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.
Video gaming actively demands players' attention, affording positive experiences like flow. Recent research has suggested to extend analysis from cognitive and physical to the social and emotional ...demands of gameplay. This article argues that Erving Goffman's concept of interaction tension offers a promising theoretical model for social demands. We report a re-analysis of qualitative interview data on the social norms of video gaming corroborating the model. As suggested by Goffman (1961) for gaming, video gaming features rich social norms regarding involvement. When spontaneously experienced and normatively demanded involvement misalign, players experience self-conscious disinvolvement and engage in unenjoyable, effortful self-control of their experienced and displayed involvement.
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.
We aimed to assess the amount and quality of empirical support for the advantages and effectiveness of gamification applied to health and well-being.
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.
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.
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).
•A systematic review is conducted to assess the empirical effectiveness of gamification in the health and wellbeing domain.•Twenty-one papers are identified that report empirical evidence on the effectiveness of gamification in health and wellbeing.•Overall the evidence suggests gamification can have a positive impact for health and wellbeing related interventions.•The evidence is strongest for the use of gamification to target behavioural outcomes, particularly physical activity.•Further research that isolates the impacts of gamification is needed.
Os game studies há muito tempo vêm debatendo como relacionar os elementos ficcionais e os do jogo nos videogames. Este artigo propõe que muitos dos desafios conceituais nesse debate podem ser ...solucionados se os jogos e a ficção não forem tratados separadamente, mas como formalizações específicas de um mesmo fenômeno comum: o jogar. O artigo apresenta cinco propostas teóricas dessa perspectiva de jogo-e-ficção-como-jogar (JEFCJ), segundo a qual tanto os jogos quanto a ficção apresentam mais semelhanças que diferenças. Ele extrai os princípios e vantagens compartilhadas por essa abordagem JEFCJ, e como isso ajuda a explicar tanto os pontos em comum, quanto as diferenças entre a ficção e os jogos.
Gamification in management is currently informed by two contradicting framings or rhetorics: the rhetoric of choice architecture casts humans as rational actors and games as perfect information and ...incentive dispensers, giving managers fine-grained control over people’s behavior. It aligns with basic tenets of neoclassical economics, scientific management, operations research/management science, and current big data-driven decision making. In contrast, the rhetoric of humanistic design casts humans as growth-oriented and games as environments optimally designed to afford positive, meaningful experiences. This view, fitting humanistic management ideas and the rise of design and customer experience, casts managers as “second order” designers. While both rhetorics highlight important aspects of games and management, the former is more likely to be adopted and absorbed into business as usual, whereas the latter holds more uncertainty, but also transformative potential.
Why do we seek out and enjoy uncertain success in playing games? Game designers and researchers suggest that games whose challenges match player skills afford engaging experiences of achievement, ...competence, or effectance—of
doing well
. Yet, current models struggle to explain why such balanced challenges best afford these experiences and do not straightforwardly account for the appeal of high- and low-challenge game genres like Idle and Soulslike games. In this article, we show that Predictive Processing (PP) provides a coherent formal cognitive framework which can explain the fun in tackling game challenges with uncertain success as the dynamic process of reducing uncertainty surprisingly efficiently. In gameplay as elsewhere, people enjoy
doing better than expected
, which can track learning progress. In different forms, balanced, Idle, and Soulslike games alike afford regular accelerations of uncertainty reduction. We argue that this model also aligns with a popular practitioner model, Raph Koster’s
Theory of Fun for Game Design
, and can unify currently differentially modelled gameplay motives around competence and curiosity.
Citizen science games are an increasingly popular form of citizen science, in which volunteer participants engage in scientific research while playing a game. Their success depends on a diverse set ...of stakeholders working together-scientists, volunteers, and game developers. Yet the potential needs of these stakeholder groups and their possible tensions are poorly understood. To identify these needs and possible tensions, we conducted a qualitative data analysis of two years of ethnographic research and 57 interviews with stakeholders from 10 citizen science games, following a combination of grounded theory and reflexive thematic analysis. We identify individual stakeholder needs as well as important barriers to citizen science game success. These include the ambiguous allocation of developer roles, limited resources and funding dependencies, the need for a citizen science game community, and science-game tensions. We derive recommendations for addressing these barriers.
How does the difficulty of a task affect people's enjoyment and engagement? Intrinsic motivation and flow theories posit a 'goldilocks' optimum where task difficulty matches performer skill, yet ...current work is confounded by questionable measurement practices and lacks scalable methods to manipulate objective difficulty-skill ratios. We developed a two-player tactical game test suite with an artificial intelligence (AI)-controlled opponent that uses a variant of the Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm to precisely manipulate difficulty-skill ratios. A pre-registered study (
= 311) showed that our AI produced targeted difficulty-skill ratios without participants noticing the manipulation, yet different ratios had no significant impact on enjoyment or engagement. This indicates that difficulty-skill balance does not always affect engagement and enjoyment, but that games with AI-controlled difficulty provide a useful paradigm for rigorous future work on this issue.
User involvement is widely accepted as key for designing effective applied games for health. This especially holds true for children and young people as target audiences, whose abilities, needs, and ...preferences can diverge substantially from those of adult designers and players. Nevertheless, there is little shared knowledge about how concretely children and young people have been involved in the design of applied games, let alone consensus guidance on how to do so effectively.
The aim of this scoping review was to describe which user involvement methods have been used in the design of applied games with children and young people, how these methods were implemented, and in what roles children and young people were involved as well as what factors affected their involvement.
We conducted a systematic literature search and selection across the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and Web of Science databases using State of the Art through Systematic Review software for screening, selection, and data extraction. We then conducted a qualitative content analysis on the extracted data using NVivo.
We retrieved 1085 records, of which 47 (4.33%) met the eligibility criteria. The chief involvement methods were participatory design (20/47, 43%) and co-design (16/47, 37%), spanning a wide range of 45 concrete activities with paper prototyping, group discussions, and playtesting being the most frequent. In only half of the studies (24/47, 51%), children and young people participated as true design partners. Our qualitative content analysis suggested 5 factors that affect their successful involvement: comprehension, cohesion, confidence, accessibility, and time constraints.
Co-design, participatory design, and similar high-level labels that are currently used in the field gloss over very uneven degrees of participation in design and a wide variety of implementations that greatly affect actual user involvement. This field would benefit from more careful consideration and documentation of the reason of user involvement. Future research should explore concrete activities and configurations that can address the common challenges of involving children and young people, such as comprehension, cohesion, confidence, and accessibility.
Alibis for Adult Play Deterding, Sebastian
Games and culture,
05/2018, Letnik:
13, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
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.
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