The maturing of gamification research

By Lennart E. Nacke, Sebastian Deterding. Computers in Human Behavior, 2017

446 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Throughout history, many have championed the use of play, games, and game-inspired design to improve the human condition. In the mid-2000s, the confluence of web technologies, digital business models, and online and location-based gaming gave rise to the most recent manifestation of this basic idea. Mobile applications like foursquare and websites like StackOverflow borrowed design elements like point scores, badges, or leaderboards from social network games and meta-gaming systems like Xbox Live to motivate user activity. This industry practice quickly became known as gamification, which can be defined as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011). Many startups and design agencies emerged to offer gamification design or software-as-a-service (SaaS) packages, and large organisations (e.g., Oracle and SAP) across the globe began exploring gamification as a way to motivate people and improve the user experience. Applications reach from education and training to health, self-management, innovation, employee engagement, heritage, crowdsourcing, civic engagement, and marketing (Seaborn & Fels, 2015). Today, gamification is an established practice and industry segment, by some estimates poised to grow to over US$ 11 billion by 2020 (Markets and Markets, 2016). A key enabler of this groundswell has been now-ubiquitous sensor and computing technology: smart cities, smartphones, and wearables are increasingly tracking and processing our every step, effectively turning our life-world into a digital game in waiting. In parallel, we see a shift to post-material values of selfexpression and experience, catered to by a dematerialized ‘experience economy’ and a new profession and practice of experience designers, as well as the growth of digital games into a dominant cultural form, complete with a whole ‘gamer generation’ socialised into them. Economically, we can observe the transformation of business models and market differentiators towards innovation, user experience, customer relations, and the tight integration of customers into value chains with user-led innovation,

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/84af759a128b16871fae5247d7ea30f2456abc3c

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Citations in the corpus

Investigating the effects of gamification-enhanced flipped learning on undergraduate students’ behavioral and cognitive engagement (2018, background): “Goal-setting theory is gaining more attention in recent years (Nacke & Deterding, 2017).”
Tailored gamification in education: A literature review and future agenda (2022, background): “Besides, recent studies on data mining (e.g., Hanna2004; Neeraj et al., 2017), and HCI techniques (e.g., Nacke 2017; Nacke and Deterding 2017) represent great opportunities to effectively evaluate students’ perceptions in this kind of system, providing a bridge between students’ perceptions on…”