An Expert Gamification System with Psychological Theories for Virtual and Cross-Cultural Software Teams

Abstract

Gamification is the concept of applying game elements in non-game context platforms to motivate people to participate in planned activities to achieve goals. Gamification has been applied to academic fields including software engineering (SE) in recent years. Many gamification implementations in SE have been ad hoc and lacked standardized guidelines. This paper introduces a new concept of building an expert gamification system (EGS) to provide guidelines for the implementation of gamification for virtual and cross cultural software teams (VCCST). The system will extend the core of a regular expert system to include gamification tools, a supplementary database, and an expert knowledge source. The cross-cultural data for the EGS contains the Hofstede's cultural dimensions (HCD). The expert knowledge source contains information from Maslow's hierarchy of needs (MHON), flow theory and self-determination theory (SDT). As more and more VCCST are formed in recent years, many issues have been raised in those teams stemming from miscommunication and cultural conflicts. This paper uses the EGS to help resolve the issues in VCCST. Also, this paper is an extension of a previous paper written by the same authors in this similar topic.