Brett Oppegaard
ABSTRACT
"Gamification" research has evolved and grown dramatically in recent years, gaining popularity across disciplines. While such efforts have generated headway in many respects, and in various directions, from conceptual understandings to user studies, the field could benefit from more work focused upon use in research methodologies at the nexus of practice and theory. This paper, in turn, reflects upon such an experiment aimed at the design and application of gamification techniques within a typical technical-communication context. In this case, subject matter experts within the National Park Service were being asked to improve accessibility of their site brochures by audio describing them. During this training, they were given an overview of audio description, as a process, as well as introduced to a prototype web tool and then asked to use that tool to create the description for their site brochure. Unlike previous training exercises with other parks in this project, though, this group also was organized by sites into a tournament bracket, in which pairs of parks competed against each other in exercises designed to create comparable audio description. The winner of each round, as determined by an independent panel of judges, advanced to the next round, spurred by the promise of fun Hawaiian-themed prizes at the end. This gamification strategy appeared to generate more data, and more research-focused data, than the previous training exercises we have offered, per user. It also apparently engaged many, in various evident ways. But it also seemed to disenfranchise some as well, who dropped out of this voluntary training, creating a mix of results, which will be outlined in this paper.
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