-2 player rating system to order tasks in the human computation game Paradox. An online experiment (n=294) found that both matchmaking-based and pure difficulty-based ordering of tasks led to significantly more attempted and completed levels than random ordering. Additionally, both matchmaking and random ordering led to significantly more difficult tasks being completed than pure difficulty-based ordering. We conclude that poor balancing contributes to poor engagement in human computation games, and that player rating system-based difficulty rating may be a viable and efficient way of improving both.

Alibis for Adult Play: A Goffmanian Account of Escaping Embarrassment in Adult Play

Although game studies are widely viewed as an interdisciplinary field, it is unclear how interdisciplinary they actually are. In response, this article reads scientometric data and game studies editorials, handbooks, and introductions through the lens of interdisciplinarity studies to assess game studies’ status as an interdiscipline. It argues that game studies show drivers and hurdles typical for interdisciplines. Yet instead of establishing themselves as the broad umbrella interdiscipline of digital game research, they are becoming one narrow cultural studies multidiscipline within the growing and diversifying field of game research and education. Researchers from fields like human–computer interaction or communication are abandoning game studies venues in favor of disciplinary ones—ironically thanks to game studies legitimizing game research. This article suggests that a design orientation and cross-disciplinary boundary objects such as middle range theories could help to broaden, deepen, and secure future interdisciplinary game research.

Make-Believe in Gameful and Playful Design

The social meanings of play sit at odds with norms of responsible and productive adult conduct. To be “caught” playing as an adult therefore risks embarrassment. Still, many designers want to create enjoyable, nonembarrassing play experiences for adults. To address this need, this article reads instances of spontaneous adult play through the lens of Erving Goffman’s theory of the interaction order to unpack conditions and strategies for nonembarrassing adult play. It identifies established frames, segregated audiences, scripts supporting smooth performance, managing audience awareness, role distancing, and, particularly, alibis for play: Adults routinely provide alternative, adult-appropriate motives to account for their play, such as child care, professional duties, creative expression, or health. Once legitimized, the norms and rules of play themselves then provide an alibi for behavior that would risk being embarrassing outside play.

Embarrassing Interactions

Gameful and playful design aspire to make existing activities and systems more engaging by infusing them with the engaging qualities of games and toys. One such quality is make-believe, the constitution of fictional “as ifs”. While frequently evoked, actual work on make-believe in gameful and playful design has remained quite scarce and scattered. This chapter therefore draws on neighbouring fields to break out five major design aspects of make-believe: theming; storification; scripting, ruling, and framing; role-play; and their integration in unified experiences. For each, the chapter presents explanatory theories; psychological and behavioural effects; design elements and strategies used to evoke said effects; and existing empirical studies. The chapter closes in summarizing how and why playful make-believe design differs from current gamification in form (often artistic one-offs) and technology (often audio); and what limitations future research should try to overcome.