To Enliven Virtual Communities of Practice through Gamification

Abstract

Communities of practice are meant to generate knowledge through voluntary interaction between their members. With the expansion of electronic communication means these communities became virtual, in the sense that most of the innercommunication and collaboration are supported by synchronous and asynchronous electronic tools. However, research data shows that most of these virtual communities have great difficulty in reaching and maintaining healthy levels of activity. Gamification proposes to transfer the kind of intrinsic motivation found in games to increase the likeability and engagement in non-game contexts. Therefore it can be an approach to increase the member participation in communities of practice and, therefore, their chance to survive. Nevertheless, although gamification has proven useful in a number of cases, its implementation has to be carefully designed according to the intended audience to be effective.