Gamification in theory and action: A survey

By Katie Seaborn, Deborah I. Fels. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud., 2015

2,305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gamification has drawn the attention of academics, practitioners and business professionals in domains as diverse as education, information studies, human-computer interaction, and health. As yet, the term remains mired in diverse meanings and contradictory uses, while the concept faces division on its academic worth, underdeveloped theoretical foundations, and a dearth of standardized guidelines for application. Despite widespread commentary on its merits and shortcomings, little empirical work has sought to validate gamification as a meaningful concept and provide evidence of its effectiveness as a tool for motivating and engaging users in non-entertainment contexts. Moreover, no work to date has surveyed gamification as a field of study from a human-computer studies perspective. In this paper, we present a systematic survey on the use of gamification in published theoretical reviews and research papers involving interactive systems and human participants. We outline current theoretical understandings of gamification and draw comparisons to related approaches, including alternate reality games (ARGs), games with a purpose (GWAPs), and gameful design. We present a multidisciplinary review of gamification in action, focusing on empirical findings related to purpose and context, design of systems, approaches and techniques, and user impact. Findings from the survey show that a standard conceptualization of gamification is emerging against a growing backdrop of empirical participants-based research. However, definitional subjectivity, diverse or unstated theoretical foundations, incongruities among empirical findings, and inadequate experimental design remain matters of concern. We discuss how gamification may to be more usefully presented as a subset of a larger effort to improve the user experience of interactive systems through gameful design. We end by suggesting points of departure for continued empirical investigations of gamified practice and its effects. We present findings from a survey of the gamification literature.Theoretical findings suggest that gamification is a distinct concept.Conceptual foundations tend to converge on psychological theories of motivation.Early applied work suggests positive-leaning but mixed results.Empirical work on specific elements with direct ties to theory and stronger experimental designs is needed.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e358d20a7fe90bff7ceb4579b5a67df05632ae08

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Citations in the corpus

Tailored gamification in education: A literature review and future agenda (2022, result): “Overall, our results for this RQ show the lack of empirical and longitudinal studies in the domain of gamified education, corroborating the gamification literature (Hamari et al., 2014; Seaborn and Fels, 2015).”
Gamification of e-learning in higher education: a systematic literature review (2023, background): “Early applied work on gamification of educational settings suggested positive-learning, but mixed results have been obtained (Seaborn & Fels, 2015).”
The maturing of gamification research (2017, background): “…has predominantly consisted of (1) definitions, frameworks and taxonomies for gamification and game design elements; (2) technical papers describing systems, designs, and architectures; and (3) effect and user studies of gamified systems (Hamari, Koivisto, & Sarsa, 2014; Seaborn & Fels, 2015).”
Gamification of health professions education: a systematic review (2020, background): “…et al. 2013; Robson et al. 2015; Simões et al. 2013; Warmelink et al. 2018; Zuk 2012), a commonly applied definition is that of Deterding et al. (De-Marcos et al. 2014; Deterding et al. 2011; Dicheva et al. 2015; Lister et al. 2014; Mekler et al. 2017; Sailer et al. 2017; Seaborn and Fels 2015).”
The effect of gamification on motivation and engagement (2018, background): “SDT rests on the three principles of autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Deci and Ryan, 2008; Seaborn and Fels, 2015).”
Serious games and the gamification of tourism (2017, background): “Researchers consider those serious games as ‘alternative reality games’ (McGonigal, 2011) due to fact that reality has been added into the fantasy world (Seaborn & Fels, 2015).”
Interpretable classification of Alzheimer’s disease pathologies with a convolutional neural network pipeline (2018, methodology): “Given the scope of the annotation task, we incorporated several aspects of gamification theory 53,54 , such as annotator leveling, achievement badges, and progress-bar filling 55,56 to acknowledge and motivate progress.”
Gamification: A cognitive-emotional view (2018, background): “For example, 25–30 percent of studies on gamification are in education (Hamari et al., 2014; Seaborn & Fels, 2015).”
Toward Meaningful Engagement: A Framework for Design and Research of Gamified Information Systems (2017, background): “There is a rich body of literature in human– computer interaction (HCI) which informs us on how the interface and interaction modalities can impact users (e.g., Seaborn and Fels 2015).”
Creating brand engagement through in-store gamified customer experiences (2019, background): “Moreover, rewards commonly occur within the gamification literature as a way to motivate behavior (e.g., Hamari et al., 2014; Seaborn and Fels, 2015).”