ECIR WORKSHOP REPORT ECIR 2015 Workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval (GamifIR’15)

The second workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval took place at ECIR 2015 in Vienna, Austria on the 29th of March. The workshop program included two invited keynote presentations, seven oral presentations of refereed papers, lots of mini discussion sessions and a fishbowl session. The presentations covered diverse topics from playing around with an eye tracker to a game with IR papers and even a game of scientific hangman, generating lively and fun discussions. The workshop was a crowdpinion experiment itself, gathering participants’ momentary opinions via an Android app. One of the main themes of the day was the interplay of gamification aspects and incentives, where the key challenge is to align player motivations with the goal of the task. Any misalignment may lead to gamification as a tool being more damaging than useful with users’ focus shifting from the task to gaming the system.