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Beyond designing for motivation: the importance of context in gamification

Published: 19 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Most design advice for the development of successful gamification systems has focused on how best to engage the end user while imbuing the system with playfulness. This paper argues that it is also critical for designers to focus on the broad context of the system's deployment, including the identification of stakeholder requirements, requirements from the hosting organization, deep understanding of the diversity of the target population, understanding of limits in the agency of the target users, and constraints arising from the post-deployment environment. To illustrate the importance of such contextual and stakeholder analysis, the paper presents issues and associated solutions that were discovered through the creation of a children's nutrition and fitness education gamification system. The problems identified through a broad analysis of context significantly altered the design of the system and led to the realization that the initially conceptualized project would have been unusable. The paper concludes with concrete lessons for designers.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI PLAY '14: Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on Computer-human interaction in play
      October 2014
      492 pages
      ISBN:9781450330145
      DOI:10.1145/2658537
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Published: 19 October 2014

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      Author Tags

      1. contextual design
      2. educational games
      3. gamification

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      CHI PLAY '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 104 submissions, 29%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 421 of 1,386 submissions, 30%

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      • (2024)Digitizing Development: Enablers and Inhibitors of Mobile App-Based Population Census AdoptionRethinking ICT Adoption Theories in the Developing World10.1007/978-3-031-57880-9_4(71-93)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2024
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      • (2022)Gamification is Working, but Which One Exactly? Results from an Experiment with Four Game Design ElementsInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2022.204190939:3(612-627)Online publication date: 6-Apr-2022
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      • (2021)Differences in Learning Motivation among Bartle’s Player Types and Measures for the Delivery of Sustainable Gameful ExperiencesSustainability10.3390/su1316912113:16(9121)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2021
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