Gamification ofworkplace activities

Abstract

Gamification—taking game design patterns and principles out of video games to apply them in non-game environments has become a popular idea in the last 4 years. It has also successfully been applied to workplace environments, but it still remains unclear how employees really feel about the introduction of a gamified system. We address this matter by comparing the employees’ subjective perception of gamificationwith their actual usage behavior in an enterprise application software. As a result of the experiment, we find there is a strong relationship visible. Following up on this observation, we pose the gamification design problem under the assumptions that (i) gamification consists of various types of users that experience game design elements differently; and (ii) gamification is deployed in order to achieve some goals in the broadest sense, as the problem of assigning each user a game design element that maximizes their expected contribution to achieve these goals.We show that this problem can be reduced to a statistical learning problem and suggest matrix factorization as one solution when user interaction data is given. The hypothesis is that predictive models as intelligent tools for supporting users in decision-making may have the potential to support the design process in gamification.