Adaptive Gamification in Collaborative Systems, a Systematic Mapping Study

Mass collaboration mediated by technology is now commonplace (Wikipedia, Quora, TripAdvisor). Online, mass collaboration is also present in science in the form of Citizen Science. These collaboration models, which have a large community of contributors coordinated to pursue a common goal, are known as Collaborative systems. This article introduces a study of the published research on the application of adaptive gamification to collaborative systems. The study focuses on works that explicitly discuss an approach of personalization or adaptation of the gamification elements in this type of system. It employs a systematic mapping design in which a categorical structure for classifying the research results is proposed based on the topics that emerged from the papers review. The main contributions of this paper are a formalization of the adaptation strategies and the proposal of a new taxonomy for gamification elements adaptation. The results evidence the lack of research literature in the study of adapting gamification in the field of collaborative systems. Considering the underlying cultural diversity in those projects, the adaptability of gamification design and strategies is a promissory research field.