Supporting Gamified Experiences for Informal Collaborative Groups

Abstract

Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. Gamification is being successfully applied in a diverse set of areas such as Education, Business, Human Resources, Health, and Entertainment. In general, gamified systems are designed and implemented for specific contexts. There is not a multipurpose approach that can be applied to many contexts. Informal groups are composed of members who come together online to perform work or social activities, fostering engagement, commitment and participation. We propose a framework to support the design of gamified experiences in general scenarios for collaborative informal groups. We built a context agnostic tool, called Gamefy, to evaluate the framework. We then evaluated motivation and flexibility enabled by the tool. We also employed the framework to assess the perceived usefulness of gamification features in two particular contexts. We then were able to identify key features to gamified experiences, and the possibility of differences in features’ importance depending on context.