Means to Gameful Ends: How Should Gamification Be Designed?

For a long time, information systems have been designed to provide organizational utility, efficiency, and cost reduction. As technological advancement took place, information systems grew to further facilitate personal productivity and entertainment. Out of modern systems, games have an extraordinary reach in modern society. That reach eventually became too significant to ignore without systematic study. While many individuals recognize the value of and need for hard work in life, many—perhaps all—do not wish to live in a universe of pure work or passive engagement with their life’s activities. In that light, scholars began investigating game design as a means to attain enjoyment and motivation in mundane life activities, giving birth to the gamification movement as we know it today. As a design and research stream, gamification refers to the design of systems, services, and processes to provide “gameful” experiences—psychological experiences, similar to those provided by games—to positively influence engagement with mundane life activities. While the user benefits reported from implementing gamification showcase its potentially positive impact, the understanding of how to design gamification is still in its infancy. Some gamification designs may be suitable to some users or in certain contexts, but the same designs may not have the same results for different users or in different contexts. Furthermore, current methods to design gamification have been developed in isolation, each reinventing the wheel, and hence struggle to provide comprehensive guidance for the gamification design process. This dissertation employs the goal-setting theory, showcasing how gamification design can suit the preferences of different users. The dissertation additionally investigates contextualized gamification design by employing the deliberation theory and researching design for collective, group engagement such as is seen in the context of civic engagement. Finally, the dissertation contributes a holistic gamification design method that incorporates the design knowledge currently gathered in the gamification fields, as well as lessons learned from the failure of gamification projects. The contributions complement each other and provide a multi-dimensional gamification design knowledge on how gamification should be designed. While this dissertation has theoretically and practically contributed to the knowledge on gamification design, there is more to be researched before gamification design can come close to being perfect. The journey to gamify is merely commencing. Not only is this pursuit of how to gamify essential to understand a phenomenon and the human behavior around it, but it is also essential to create a gameful reality, one not of pure work but of enjoyment, motivation, persistence and flow.