Introduction to Gamification Minitrack

During the last decade games have become an established vein of entertainment, and consumer culture, and essentially, a common part of people’s daily lives. However, in addition to the increased penetration of games, the ways in which people play and employ games have also become more varied. The long-tail is getting longer: there are more different kinds of games available for a multitude of different platforms that cater for differing gaming needs for widening audiences, and which use a wide variety of business models. The most prominent advancement stemming from these developments has been named as “gamification” which generally refers to the increased convergence of games and everyday life. More particularly and practically, gamification commonly refers to the process of enhancing services and systems so that they increase enjoyable and intrinsically motivated use; as well as supporting further behavioral change by employing elements characteristic of games, “Transforming Homo Economicus into Homo Ludens”. While gamification has been regarded as one of today’s most potential technology trends, it has also been acknowledged that gamification is considerably difficult to design and implement. Therefore, in “How to gamify? A method for designing gamification”, Benedikt Morschheuser, Karl Werder, Juho Hamari and Julian Abe seek to advance the understanding of best practices related to the gamification design process via design research approach, and by developing a design framework for gamification. Another major hindrance in designing successful gamification applications has been believed to stem from individual differences between users. Little work has been done to understand the motivational impact of specific game elements depending on user traits and attributes, and therefore, gamification has commonly been implemented with the heuristic of “one-size-fitsall”. Therefore, in “Identifying Motivational Styles in Educational Gamification”, Jared Chapman and Peter Rich investigate the levels of motivation reported by students from different game design patterns. In the same vein, companies are actively attempting to find ways to overcome the difficulties in designing successful gamification solutions, however, it has remained opaque as to how companies are approaching gamification. Therefore, in “Gamification in Proprietary Innovation: Identifying a Technical Framework Based on Patent Data”, Patrick Höflinger identifies underlying patterns in international patent documents related to gamification (from EPO, USTPO and Google Patents) in order to discover what kinds of patents are been filed related to gamification, in which classes of patents, who is filing them and what are the reoccurring themes in the patens. The analysis provides interesting insights into the otherwise rare explored area of patents and company interests related to gamification. Work-related domains, across all shades of collars; both in industrial and managerial work, are one of the most significant application areas of gamification. However, there has still been little research on the effects of gamification on employee motivations, work engagement and resulting behavioral outcomes regarding efficiency and sustainability. In “Continuous feedback as a key component of employee motivation improvement a railway case study based on the placebo effect”, Witold Bartnik and Małgorzata Ćwil investigate the importance of feedback (targeting the four basic human needs of competence, relatedness, autonomy and purpose) in achieving continuous improvement in motivations of train driver and in consequent train driving efficiency. In “Impact of Gamification on User’s KnowledgeSharing Practices: Relationships between Work Motivation, Performance Expectancy and Work Engagement”, Mario Silic and Andrea Back, on the other hand, investigate the relationship between gamification and engagement in more a more information-driven domain; the context of knowledgesharing.