In this paper we explore mastery, a powerful intrinsic motivator, and its relationship to player engagement in a mobile skill-based game platform (Skillz.com). More specifically, we present a unique Elo-based rating system for quickly matching players with similar skill levels, which results in fair tournaments. Our rating system assigns a player with a relative rating that predicts how well they will do against another player. In an n-player game, the players with higher ratings have a higher likelihood of winning against those with lower ratings. We show that a system that promotes fairness allows players to improve by competing against players close to their skill level, which in turn promotes a sense of mastery. We show that when players feel they are improving, their engagement in the game increases. Finally, we discuss the implications of our approach for increasing fairness in gamification by matching users and tasks based on skill level.
It is heavily debated within the gamification community whether specific game elements may actually undermine users' intrinsic motivation. This online experiment examined the effects of three commonly employed game design elements -- points, leaderboard, levels -- on users' performance, intrinsic motivation, perceived autonomy and competence in an image annotation task. Implementation of these game elements significantly increased performance, but did not affect perceived autonomy, competence or intrinsic motivation. Our findings suggest that points, levels and leaderboards by themselves neither make nor break users' intrinsic motivation in non-game contexts. Instead, it is assumed that they act as progress indicators, guiding and enhancing user performance. While more research on the contextual factors that may potentially mediate the effects of game elements on intrinsic motivation is required, it seems that the implementation of points, levels, and leaderboards is a viable means to promote specific user behavior in non-game contexts.
This research has been conducted to ascertain the validity of existing videogame reward categorisations. An overview of current videogame reward types is provided and the need for further research in the area of videogame reward systems is identified. Possible limitations of the primary existing reward taxonomy are identified. We propose a definition of videogame rewards and present initial findings on a partially validated videogame reward taxonomy. Future games and gamified applications stand to benefit from a categorisation of videogame rewards, as videogame rewards play a pivotal role in player motivation.
Balancing academic, physical and emotional needs of students while maintaining student interest is increasingly challenging in the resource constrained environments of the modern classroom. To answer this need we created and evaluated an exergame system called Vortex Mountain, which leverages the physical benefits of exercise and the motivational benefits of educational games to provide a healthy and engaging classroom activity for middle school students. Through a controlled study, we demonstrate that our classroom exergame provides similar affective, engagement, and learning benefits to an exercise or game intervention, while leveraging the valuable ancillary benefits of each. Thus, we believe that exergames have a future in the modern classroom and possess significant potential for future technical and pedagogical research.
In this paper, we overview the design of tablet apps built to teach introductory computer science concepts, and present the results and conclusions from a study conducted during a first year computer science course at McMaster University. Game design elements were incorporated into the apps we designed to teach introductory computer science concepts, with the primary aim of increasing student satisfaction and engagement. We tested these apps with students enrolled in the course during their regular lab sessions and collected data on both the usability of the apps and the student's understanding of the concepts. Though overall we found students preferred instruction with the apps compared to more traditional academic instruction, we found that students also recommended combined instruction using both traditional methods and the apps in the future. Based on this we conclude that gamification and serious game design approaches are effective at increasing student satisfaction, and make several recommendations regarding the usage and design of educational software incorporating game design elements.
Gamification, that is, employing game design elements to non-gaming applications to make them more fun, engaging, and motivating, has been growing in popularity and is seen in a large number of contexts. In this paper we present a framework that seeks to provide investigators with guidelines for the implementation of gamification. The proposed framework is an adaptation of a framework proposed by the Medical Research Council in 2000, and has been extensively applied to research in health services, public health, and social policy related to health. The use of this framework within the gamification field may help make gamification a more controlled intervention that can be documented, and evaluated, with replicated outcomes amongst differing contexts.
This paper highlights the reactions of non-beginners to gamification in persuasive health technologies data from a month-long 15-person study of first time Wii Fit users. Participants represent beginners and non-beginners with respect to past fitness experiences and current goals, and we find that these starting points affect their experiences with the system. While beginners respond positively to gamified elements in Wii Fit, these same elements have a detrimental effect on non-beginners' experiences, leading them to abandon the system as a fitness tool. This suggests the need for gamification in persuasive systems to better consider the nuanced context of use, and we recommend ways in which tools like Wii Fit can use gamification to motivate users with varied levels of experience with the target behavior.
Tasks have an overwhelming effect on our management capacity, including the societal need to attend events as part of our office culture. Using gamification to make task and chore management more exciting could allow people to be more productive while they are engaged and focused on their tasks. There is currently a lack of studies on the usefulness of gamified task-management applications. We address this by investigating two memory-aid applications with task-based gamification. One app was easier to learn to use while the other was more satisfying and motivating. Participants, who felt good about an apps' reward system, were also more satisfied with its use. Conventional task managers are, however, preferred for speed and efficiency. Based on interviews, it seems that gamified task managers are not more useful than classical ones. However, there is a relationship between how participants perceive game mechanics and how useful they find an app for task management.
Gamifying citizen science campaigns has the potential to further engage existing volunteers, as well as to attract new contributors. By evaluating Biotracker, a gamified mobile application that gathers plant phenology data, we explored the feasibility of engaging a secondary group of Millennials, who are notorious technology enthusiasts, with a gamified citizen science app. We also explored the potential benefits that using an application might offer these users. Results suggest that gamification is key to attracting many Millennials, as are social motivations and, to a lesser extent, education. Potential benefits to these participants include an increased awareness of community and an increase in domain knowledge.
Limber is an office "exergame" aimed at incentivizing regular body movement and good posture. In this paper we describe our progression in design and implementation from a wearable system targeting repetitive stress injury to the back, wrist and neck, to our current vision-based system focused on posture, gross motor mobility and whole body stretches. We argue that our design- driven research approach has helped us to uncover key research questions while also leading to a robust design that effectively manages a tension between motivation to play and the need to concentrate on primary work activities.
This paper examines the effect of gamification techniques in engaging students in a teaching context, in particular the influence of competition. We conducted a longitudinal survey study (informed by a focus group) -- in an MBA classroom that uses ERPsim, which is a gamified simulation system for teaching the SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software solution. Flow theory was used to understand engagement during this method of learning. We examined the effect of antecedents of Flow, such as skill and challenge, and the effect of Flow on its consequences such as satisfaction and student feelings. In line with earlier research, our results showed that losing a competition can have a detrimental effect on students' satisfaction and enjoyment; however, competition is still a key element that highly motivates students to engage in the gamification tasks.
Games are of great interest in education. Their motivational qualities make players more persistent and resilient. In particular, virtual environments have proven to be good learning engagers, as they generate opportunities to create, explore and communicate. Here we present an exploratory study on how student autonomy and creativity can be improved by mixing virtual environments and gamification. To attain this, we added to a gamified course a 2.5D virtual environment that grows along with student grading, called AvatarWorld. There, students are represented by customized avatars, and they also can create custom content. Preliminary results suggest that even though students did not spend too much time in AvatarWorld, they were motivated to perform creative tasks that required knowledge acquired in the course.
In this paper we explore how gamification can be applied to education in order to improve student engagement. We present a study in which a college course was gamified, by including experience points, levels, badges, challenges and leaderboards. The study was five years long, where the first three were non-gamified years, and the last two regarded two successive experiments of our gamified approach. To assess how gamification impacted the learning experience, we compared data from both gamified and non-gamified years, using different performance measures. Results show significant improvements in terms of attention to reference materials, online participation and proactivity. They also suggest that our approach can reduce grade discrepancies among students and help them score better. Modeling course activities with game challenges and properly distributing those over the term seem to enhance this effect.
Recently, a number of organizations have employed the use of gamification for the purpose of employee recruitment. Results of these gamified recruitment processes are reportedly positive, although no clear statistics have been provided to objectively gauge its effectiveness. We submit that gamification of the recruitment process may be conceptualized as a system of persuasive design. That is, gamification may be used to attract a wide range of potential job applicants, engaging them and directing their attention to pertinent organizational information. Once attracted gamification affects applicants through influencing their states of decisive attention. This paper will draw from foundational theories of psychology to illustrate the possible mechanisms of attitude change that gamification may engender. When applied to recruitment, attitude changes towards an organization may possibly lead to job pursuit behaviours, or greater awareness of an organization. This theory paper is one of the first on the psychology of gamification as applied to recruitment. The propositions in this paper will later be empirically tested.
By avoiding holistic and accurate portrayals of the physical limitations of human beings, contemporary games ultimately fail to acknowledge the more marginalized qualities of humankind in their characters. For example, we often see idealized human heroes who require no food, water or sleep in games from all generations, such as the majority of characters in first person shooters (FPS), role-playing games (RPG) and action adventure games. Such characters shrug off extreme bodily damage and are almost always in perfect mental health. 3=3 aims to expand the definition of what it means to experience the journey of an ideal protagonist through the realization and development of three characters, each of whom have an individualized disability or impairment. Inspired by games with proven design frameworks, game mechanics and user experiences, their journey together to survive a contemporary disaster scenario becomes a memorable experience of emotive and relational understanding. 3=3 aims to encourage a positive shift in the way gamers understand and perceive the embodied experiences that manifest from the addressed disability demographics, not only in virtual characters, but in real life encounters. Additionally, the success of 3=3 would invoke new perceptions in regards to how notable characters can be portrayed, encouraging game designers to consider more realistic, inclusive portrayals.
Gamification is the use of game-like properties in non-game scenarios, and is applied in the design of our application to stimulate cognition, and enjoyment, which often decreases due to age-related changes. The goal of the research reported here is to develop a game, targeted for elderly citizens, that has a user-friendly interface and the ability to predict cognitive ability. This paper will introduce and evaluate a game designed based on the classic carnival game called whack-a-mole, which has the objective of a user 'hitting' a 'mole'. Our version of the game underwent a usability study where we evaluated the game in an experiment, and investigated its cognitive predictive ability. This paper will discuss the results from the experiment, detail the limitations, and propose future research.
Driving can be dangerous, especially for young and inexperienced drivers. To help address the issue of inexperience a gamified logbook application was developed for Learner drivers. The application aims to encourage learners to undertake a wider range of practice, while also making it easier to record their mandatory practice sessions. This paper reports on the design of this application, focusing on the effect that adding gamification can have on the usability and user experience of the application and the importance of playability testing for gamified systems. Two versions of the application were developed, one with game elements and one without game elements. This paper presents findings from a study that compares the user experience of these two versions of the application with twelve recent Learner drivers. Overall, participants reported that the gamified version was more engaging and motivating than the non-gamified version, however neither versions were preferred over the other. We theorise that this may have occurred due to a number of usability issues that arose, including an increased difficulty in learnability due to the added game elements. These design issues are important to address in future gamified system designs.
Many courses require self-study to succeed. This is especially true of online courses. However, self-study activities, such as reading the textbook and completing the associated workbook, are not motivating and do not contribute directly to grades. As a result many students do not complete these activities and this may lead to a lower understanding of the material and a lower overall grade in the class. In this paper we present the prototype of a casual game, Reading Garden, which encourages self-study through casual gameplay.
In this paper we explore mastery, a powerful intrinsic motivator, and its relationship to player engagement in a mobile skill-based game platform (Skillz.com). More specifically, we present a unique Elo-based rating system for quickly matching players with similar skill levels, which results in fair tournaments. Our rating system assigns a player with a relative rating that predicts how well they will do against another player. In an n-player game, the players with higher ratings have a higher likelihood of winning against those with lower ratings. We show that a system that promotes fairness allows players to improve by competing against players close to their skill level, which in turn promotes a sense of mastery. We show that when players feel they are improving, their engagement in the game increases. Finally, we discuss the implications of our approach for increasing fairness in gamification by matching users and tasks based on skill level.
Gamification has become an increasingly popular way to improve user engagement and motivation, but there is currently a lack of empirical research to demonstrate that increased gamification provides these benefits. To help address this problem we designed three versions of a gamified market research survey and tested them alongside the established industry standard in a study of over 600 participants. We also highlight examples where game elements compromise respondent data, and provide design solutions that correct the problem without losing the motivational benefits of gamification.
