Gamifying social media to encourage social activities with digital-physical hybrid role-playing

Abstract

This paper proposes a new way to gamify the micro-crowdfunding service. Micro-crowdfunding is a crowdsourcing service to achieve a sustainable society based on a crowdfunding concept and an aging money concept. In this type of service, each activity to achieve a sustainable society is called a mission, and performing a mission is encouraged through social and economic incentives. A new approach described in this paper enhances the original strategies by using a game concept. The approach consists of two techniques. The first technique adopts several concepts from dramaturgy. The technique coordinates multiple missions and encourages people to complete them by providing a fictional goal that most people want to achieve. The second technique incorporates persuasive ambient mirrors that reflect people's current situation with visual and fictional expressions. The technique emotionally increases people's incentives by using operant conditioning. We also conduct a user study to validate the approach proposed in this paper. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.