Immersive experiences are increasingly used to communicate environmental impacts. Such experiences could be useful in raising engagement and knowledge of the general public regarding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, it is not clear if increasing the degree of gamification or enacted interactions in such immersive experiences could increase the memorability of GHG emissions data. To answer this question, we designed a virtual reality experience allowing people to explore GHG emissions of daily actions with various degrees of enacted and gamified interactions. We conducted a controlled and pre-registered study with 63 participants to understand how quiz-based gamification and enactment could influence GHG emissions memorability, intrinsic motivation and flow. We found evidence for our immersive design to increase general public knowledge about GHG emissions, whatever the condition. However, we found no strong evidence for an effect of enactment on GHG emissions memorability, while we found slight evidence for a small positive effect of quiz-based gamification. Moreover, we showed a positive effect of enactment on flow and intrinsic motivation. This study contributes to the understanding of how immersive visualizations can be optimized for climate education, highlighting the nuanced roles of gamification and enactment in shaping user engagement and knowledge gains. Supplementary material available at https://osf.io/48pnr.

Walking is an essential aspect of daily life, while walking with companions offers numerous benefits. Recently developed mobile robots, through their ability to navigate challenging terrains, open new possibilities for outdoor walking companionship. Yet, little is known about how such companions shape the human walking experience. In this study, nine participants walked outdoors with a robot and later reflected on their walking experience in semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis showed that the robot influenced how participants related to it, how they managed proximity, and how their attention, control, and social presence were affected. Building on these insights, we identify five key dimensions of human–robot walking: attunement, awareness mediation, proxemics, social perception, and playful curiosity. These dimensions capture how walking with robots transforms this ordinary activity into a co-experienced practice and additionally offer concrete design implications for designing and creating more meaningful, comfortable, and socially attuned human-robot walking interactions.

With advances in biosensing and artificial intelligence, we are seeing fast developments of recursive biocybernetic closed-loop systems. These media technologies adapt the content in real-time based on users’ psychophysiological input, with the goal of modulating users’ affective responses. However, existing research primarily focuses on technical design aspects.

This study examines fashionability in computational fashion wearables (CFWs) through the reflective accounts of ten academic researcher–designers. While wearables are often studied for technical functions, fashionability, a key to adoption and sustained use, has received less attention. Using semi-structured interviews, we captured designers’ reflections-on-action as they revisited their own prototypes and surfaced forms of tacit, practice-based knowledge that are difficult to access through conventional user studies. Reflexive thematic analysis generated five themes: Desirable Friction, Contextual and Sub-Cultural Relevance, Symbiotic Sensory Envelopes, Narrative Social Performance, and Adaptive Longevity and Circularity. These themes reposition CFWs not as seamless devices but as expressive, situated, and evolving interfaces that mediate sensory, social, and cultural experience. Our findings contribute to fashion theory and HCI by showing how designers mobilize friction, context, sensory depth, and temporality as design resources. We conclude with actionable directions for embodied prototyping, multisensory calibration, narrative staging, and modular longevity.

Human well-being is inseparable from environmental context, with nature long recognized for its restorative potential. As everyday life becomes increasingly mediated by technology, access to nature is reconfigured through digital media. Virtual nature is often proposed as a tool for supporting well-being, yet the assumptions guiding its design and evaluation remain under-examined. This paper presents a systematic review of 124 empirical studies on virtual nature and well-being. Results generally trend toward clear positive effects on well-being; however, the current state-of-the-art remains considerably limited. Research is dominated by short-term, passive interventions grounded in stress reduction and attention restoration theories, prioritizing affective and physiological outcomes over cognitive or relational dimensions. We conclude by outlining four design inspirations that reposition virtual nature within HCI, shifting attention from short-term relief toward more diverse forms of human–nature interaction including cultural, participatory, and more-than-human perspectives.

Autonomous systems such as robots are permeating our daily lives increasingly every day, which are now adorned with social elements, bringing them closer to synthetic companions. While used in fields like well-being, education, guidance, and entertainment, companion robots also hold great potential for outdoor uses, particularly accompanying people in the wild with numerous potential benefits. However, current studies lack a comprehensive understanding of the possible uses, functions, and behavior of companion robots outdoors. To explore this area, we have run a co-design study consisting of 5 design workshops with 30 participants, including interaction designers, product development experts, engineers, robotics experts, and frequent forest goers. The study resulted in nine valuable design themes, transferred into five design concepts, which were then interpreted into a comprehensive design space that can be leveraged by designers and researchers in creating companion robots for the wild.

Virtual reality (VR) is reshaping tourism as museums increasingly adopt it to create immersive visitor experiences. While presence is key to VR effectiveness, little is known about how interaction modes affect it. This study examines the impact of two elements −guidance and spatial mobility− on perceived presence in virtual museum visits. It also explores the psychological mechanisms involved and identifies autonomy as a positive driver and satiation as a limiting factor. Results show that guidance enhances presence although it slightly reduces autonomy, while spatial mobility has less of an effect. In turn, presence boosts perceived entertainment and informativeness and positively influences attitudes toward the destination and visit intention. This research helps to understand how interaction design in immersive environments shapes user experience and behaviour. It offers theoretical insights on presence drivers as well as practical implications for creating more effective, satisfying, and wellbeing-oriented VR experiences in tourism.

This paper presents intermediate-level knowledge in the form of a taxonomy that highlights 12 different ways in which interactive tech might support forest-related experiences that are joyful for humans. It can inspire and provide direction for designs that aim to enrich the experiential texture of forests. The taxonomy stemmed from a reflexive analysis of 104 speculative ideas produced during a year-long co-design process, where we co-experienced and creatively engaged a diverse range forests and forest-related activities with 250+ forest-goers with varied backgrounds and sensitivities. Given that breadth of forests and populations involved, our work foregrounds a rich set of design directions that set an actionable early frame for creating tech that supports joyful human-forest interplays – one that we hope will be extended and consolidated in future research, ours and others'.

Location-based media applications such as Google Maps, Strava and Pokémon GO together have more than a billion monthly active users, and popular social media such as Snapchat and Instagram now also feature map-based content. All these media products rely on user-generated content as a core element of their service, but there is a lack of synthesis on the users' motivations to contribute this data to the platform providers. In this study, we performed a literature review to uncover users' motivations to participate in location-based crowdsourcing and contribute shared content on these platforms. Among our findings, we show that spatial and temporal aspects, social effects, technical elements, motivational mechanisms, practical value offered to the contributors and individual differences need to be considered in motivating users to contribute shared content. We present recommendations for designers, suggest which terminology to use around this topic and propose an agenda for future research.

One of the primary objectives of gamified education is to promote students' behavior change to provide a positive learning experience. Most studies, however, focus exclusively on studying how students experience the systems, ignoring the emotions generated by sensory information. To fill this lack, we conducted a between-subjects controlled experiment (N = 62) to analyze the effects of gamification on students' basic emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust). Based on descriptive and inferential statistical techniques, we compared the students' basic emotions between participants who used a gamified version of a learning management system (experimental group) and a group that used the system with identical educational tasks without gamification (control group). The primary results reveal that anger was the most frequently observed emotion in both system versions, whereas scare was the least expressed emotion in both versions. No significant differences in emotions between groups were registered. We contribute especially to the fields of educational technologies and gamification with insights into the effects of gamification on students' basic emotions.

This paper presents a Research Through Design investigation exploring innovative approaches to industrial heritage interpretation through extended reality (XR) technologies and narrative design. Using the historic Finlayson Factory in Tampere, Finland as a case study, we developed "Who Killed Helene Pumpulivaara?" - an interactive heritage experience that combines crime mystery narrative with XR technology to address key challenges in digital heritage interpretation, particularly decontextualization and accessibility. Our methodology used emerging AI tools and accessible technologies to create a multi-platform experience implemented across web and VR environments. The research revealed several significant findings: first, the varying fidelity levels between AI-generated and authentic content created an unexpected advantage in distinguishing historical fact from creative interpretation; second, combining accessible technologies with AI-assisted content generation can democratize the creation of engaging digital heritage experiences; and third, spatial relationships and narrative progression can effectively counter decontextualization concerns in digital heritage. The implementation points toward spatial augmented reality as a promising direction for future heritage interpretation, suggesting possibilities for deeper integration with physical spaces through interactive projections. This research contributes to ongoing discussions about democratizing heritage interpretation and demonstrates how thoughtful integration of emerging technologies can enhance rather than diminish authentic heritage experiences, while making industrial history more engaging for contemporary audiences.

This demo presents "Who Killed Helene Pumpulivaara?", an innovative interactive heritage experience that combines crime mystery narrative with XR technology to address key challenges in digital heritage interpretation. Our work makes six significant contributions: (1) the discovery of a "Historical Uncanny Valley" effect where varying fidelity levels between AI-generated and authentic content serve as implicit markers distinguishing fact from interpretation; (2) an accessible production pipeline combining mobile photography with AI tools that democratizes XR heritage creation for resource-limited institutions; (3) a spatial storytelling approach that effectively counters decontextualization in digital heritage; (4) a multi-platform implementation strategy across web and VR environments; (5) a practical model for AI-assisted heritage content creation balancing authenticity with engagement; and (6) a pathway toward spatial augmented reality for future heritage interpretation. Using the historic Finlayson Factory in Tampere, Finland as a case study, our implementation demonstrates how emerging technologies can enrich the authenticity of heritage experiences, fostering deeper emotional connections between visitors and the histories embedded in place.

Virtual reality (VR) is considered a technological megatrend that is driving the digitization of all aspects of human life. Avatars, virtual bodies controlled by users, play an important role in VR. Many scholars consider the sense of embodiment as a key affordance of avatars. However, our understanding of how to optimize embodiment through avatar representation in VR remains underdeveloped. This study systematically reviewed a body of 43 studies from 41 research papers that investigated the manipulations of avatars in VR. The corpus was coded with head-mounted display (HMD) models, avatar creation tools, mirror use, task context, and avatar manipulations. Based on these experiment-based studies, we discuss how different types of avatar representations affect users’ embodiment. Based on the findings, we indicate practical implications of avatar design in VR applications.

Social performance situations, often crucial and expected in today’s work contexts, can be perceived as highly challenging and stressful. Therefore, experiencing anxiety in public speaking situations can have a negative impact on individuals’ working lives and career prospects. Virtual reality environments offer novel means to practise public speaking anywhere, safely and privately, and to replace simulations with more dynamic and innovative training environments unavailable in real-life scenarios. Additionally, these innovative tools and methods could also be used during virtually implemented real-life interactions as working conditions are increasingly shifting towards more technology-mediated forms. This research investigates the potential for a virtual reality height manipulation (i.e. raised or lowered point-of-view) to influence individuals’ self-statements during a stressful speech task and, subsequently, their personal performance evaluation. Results of a strictly controlled, between-subject experiment indicate that participants perceiving themselves taller evaluated their speech performance more positively and experienced fewer negative self-statements during the speech task. Furthermore, perceived tallness was associated with lower levels of public speaking anxiety. These results suggest that even a simple, visual first-person perspective manipulation of virtual reality environment influences individuals’ personal evaluation of their own performance and potentially helps them improve their task-related cognitive processes.

Advances in mobile consumer technology, especially in smartphones, have given rise to numerous new crowdsourcing opportunities. With the miniaturization of sensors and the growing number of smartphone models containing a wide range of them, we are now capable of creating digital imitations of real-world objects using everyday mobile devices. In this study, we created four augmented reality (AR) applications utilizing LiDAR sensors that were designed for crowdsourcing the creation of such digital imitations, i.e., digital twins. A user study was undertaken where video recordings, audio recordings, point cloud, and mesh data were collected in forest settings. Each approach was evaluated in terms of the characteristics and quality of the crowdsourced data acquired, as well as the participants’ behavior and experience. Our findings demonstrate that through gamification approaches, we can influence not only the user experience but also the type and quality of the crowdsourced data. Our findings offer guidance on which gamification dynamics and interactions are best suited for several types of crowdsourcing tasks. We also show that the collection of meaningful data is not limited to specific interactions or experiences and suggest that there are multiple routes in gamification design for reaching the desired outcomes.

The flow experience is a central focus in the design of game-like environments. However, the current state of research in this area remains unclear. We conducted a systematic literature review to answer the following questions: How has the flow experience been analyzed in gameful environments? In what types of gameful environments has the flow experience been analyzed? and What types of technology have been utilized to present gameful environments? In addition, we performed a scientometric analysis. We identified 601 authors who contributed to the field, primarily through quantitative studies published as journal articles in education. Self-report scales are the predominant method for assessing the user flow experience. Games and gamified environments are the most commonly used approaches, with websites as the primary technology for delivering gameful experiences. Based on these findings, we propose an agenda for future research to guide further studies in this domain.

Understanding users and consequent personalization opportunities have become a major area of interest in gamification and UX research. Currently, personalization is mainly based on player typologies, which might give a partial picture of the plethora of user attributes. Addressing this challenge, in this study, we investigate the connections of the Hexad gamification user types, demographic factors, and gaming habits to understand how different user factors are related. Our results indicated significant but weak associations between user types and demographic factors and no significant association with gaming frequency-related factors. These results suggest that researchers and designers might need to consider more than the dominant factors to create personalized environments. We also provide exploratory suggestions on possible strategies to personalize gamification based on Hexad and other user factors. Our study contributes to the fields of user modeling and gamification, providing new insights into how different user characteristics are related while opening space for the conduction of new studies in the field.

• The study experimentally compared the novel VR interfaces that use current state-of-the-art kinesthetic gloves as manipulation tools with the traditional controller-based VR interface in accurate 3D object manipulation. • The experiment demonstrated the strengths of finger-based multipoint interaction provided by kinesthetic gloves, in terms of task completion time, accuracy, perceived workload and user preference. • The results also revealed the advantages and disadvantages of force feedback from the gloves for 3D manipulation and demonstrated the direction of future technology improvement. One of the challenges facing virtual reality (VR) is the pursuit of efficient and natural object manipulation, required by many applications, such as computer-aided medical diagnosis, surgery planning and industrial prototyping. Current hand-based three-dimensional (3D) manipulation allows users to interact with virtual objects intuitively, enabled primarily by using motion controllers with single-point interaction. There are promising avenues to increase naturalness of interaction through kinesthetic gloves that provide finger-based multipoint interaction with force feedback. These novel gloves could have more potential for 3D object manipulation in VR, however, their practical usability in this field remains largely unexplored. This study compared the glove-based VR interfaces (with/without force feedback) with the traditional controller-based VR interface in accurate movement and rotation tasks. The results demonstrated the strengths of finger-based multipoint interaction provided by kinesthetic gloves in accurate 3D manipulation, in terms of task completion time, accuracy, perceived workload and user preference. Additionally, the experiment identified that force feedback from kinesthetic gloves surprisingly did not benefit user task performance and even negatively affected rotation accuracy. However, it was perceived as valuable for object rotation that required complicated finger movement and coordination.

Remote sensing for observing and recording our surroundings is becoming mainstream. Technologies, such as light, detection, and ranging (LiDAR), are now part of consumer mobile devices and provide a variety of novel interaction opportunities with the environment. Mobile remote sensing also provides affordances for crowdsourcing through location-based applications such as games and gamified systems. While such use cases today are technologically feasible, there is a lack of understanding of how and what kinds of interactions and applications would be both (1) engaging and motivating for users and also (2) maximize the volume and quality of the data being gathered. In this study, we investigate these challenges by developing and testing four gamified augmented reality prototypes that use LiDAR for collecting point cloud data during location-based gaming. Through field testing, interviews, and surveys with 21 participants, followed by reflexive thematic analysis, we identified five themes of dynamics, which exemplify tensions and challenges to designing gamified AR crowdsourcing. The findings primarily point to hazards in design that may undermine user motivation as well as constraints of the environments themselves in facilitating and affording meaningful and rich (gameful) interaction.

Social virtual reality (VR) enables embodied interactions with others within 3D environments. There has been a growing amount of research on avatar appearance and its influence on social presence and user behaviour, including communicative outcomes. As the focus has often been on the effects of avatar-related intrapersonal processes, it would be necessary to shed more light on the influence of interpersonal processes behind dynamic avatar-mediated interaction. This research aimed to investigate the effects of avatar customisation on social presence and perceived relational messages during a collaborative puzzle task in immersive social VR. The strictly controlled between-subject laboratory experiment (N = 50) with two body-tracked avatar conditions (Custom vs. Assigned) was conducted. Results do not indicate that avatar customisation has a significant effect on social presence or relational communication in the collaborative task-related context. However, it is worth noting that participants in both conditions presented markedly high social presence scores and rated partners' relational messages positively, which might have introduced a ceiling effect diminishing any potential difference in social presence between the conditions.

Today, millions worldwide play popular location-based games (LBGs) such as Pokémon GO. LBGs are designed to be played outdoors, and past research has shown that they can incentivize players to travel to nature. To further explore this nature-connection, we investigated via a mixed-methods approach the connections between engagement with LBGs, inspiration and environmental awareness as follows. First, we identified relevant gamification features in Study 1. Based on the insights, we built a survey that we sent to Pokémon GO players (N=311) in Study 2. The results showed that (a) social networking features, reminders, and virtual objects were the most relevant gamification features to explain inspired by playing Pokémon GO and that (b) inspired to outdoor engagement partially mediated the relationship between inspired by playing Pokémon GO and environmental awareness. These results warrant further investigations into whether LBGs could motivate pro-environment attitudes and inspire people to care for nature.

The aim of this work is to explore the forms of toxic behaviour that players encounter in competitive multiplayer real-time strategy (RTS) games. To this end, we carried out ethnographic observations and player interviews within the popular RTS game StarCraft II, and approached the data inductively, leading us to discover ten categories of toxic behaviour. While the harmfulness of toxic actions can be obtained as a product of severity and frequency, players’ assessment of the severity of toxic behaviors was contextualized by, (1) directly observed; (2) background; and (3) extraneous factors. Following our empirical findings, we derive a conceptual model for differentiating toxicity from mildly annoying and more severe behaviors. The discovered view of toxicity challenges the prevailing paradigm of treating players’ toxic behavior as a monolithic construct with a linear intensity spectrum. Instead, we advocate for a more granular approach, encouraging an understanding of the underlying dynamics behind negative online behaviors.

The ongoing ecological crisis is the current biggest threat for our species. As we attempt to address the situation through policy, interventions, and education, we urgently need to understand how people encounter and relate to nature: As it is, in the world, and portrayed through different media. As an exemplary medium facilitating digital nature, this paper focuses on video games. Using first-person research methods, we report on the first author sensitising themselves to nature as a ubiquitous feature, theme, and actor in video games. They played eight nature-focused games for three months. Through auto-ethnography, close reading and “noticing” (after Tsing), we make sense of their experiences using the humanistic concept of ecological (in)congruence: We draw out the relational gap and potential meanings between real nature and its virtual equivalent. Based on these insights, we outline two design impulses for how the HCI community might approach nature—within games and beyond.

Contribution: In this full research paper, we offer a quantitative analysis of how gamification influences students' gameful experience within a mobile online learning gamified platform, specifically Duolingo. We explored how these effects vary based on students' self-declared gender, providing valuable insights into the intricate dynamics within gamified educational environments. Background: The use of gameful environments as educational tools has been acknowledged for its potential to yield diverse outcomes in students' learning achievements, encompassing both advantageous and disadvantageous effects. Among the hypotheses regarding the observed diverse outcomes is that gamification may influence individuals' experiences differently based on their inherent traits, such as gamer type, age, and gender. While recent research has made strides in exploring this hypothesis, knowledge regarding how gamification can affect users' experience in gameful environments remains limited. Research Questions: This study aims to address the following question: How does gamification affect students' gameful experience (i.e., accomplishment, challenge, competition, guided, immersion, playfulness, and social experience) according to their self-declared gender? Methodology: To answer this research question, we conducted a quasi-experimental study (i.e., involving the comparison of groups without random assignment), organized in three steps. In the first step, we invited technology students to utilize the gamified platform, Duolingo, for a minimum of 20 minutes. In the second step, participants completed the GAME-FULQUEST, a scale comprising 56 items across seven dimensions, designed to measure their gameful experience while using the platform. They also answered a demographic questionnaire to indicate their gender (following ethical recommendations, we included the options: “male”,”female”, “non-binary” and “I prefer to not disclose”). In the third step, we employed Structural Equation Modeling to analyze the effects of gamification on students' gameful experience, according to their gender. Our sample comprised 110 students, with 42 self-identified as females and 68 as males. Findings: Our results indicate that learners' gender did not affect any of the dimensions of the gameful experience. This result opens up space for several insights into how gamification can affect the learners' experience according to different variables.

Contribution: In this full research paper, we contribute to the gamification literature by exploring students' emotions when completing educational tasks in a gamified and non-gamified education system, qualitatively explaining some triggers for their emotions. Background: An emotion is a spontaneous, short-lived, and subjective response to whatever is happening. Despite the various existing theories, we draw on Ekman's theory, which identifies seven basic emotions: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, contempt, surprise, and disgust. In education, gamification has been widely used with one of its objectives being to provoke positive emotions in students. However, little is known about students' emotions when using gamified and non-gamified educational systems. Research Questions: Advancing the literature, we answered the following research question: what emotions are experienced by students when performing tasks using a gamified and non-gamified educational system? Methodology: For up to 30 minutes, nine males and seven females completed educational tasks in general knowledge, English, and reasoning. Some interacted with a gamified version of an educational platform, which included 10 gamification elements based on Self-determination theory, while others engaged with the same tasks in a non-gamified version of the same system. During system usage, we employed the Noldus Observer XT and FaceReader systems to map students' emotions over time. After system usage, semi-structured interview data provided a deeper understanding of why certain emotions were experienced. Finally, we conducted a Thematic Analysis to qualitatively interpret the data. Findings: Participants remained indifferent most of the time in both settings, indicating that the gamification elements had no extra role. The most frequent emotion was anger, an emotion experienced when a goal is prevented from being pursued. They also experienced some disgust. Those exposed to gamification elements were more likely to be happy and equally likely to be sad. In terms of gender, male participants felt more anger and disgust, while women felt more happiness and sadness.

Contribution: In this full research paper, we provide a qualitative view of how undergraduate students experienced flow state dimensions (i.e., challenge-skill balance, action-awareness merging, clear goals, unambiguous feedback, total concentration, sense of control, loss of self-consciousness, transformation of time and autotelic experience) in a gamified educational and a non-gamified educational system. Background: When in a flow state, individuals experience deep immersion and focus on tasks. Encouraging educational experiences toward flow is important because this construct is linked to cognition (academic performance) and behavior (engagement). Gamification has been implemented to bring students to a flow state. However, despite several studies (mostly quantitative) little is known about how the flow state is experienced in gamified educational systems. Research Questions: Advancing the literature, we answered the following research question: how do students experience flow state when performing tasks using a gamified and non-gamified educational system? Methodology: 68 students from 20 countries participated in an experiment. They were randomly assigned to an experimental group (a gamified system with 10 different gamification elements based on Self-determination theory) and a control group (the same system without gamification). Immediately after the experiment, we asked them to share some thoughts from their experience openly. We then conducted a qualitative study based on Thematic Analysis with 18 of them who volunteered for further interviews. Findings: We found that students who completed questions in the non-gamified version acknowledged time and social pressure as elements that sustained their engagement. However, we did not intentionally expose them to these game elements. A sense of competence emerged strongly as they completed the educational tasks through the system. We found different nuances of competition, including self-competition, associated with the sense of flow in both groups. The findings also suggest that the tasks play a role in the sense of flow they experienced.

Leveraging user behavior has become an increasingly valuable resource for modeling and personalizing systems based on the unique characteristics of each user. While recent studies have recently been conducted along these lines, there is still a lack of understanding of the relationship between students’ Myers-Briggs Type Indicators and their behavior within educational systems. Facing this problem, we conducted a long-term study (15 weeks) with 96 students, analyzing how their engagement metrics and communication frequency in a Moodle Learning Management System are related to their Myers-Briggs personality types (i.e., extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving). The primary findings indicate that i) participants identified as extroverted demonstrated heightened activity levels throughout more weeks of the course, and ii) participants characterized by judging and thinking traits engaged in a greater number of activities over the course duration. The results contribute to the field of educational technologies by providing valuable insights into the relationships between different characteristics associated with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and students’ behavior when using an educational system.

Gamification is commonly employed to support the formation of positive psychological states and learning outcomes, with one of the primary psychological factors chiefly relevant to learning being the flow state. However, the effects of gamification on students’ flow experience are still little known. Filling this gap, we conducted a between-subjects controlled experiment (N = 65) to analyze the effects of gamification on students’ flow experience. Using descriptive and inferential statistical techniques, we compared the flow experience between participants who used a gamified version of an educational system (experimental group) and a group that used the same system without gamification (control group). The main results indicate that the employed gamification design did not affect students’ flow experience. Our study contributes especially to educational technologies and gamification fields, demonstrating that gamification may not affect students’ flow experience.

The Internet of Things has become a comprehensive concept used in different contexts (e.g., smart cities, security, and education). In particular, in education, a vast literature has used the Internet of Things to promote smart education. However, there is still no overview of how the Internet of Things has been used to promote smart education. We addressed this challenge by conducting a systematic literature review on the use of the Internet of Things to promote smart education. Through a systematic literature review, we answered the following research questions: i) Which smart objects collect data from the physical world? ii) What types of information are collected? And, iii) what are the goals of collecting this data? Our analysis reveals that i) the most common smart objects in educational environments include sensors, cameras, ID tags, and wearable devices; ii) these devices collect data in twelve main categories, which include everything from microclimatic information to details of the emotional and behavioral state of the actors involved; iii) the purpose of this collection is to provide a more effective and personalized educational experience to individual needs. Our findings play a crucial role in educational technologies, establishing a foundation for future research endeavors and providing valuable insights into the use of the Internet of Things to promote smart education.

One of the most important challenges in gameful educational environments (e.g., gamified educational systems, educational games, and educational VR applications) is to identify students’ experience (e.g., engagement, motivation, and flow experience) during the system usage. Especially regarding flow experience, in recent years, different studies have analyzed students’ flow experience while using gameful educational environments. However, it is difficult to identify the state-of-the-art flow experience analysis in gameful educational environments. Facing this challenge, we present a systematic literature review investigating how the flow experience analysis is conducted in gameful educational environments. The main results indicate that most of the studies are using psychometrically validated scales to measure the students’ flow experience. Our results especially contribute to the fields of educational technologies and gameful design in education, presenting a state-of-the-art flow experience analysis in gameful educational environments.

In recent years, numerous studies have investigated the effects of gamification on different students’ experiences (e.g., motivation, engagement, and accomplishment). However, the effects of gamification on students’ academic performance are still a mystery. To address this gap, we conducted a between-subjects controlled experiment (N = 71) to analyze the effects of gamification on students’ academic performance. Using descriptive and inferential statistical techniques, we compared the academic performance of participants who used a gamified version of an educational system (experimental group) and a group that used the same system without gamification (control group). The main results indicate that the student’s academic performance was significantly higher in the experimental group (i.e., students who used the gamified version of the system). We contribute to the fields of educational technology and gamification by providing new evidence about the effects of gamification on the actual students’ academic performance.

In recent years, the personalization of gamified education has been widely discussed. However, results are still mixed (i.e., positive, negative, or null). At the same time, most studies focus on analyzing only classic gamification designs (e.g., based on points, badges, and leaderboards). To address this problem, we investigated the effects of ecological gamification on learners’ engagement according to their gamification user types. We conducted a quasi-experimental study (N = 104) using a gamified educational system and analyzing data through partial least squares structural equation modeling. The main results indicate that i) ecological gamification positively affected Disruptors’ sense of perceived usability, and ii) Players’ sense of reward. Our results contribute to the fields of educational technologies and personalized gamification, providing insights regarding the personalization of gamified education.

Educators worldwide strive to transform what are often perceived as "dull learning environments" into engaging ones. Although numerous studies explore gamification in education, few explore the gamification of class assignments. Building on the premise that individuals are more likely to engage with tasks they find interesting, our central research question was: What factors contribute to the interestingness of class assignments? We conducted a qualitative study (employing Thematic Analysis) involving Brazilian college sophomores tasked with designing assignments for their enrolled courses. Our qualitative findings revealed several characteristics that can enhance task interest. Furthermore, we found that interestingness varies based on individual factors, rather than adhering to a one-size-fits-all solution. Additionally, we profiled students according to their gamification user types (utilizing the Hexad framework) to understand assignments from the perspective of different user personas. This study offers valuable insights into the gamification of classroom assignments, contributing to the fields of gamification and instructional design.

In the last few years, virtual reality began to be adopted as a strategy to enhance the learning experiences of autistic children. However, only a few studies have analyzed the outcomes of using virtual reality for children with Asperger’s syndrome (i.e., a section in the large group of Autism Spectrum Disorders). Simultaneously, many neglect parents’ views on using virtual reality in educating children with Asperger’s syndrome. To address this gap, we qualitatively investigated the perception of parents of children with Asperger’s syndrome about their children’s behavior before and after using a virtual reality-based learning system. Employing Constructivist Grounded Theory, we surveyed and analyzed three parents’ perceptions of their children’s behavior with Asperger’s syndrome before and after continuous system usage for three months. Qualitative findings indicate that parents noticed that their children acquired positive behaviors throughout the use of the system (e.g., interacted with peers, engaged in group activities, and maintained eye contact with others), thus, advancing barriers related to Asperger’s syndrome. Our study contributes to the area of educational technologies and autism, generating new knowledge about the possibility of using virtual reality to enhance positive behaviors in children with Asperger’s syndrome.

Walking is an integral part of daily human lives which also has a great influence on happiness and wellbeing. Walking with a dog companion is one of the most popular forms of recreational walking that has similar benefits. The recent development of mobile zoomorphic robots, especially robot dogs has opened up new opportunities in the landscape of walking with companions. This led us to investigate how such robots can accompany humans in walking, and how the mobility and behavior of robots in a daily-life walking scenario affect humans’ walking experience. We interviewed nine participants who took a 15–20-minute walk with a companion robot around a university campus, to understand how diverse walking behaviors of a companion robot influence their perceived experiences. We have generated four key themes through thematic analysis. They imply that affective relationalities between humans and robots can build intimacy and empathy, whereas personal space and physical proximity need to be thought carefully to ensure interaction comfort and spontaneity. Additionally, the robot influenced people’s self-reflection and social values refraining them from enjoying an unknown experience, while ambiguity in communication led to less confidence and trust.

Throughout human history, communication has evolved and diversified t hrough v arious m eans, f rom natural languages to modern forms like video and virtual reality. Now, a paradigm shift, transhumanism, is proposing the integration of machines and computers into the human body to augment individuals physically, sensorily, cognitively, and emotionally. In this pictorial, we examine “How can we approach the design of transhuman technologies for communication?” and “How might future research examine their impact on communication?” For this, we conducted co-speculation workshops to identify design opportunities, and based on them, created fictional a bstracts envisioning future research. Our work contributes a set of design speculations and a range of thought-provoking research ideas that will foster discussions about probable pitfalls and benefits of transhuman technologies in the future of communication.

The concepts of sacred places and spaces appear throughout religions globally. Places such as churches, cathedrals, temples, mosques, synagogues and graveyards are given special meanings, both functionally and spiritually, and separated from the ordinary. Recently location-based augmented reality (AR) technologies and applications have become widespread, and this raises questions regarding how AR content relates to sacred places. In this study, we approached this complex topic by asking clergy of the Lutheran Christian Church (N=47) to reflect on associated phenomena. We approached the data via reflexive thematic analysis and uncovered tensions related to (1) connected vs detached from sacredness; (2) supporting the spiritual purpose of the space vs conflicting with it; and (3) maintaining tradition vs embracing innovation. Overall, our findings suggest that AR technologies and products impact sacred spaces on multiple levels, but currently there is no consensus among the clergy on the impact of these changes.

The use of virtual reality (VR) has seen significant recent growth and presents opportunities for use in many domain areas. The use of head-mounted displays (HMDs) also presents unique opportunities for the implementation of audio feedback congruent with head and body movements, thus matching intuitive expectations. However, the use of audio in VR is still undervalued and there is a lack of consistency within audio-centedd research in VR. To address this shortcoming and present an overview of this area of research, we conducted a scoping review (n = 121) focusing on the use of audio in HMD-based VR and its effects on user/player experience. Results show a lack of standardisation for common measures such as pleasantness and emphasize the context-specific ability of audio to influence a variety of affective, cognitive, and motivational measures, but are mixed for presence and generally lacking for social experiences and descriptive research.

Flow experience is one of the most ambitious targets of any user interface designer. However, it has remained elusive to evaluate how well user interfaces give rise to flow experience outside conducting invasive self-reporting-based questionnaires, which remove the users from the flow experience and can't be massively applied. At the same time, otherwise, well-built systems do track the behaviour of users on the interface, and therefore, user behaviour data could act as a reliable proxy for assessing the experience of users. Currently, there is little empirical research or data about which indices of user behaviours might correspond with having a flow experience as well as the different psychological constituents of the flow experience. Therefore, facing the challenge of using users' behaviour data to model users' experience, we investigated the associations between users' behaviour data (e.g. mouse clicks, activity time in the system, and average response time) and their self-reported flow experience by using data mining (i.e. associations rules) analysing data from 204 subjects. Results demonstrate that the speed of users' actions negatively affects the flow experience antecedents while also positively affecting the loss of self-consciousness. Our study advances the literature, providing insights to identify users' flow experience through behaviour data.

Achieving cooperation between individuals is challenging and often driven by self-beneficial motives. On the other hand, people also seem capable of subordinating their personal interests and of engaging in cooperation for motives other than their own, i.e. out of altruistic impulses. One context in which both motivational facets can be observed is multiplayer online games. However, there is a lack of knowledge about how cooperation based on altruism and egoism develops in games, which also prevents us from transferring this knowledge as a form of gamification. In this study, we explore which game features are accountable for altruistic and egoistic sentiment, and how these distinctive demeanours induce cooperation in games, with the intent to also derive implications for gamification. We employ we-intention and I-intention theory and conduct a survey among players of the game Ingress (N = 206). Our findings imply that (1) cooperative game design can give rise to within-group altruism in form of enjoyment in helping others and cooperative goals, (2) altruism can lead to the formation of we-intentions, and (3) individualistic game features invoke I-intentions and self-centered motivations in games in the form of recognition-seeking. Theoretical and practical implications are provided for cooperative game and gamification design.

With the advent of consumer-grade electroencephalography (EEG) and virtual reality (VR) devices, the use of human cognitive processes directly as means for user-adapted interaction in immersive virtual environments has become increasingly relevant. In this study (N = 43), we investigate electroencephalography-based neurofeedback interaction in virtual reality (VR). Particularly, we investigate this phenomenon in the context of meditation which enables the studying of cognitive processes (attention, sense of presence, meditation depth) when using an immersive interface that is adaptive based on neural responses. A prototype virtual reality environment was built that employs head-mounted display (HMD), and the neurofeedback functionality guided the user to increase the neural indices of meditation-related concentration and relaxation. The observed findings provide evidence for the effectiveness of neurofeedback functionality and VR in evoking desired types of neural activation and subjective experiences.

The commonly applied strategies for promoting policy compliance can be coercive, potentially hindering behavioural change and discouraging individuals from taking a proactive role in their social settings.These approaches also pose risks related to ethics as they may sacrifice individual agency and autonomy.However, contemporary motivational strategies may provide solutions to these conundrums.One of the prominent approaches is gamification, which aims to foster engagement and intrinsic motivation by using game-like design.Despite increasing interest, the corpus on gamification is yet to comprehensively investigate its effects on policy compliance and proactive citizen behaviours.Therefore, this study examines the relationships between gamification design types, gameful experience, policy compliance and safety citizenship behaviour in the social distancing context (during COVID-19) using a vignette-based online experiment (n = 937).Based on the results, gamification supports policy compliance and safety citizenship behaviour.The results further indicate that the effect of gamification is mediated by the engaging gameful experience it creates, and adds granularity by showing the differential effects of achievement and progression-based, competitive, and immersive designs.The findings provide evidence of gamification's potential as a non-coercive method of helping people follow policies while encouraging a proactive citizen role.

Computational wearables are redefining our presence in the world and transforming our lifestyles by engendering a seamless connection between the wearer and the worn. Despite numerous original studies on the development as well as the current advances of wearables, a systematic review from the standpoint of fashion seems to be lacking. Thus, this systematic review aimed to explore the current state of research on computational fashion in wearables’ literature in terms of the key domains, theoretical models, materials, interaction modalities, and existing gaps. To this aim, the authors built a search string based on the keywords in related topics and conducted the research using Scopus databases. As a result, a total of 4777 papers between January 1990 to August 2021 were screened and 82 research study papers finally passed the inclusion-exclusion criteria for the purpose of the review. The results display: first, computational wearables’ studies are becoming more inclined towards the aesthetic aspects of fashion wearables; second, although the functional aspects of the design processes received more attention, embodiment was the most discussed theory in the included studies; third, the extensive application of fabric implied the need for new fabrics with both smart quality and flexibility to afford aesthetic aspects; fourth, ambient data as input modalities received extensive attention in fashion wearables; fifth, kinetic output modalities as novel modes of fashion expression are becoming as prevalent as visual modalities. Finally, our findings provide a detailed overview of distinct facets of studies on computational fashion and a future research agenda for researchers and designers working on fashion and wearables.

Gamification has become one of the main areas in information systems and human–computer interaction research related to users’ motivations and behaviors. Within this context, a significant research gap is the lack of understanding of how users’ characteristics, especially in terms of their preferences for gameful interaction (i.e., user typologies), moderate the effects of gamification and, furthermore, how gamification could be tailored to individual needs. Despite their prominence in classifying users, current typologies and their use in research and practice have received severe criticism regarding validity and reliability, as well as the application and interpretation of their results. Therefore, it is essential to reconsider the relationships and foundations of common user typologies and establish a sound empirical basis to critically discuss their value and limits for personalized gamification. To address this research gap, this study investigated the psychometric properties of the most popular player types within tailored gamification literature (i.e., Bartle’s player types, Yee’s motivations to play, BrainHex, and HEXAD) through a survey study (n=877) using their respective measurement instruments, followed by a correlation analysis to understand their empirical relations and an exploratory factor analysis to identify the underlying factors. The results confirm that user typologies, despite their different origins, show considerable overlap, some being consistent whereas others contradicted theoretically assumed relationships. Furthermore, we show that these four user typologies overall factor into five underlying and fundamental dimensions of Socialization, Escapism, Achievement, Reward Pursuit, and Independence, which could be considered common concepts that may essentially reflect key determinants of user motivation in gamification. Our findings imply that future research and practice in tailored gamification design should shift the focus from developing and applying ever more nuanced typologies to understanding and measuring the key underlying determinants of user motivation in gameful systems. Moreover, given the considerable interrelationships between these determinants, we also argue that researchers should favor continuous representations of users’ motivations in specific situations instead of a dichotomous operationalization of user types as static manifestations of their preferences.

With the parallel advancement and evolution of psycho-physiological sensors, haptics, and overall wearable computing, wearable devices have become a mainstay in everyday life. While gaming is one of the most intuitively appealing areas for using wearable devices, most gaming concepts relying on wearable devices have had only moderate success. Therefore, further knowledge is needed by game developers for innovating new gaming concepts, by wearable designers to innovate new affordances for gaming in wearables, and by gamers for seeing the possibilities of what wearables can bring to gaming. To address this research problem, we combined vignette and survey studies (N = 289) to investigate which features of wearables (integrability, wearability, modularity, sociability, programmability, bio-adaptability, audiovisuality, and embodied modality) would lead to gameful experiences. Overall, the results indicate that integrability to games, wearability, modularity, and sociability were dimensions of wearables which were most strongly connected with the expectation of a heightened game experience. The findings of the study contribute to the current understanding on the experiential value of gaming wearables, as well as providing practical guidance for gaming wearables designers and marketers.

Climate change is one of humankind's grand challenges, and how we think about it influences how we perceive its risks and act. Understanding people's mental models of climate change (that is, how they internally represent it) and potentially challenging and changing them can be a fruitful avenue towards engagement. However, our understanding of how games can affect climate change mental models is limited, especially in the lack of control conditions with comparable content. In this experiment, participants created cognitive maps of climate change before and after experiencing an immersive VR game, a desktop PC game, or a text with graphs. We show that all conditions improved the quality, focus, and systems orientation of cognitive maps, but no significant differences were found between groups. The intervention effectively increased the salience of issues such as health and biodiversity impacts, even though changes were limited in scope. The game was on average more enjoyable than the text, with the VR version significantly more so than the other two conditions. The findings suggest that games can be a viable and attractive communication and learning method where engagement is a struggle. We provide avenues for future research and, especially, game design in this area.

The advancement of human-computer integration as a research field promises to introduce transhumanistic ways of communicating through the enhanced abilities of augmented humans. Our work seeks to illuminate this experiential landscape, exploring a diverse set of human augmentation technologies (HATs) for communication purposes. We investigated this topic through four co-speculation workshops focusing on physical, cognitive, sensory and emotional augmentations with 35 participants. Through a reflexive thematic analysis of the workshop data, we outlined eight HAT speculations for transhuman communication, grouped into four overarching augmentation clusters: (1) Bodily Changes in/for Communication, (2) Communication with Transferrable and Collective Beings, (3) Communication through Emotion and Memory, and (4) Communication with Augmented/Altered Perception. By serving as a foundation for discussions on transhumanism and communication in CSCW and beyond, these speculations contribute to a design space highlighting design opportunities and challenges to developing and researching near-future communication technologies.

There are numerous benefits from regularly walking in nature, and today's mobile technologies have the potential to encourage people to do so. Past research has showed that gamified map-based apps and location-based games (LBGs) have the capability to incentivize people to go to nature areas in cities and beyond. In this study, we explored LBGs' potential to bring people to nature by conducting a field experiment with a new mechanic called Routes in the popular LBG Pokémon GO. Prior to the Route feature's launch, we created altogether 13 Routes of various lengths in both city and nature landscapes. We collected numerical in-game data of how many times each Route was walked and deployed a survey (n=67) for Pokémon GO players in the area where the Routes were made. The findings suggest that proximity to population concentrations and in-game rewards are key drivers of Route popularity. Players' motivators to choose nature Routes over urban Routes were limited to outside-the-game factors such as scenery, and overall in our experiment the urban Routes turned out to be more popular.

Here we present an exploration into the playful potential of forests and how interactive tech might respond to it. Through first-person, speculative, and situated generative design methods, we engaged with a range of forestry activities to explore their capacity to afford experiences based on joy and care. An analysis of our 16 trips to the forest (and the reflections they motivated) revealed 13 play potentials [6] of human-forest interactions: 13 aspects of forestry experiences that can be intrinsically joyful. We present them clustered as 5 overarching directions that can guide the design of technology that pays more attention to nature's inherent playful character. Our work can inspire a new wave of forest technology that transcends techno-solutionism and privileges alternative values of joy and care.

Recent research calls for new design methods and tools that respond to the idiosyncrasies of emergent design spaces. Here we address one of them: the design of nature-related technology. To facilitate increasingly situated practices in this space, we created the Wild Probes: a set of probing tools for displacing co-design into the wilderness. Our toolkit enables forestry future-making by helping forest goers to pay attention to, reflect on, ideate around, and document their forestry experiences. Here we present the design and early use of the toolkit. We hope other designers will find it useful and extend it with new Wild Probes of their own.

In recent years, extended reality (XR) technology has seen a rise in use in environmental subjects, i.e., climate change or biodiversity loss, as a potential tool to inform and engage the public with current and future environmental issues. However, research on the potential of XR technology for environmental sustainability is still in the early stages, and there is no clear synthesis of the methods studied in this field. To provide a clearer view of existing approaches and research objectives, we systematically reviewed current literature dealing with XR use in environmental topics. Although the results indicate that the volume of literature exploring XR in environmental applications is increasing, empirical evidence of its impact is limited, hindering the possibility of presently drawing significant conclusions on its potential benefits. Based on our analyses, we identified thematic, theoretical, and methodological knowledge gaps and provide a guideline to aid future research in the field.

Previous research suggests that the experience and practices related to gaming and extended realities, and religion and spiritualism, share similarities. In this study, we explore how both the employees of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (n=156) and pervasive game players (n=98) perceive and make sense of these connections. We approach the qualitative data from the perspective of Durkheim, who, similarly to how game theorists view games, views religion as a multi-faceted system that incorporates the rules, practices and communities that comprise the religion. From the data emerges the following prominent connection as perceived by both groups of informants: systems of (1) shared premise, (2) resilience and restoration, (3) symbolism, (4) extended reality and (5) day-to-day structuring. A numerical view of the data shows that 42,5% of the participants did not perceive similarities, and examination of these responses suggested that while religion and pervasive games share functional similarities, they are further apart from a substantive perspective.

Engaging with nature enriches people’s life greatly, and it is a particularly powerful wellbeing activity. Unsurprisingly, researchers in HCI and beyond seek to augment and extend the relationship people have with nature through technology, to positively enhance their health as a result. In this paper, we report on a scoping review that examines research exploring health, nature, and technology research. By charting 29 papers from the last five years, we produce a situated snapshot of the current research landscape and identify three trends within the paper pool: Despite the potential for rich, experiential engagements, human-nature interaction is often understood as an endeavour that is 1) universal, 2) flattened and 3) disconnected from everyday life. We reflect on our findings to outline design opportunities for human-nature interaction that extend and re-orientate it; to design for multi-dimensional caring experiences that allow for a more-than-just-human understanding of nature.

Currently, an essential challenge in education in Brazil is to promote quality education that reaches all schools in the country, even those with limited technological educational resources. With this work, we have made a contribution to the field of gamified education by creating a comprehensive didactic booklet that has been translated into Brazilian Portuguese, English, and Spanish, thereby facilitating educators to gamify their classrooms in an unplugged and personalized way. We have introduced an innovative approach to designing unplugged gamified classes, aiming to provide engaging and enjoyable learning for students. This instructional material is based on a framework of five distinct gamification designs, offering teachers a versatile toolkit to gamify their classes, even if they never had any experiences with gamification. Our resources not only serve as valuable aids but also function as guides for teachers, empowering them to gamify their classes in a manner that is both student-centric and adaptable to different contexts, an essential characteristic with the possible variations of the students and places. This booklet is the result of an intensive training course provided to 15 Brazilian teachers, even in a short period of time, training them with essential knowledge and skills. These educators gained proficiency in several key areas, including i) understanding the fundamental concept of gamification and your more common definition, profiling their students and recognizing the pivotal role this plays in designing effective gamified learning experiences for the evolution of them, ii) familiarization with the various gamification elements and their organization into the five distinct designs, and iii) crafting context-free lessons that align with each of these innovative gamification designs. In an evolving educational landscape, our work stands as a beacon, enabling educators to harness the power of gamification and create dynamic, interactive learning environments for their students. This initiative has the potential to improve the quality of education and awaken in students a curiosity that transcends traditional borders. Such a transformation in the educational landscape could have far-reaching effects, ultimately contributing to the cultivation of an innovative, engaged, and motivated future generation, which will drive progress and innovation in various contexts.

This experience report addresses training that was offered to teachers in Brazil. The main objective of such training was to train teachers to be able to gamify their own classes, in an unplugged way (i.e., without the use of digital technologies), and student-centered (i.e., personalized). The external observation was used as the primary data collection approach. This initiative was proposed by the Brazilian Ministry of Education, in which 27 laboratories were made available (one for each state of the federation) with the aim of preparing teachers nationwide. However, although some educators have shown a strong interest in using gamification as a strategy in their classrooms, a second group has demonstrated some resistance to the incorporation of gamification within the scope of education. These different levels of receptivity among teachers highlight the importance of continuous support and professional development to ensure the successful integration of gamification into the educational setting.

Studies on gameful approaches in education have constantly sought to identify users' motivation and experience. However, most of these studies have focused exclusively on students' perspectives without considering the teachers' motivational and affective issues. Thus, although the community already has considerable knowledge regarding motivational and affective issues related to students' experience, little is known about teachers' acceptance of using gameful approaches in education. starting to face this challenge, in this paper, we present a case study ($\mathrm{N}=41$) analyzing the teachers' acceptance of the use of a gamified educational system. The main results indicate that previous experience with distance education and gamification can positively affect the perceived ease of use of gamified educational systems. However, unlike expected, experience with educational technology can not significantly affect perceived ease of use. Our results contribute to the fields of educational technologies and gamification in education by presenting the teachers' perceptions regarding a gamified educational system in education.

The education of autistic children is highly challenging and has been calling the attention of different types of professionals to offer solutions capable of helping in the education of these children. One of the most promising possibilities is the use of gameful approaches (e.g., serious games, simulators, and gamification) in the teaching of autistic children. However, despite the recent efforts, it is difficult to understand how these approaches have been developed and applied. To face this problem, we conducted a systematic mapping investigating the design and application of gameful approaches for the education of autistic children. The main results indicate a predominance in the use of 2D games for personal computers, focusing on the contexts of nature, home, and city, analyzed by qualitative approaches. Our study mainly contributes to the areas of educational technologies, mental health, and game-based learning, by providing a general view and a research agenda on the design, use, and evaluation of gameful approaches in the educational process of autistic children.

Gameful approaches (e.g., gamification, games, and alternate reality games) have been widely used in education in recent years. However, the results are still contradictory and generated different challenges. One of the main challenges is to understand how different individual aspects affect the users' experience in gameful educational systems. To face this challenge, in this paper, we present a study ($\mathbf{N}=\mathbf{205}$) analyzing the effects of demographic aspects (i.e., age, gender, and cultural orientation) on users' flow experience (i.e., challenge-skill balance, action-awareness merging, clear goals, unambiguous feedback, concentration, sense of control, loss of self-consciousness, transformation of time, and autotelic experience) during the use of a gamified educational system. The main results indicated that age positively affected the overall flow experience while individualism negatively affected the overall flow experience. Our results contribute to the fields of educational technologies and gamification, providing insights into how different demographic aspects can affect the user flow experience in gamified educational systems.

The recent progress in generative AI models, particularly large language models (LLMs), has brought about a transformation in the field of education. Conversational LLM services, such as Google's Bard and OpenAI's ChatGPT, offer students access to many abilities such as summarization and generation of text and code, and on-demand replies to questions on expert topics. In this paper, we observe ChatGPT to explore how LLM services impact learning and instruction in higher education. First, we mapped the capabilities of the system by reviewing the grey literature on ChatGPT and using the system ourselves for two months. Second, we selected a Bachelor level computer science curriculum from a Finnish university, and examined the impact of ChatGPT on the offered courses. As an outcome of this study, we highlight 13 implications for students' learning in higher education, and discuss the contemporary future of AI-assisted learning in universities and beyond.

The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the world population in several ways. Schools had to modify their teaching methods, reinventing pedagogical practices and actions to students to continue learning in a new teaching and learning routine. In particular, gameful approaches (e.g., games, gamification, and simulators) were alternatives used to improve the quality of emergency remote teaching. However, the need to use these approaches on an emergency basis meant that institutions could not plan the application or analyze the impacts of these technologies. To fill this gap, we performed a qualitative study, in which four students and a teacher participated. Using thematic analysis, we explored their perception regarding the use of social gamification in emergency remote teaching compared to regular face-to-face teaching. The results indicate that some different gamification elements drew the attention of students during remote and face-to-face teaching. However, no differences were identified between the different teaching modalities. Our study contributes to the fields of educational technologies and gamification through insights into the application of social gamification in education.

In the realm of music we have multiple examples of successful rock stars, composers and producers who describe themselves as self-taught. This suggests there might be a demand in formal music education for learning technologies that support students’ self-propelled discovery. In this theoretical work, we explore the design space of educational music composing games that would allow students to explore and learn music theory concepts at their leisure. We designed four unique tile-based music creation games based on popular contemporary video game genres, and evaluated them from the perspectives of learning and musical expression. This study opens up new avenues in music composing game design, and offers examples of some ways in which games can be harnessed as vehicles to learn music theory and composition.

The production of immersive media often involves 360-degree viewing on mobile or immersive VR devices, particularly in the field of immersive journalism. However, it is unclear how the different technologies used to present such media affect the experience of presence. To investigate this, a laboratory experiment was conducted with 87 participants who were assigned to one of three conditions: HMD-360, Monitor-360, or Monitor-article, representing three distinct levels of technological immersion. All three conditions represented the same base content, with high and mid-immersion featuring a panoramic 360-video and low-immersion presenting an article composed of a transcript and video stills.

In today’s world of knowledge-based economies, gig economies, crowdsourcing, and overall ICT-driven creativity, the avenues toward creativity and for its cultivation are increasingly diverse and sought after. Researchers have postulated that, in the context of creativity and information technology, not only are people are increasingly driven by the game-like structures of contemporary systems, services, organisational forms, incentive arrangements, and player-like behaviours rather than monetary incentives but also that the platforms that facilitative creative learning are becoming increasingly reminiscent of games. However, it is unclear how this gamification affects creativity vis-à-vis other forms of incentives. In this study, we investigated how gamification, money and punishment affect people’s creativity. We randomly assigned 102 participants to four groups and given different incentives to complete an alternative-uses task. We measured their creativity according to the four classic elements: fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. The results showed that creativity was significantly higher in the gamification and punishment conditions compared with the control and monetary reward conditions, but creativity was not significantly different between the monetary reward and control conditions. The findings of this study provide theoretical and practical insights to guide people designing effective talent development programmes and stimulating creativity in their employees.

Fields such as immersive journalism and VR-based media consumption are expected to holistically engross users and have a deeper emotional impact as well as internationalization of information. ThisWe used a between-subjects repeated-measures experiment (N = 87) to study employs contenteffects of a 360-degree video presented in three levels of immersiveness. High and medium immersion (VR-360 and Screen-360) presented the original video using different technology, whereas low immersion (Article) represented video content in the form of a transcript and video stills. The results suggest that the higher immersiveness has a more prominentgreater effect on the emotional response of consumers. Moreover, higher negative affect after the media experience appears to be associated seems to predictwith lower cued recall memory of the presented content. When it comes to individual differences, age in the range of 18-40 years does not seem to influence the strength of the affect change but females might experience a higher change than males. This study suggests caution when creating informational but highly emotional immersive media content as the negative emotional experience might impede memory of factual information. These implications are further applicable to fields other than journalism, such as education and simulation trainings.

Widespread climate change engagement is needed to confront our current environmental crises, but it remains difficult to attain. Methods such as visualizations and experiential learning activities, including games and gamification, have been proposed to engage citizens beyond what generic and one-way information sharing can, but rigorous studies comparing the effects of game-based learning with traditional methods are rare. Therefore, this study investigates the effects of a serious game vs. control on learning outcomes related to climate change concepts. We conducted an experiment involving N=105 participants randomly assigned to two treatment groups (a desktop screen-based video game and an immersive VR version of the same game) and a control (a text with charts) and investigated the differences between pre- and post-intervention measures of knowledge. The results show that all three conditions had a large effect on learning, but there were no significant improvement differences between groups. Therefore, video games, either on desktop or virtual reality, may be as effective as more traditional instructional materials. Based on detailed observations of the questionnaire data, we also provide game design recommendations. Future studies could focus on specific features of learning and cognitive engagement and expand this experimental design to affect and behavior.

Toxic behavior remains a salient challenge for online gaming environments, such as multiplayer online battle arena video games (MOBAs). In this study, we sought to understand player roles and settings in which toxicity occurs using a mixed-methods approach. First, we conducted ethnographic observations and interviews with players of the most popular contemporary MOBA, League of Legends (Study 1). During the qualitative analysis three main themes emerged: (1) the fluidity of roles, (2) the subjectivity of the toxic experience, and (3) cascading effects and changing modalities of toxicity. Based on the themes, we formulated hypotheses regarding players’ experience with toxicity. To test these hypotheses, we gathered cross-sectional data from MOBA players (n = 216), which we analyzed with co-variance-based statistics (Study 2). Our quantitative findings showcase the complexity of toxicity as well as players’ ambivalence toward the topic. We found indicators of substantial influences of personality and a cycle of retaliation toxicity spread as victims retaliated against the perpetrator.

Location-based multiplayer games such as Pokémon GO are tied to real-world locations. Past research has demonstrated that, consequently, these games influence where players move. In order to explore what dynamics in these games incentivize travel to specific places or areas, we engaged in interviews with active players. We discovered 11 unique game dynamics, which could be positioned under three overarching themes: (1) the playing field, as determined by the placement of points of interest, the players' habitat and their surroundings; (2) the player communities and real life relationships, which motivated and directed the playing; and (3) coincidental motivational support, which highlighted how location-based games offer multi-layered motivation for players to travel to, and engage with, specific real-world locations. Our study contributes to the fields of gamified human mobility and human-nature interaction by elucidating how playful technologies can influence where and when people move.

The convergence of gaming and gambling, known as "gamblification", has been a topic of increasing interest in recent years. Loot boxes, i.e., rewards offering randomized content in exchange for money or time, have been a particular focal point. Research has shown links between excessive loot box consumption and problematic consumption behaviors, leading to several attempts to regulate loot boxes. Arguments against regulation have been that loot boxes are conceptually and structurally akin to other unregulated game formats, such as collectible card games. However, this discourse is often without deeper analysis of the mechanics of different products at the center of convergence. Therefore, to add to this knowledge, this article examines the similarities and differences between booster packs in Magic Arena, their physical counterparts in Magic: The Gathering, and loot boxes included in digital games. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which these booster packs compare to loot boxes in terms of consumption patterns, visual appearance, contextual factors, and regulation. Analysis reveals that digital booster packs in Magic Arena differ from both loot boxes and physical card packs, both due to their direct impact on gameplay, and their unique features afforded by the digital environment in which they exist.

Modeling users' experience in gameful systems is one of the main contemporary challenges in the field of human-computer interaction. One of the most desired and complex experiences to be identified is the flow experience (i.e., challenge-skill balance, action-awareness merging, clear goals, unambiguous feedback, concentration, sense of control, loss of self-consciousness, transformation of time, and autotelic experience). Facing this challenge, we conducted a quantitative study (N = 313) based on structural equation modeling, aiming to model and predict the users' flow experience through their behavior (represented by performance-related, interaction with gamification, as well as the time they take in different actions) in the system. The main results indicate that i) gamification (i.e., doing well in points, badges, and leader-board) was positively related to users' experience of good challenge-skill balance, ii) whereas it was negatively related to users' concentration. Thirdly iii) user performance was positively related to users' concentration. However, overall, the results indicate that while associations between user behavior and flow experience could be established, there remains future work to be done to fully explain user flow experience while using a system. Our study contributes to the fields of human-computer interaction, gamification, and educational technologies, especially through insights related to modeling and predicting flow experiences in gameful systems through behavior data.

In recent decades, several studies have suggested and validated user models (e.g., Bartle, and Hexad) to represent different user profiles in games and gamified environments. However, when applying these user models in practice (e.g., to personalize gamification), several studies reported contradictory outcomes. Recently, some studies outlined that one of the possible explanations for these contradictory findings is that people can present changes in their user profiles over time. In this study (N = 118), we present an analysis of the consistency of gamification user orientations after six months of the initial identification, by analyzing the association between user orientations in the first and second data collection. Overall, our results corroborate prior research demonstrating that user orientations can not be considered stable over time and also that the strongest tendency of the users might not be sufficient to determine how users change. Furthermore, we were able to identify that some user orientations can be more stable than others and model some relationships between their profiles after six months. Based on the results, we indicate a research agenda that can further the knowledge about the topic, as well as indicate a set of suggestions on how to model user profiles based on our results.

Games are considered promising for engaging people with climate change. In virtual worlds, players can adopt empowering roles to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and/or adapt to climate impacts. However, the lack of a comprehensive exploration of existing climate-related identities and actions prevents understanding their potential. Here, we analyze 80 video games and classify avatar identities, or expected player roles, into six types. Climate selves encourage direct life changes; climate citizens are easy to identify with and imitate; climate heroes are inspirational figures upholding environmental values; empowered individuals deliberate to avoid a tragedy of the commons; authorities should consider stakeholders and the environment; and faction leaders engage in bi- or multilateral relations. Adaptation is often for decision-making profiles, while empowered individuals, authorities, and faction leaders usually face conflicting objectives. We discuss our results in relation to avatar research and provide suggestions for researchers, designers, and educators.

Games have been used for utilitarian purposes since at least the 1960s, with gamification pursuing game-like experiences in areas such as education, health, and sustainability. While these methods generally attempt to improve life for players, a central and underexplored issue is the friction between a design that wants players to attain a utilitarian outcome, such as learning, and players who often strive for self-directed play. Based on data collected from user testing of a digital serious game and following an inductive process, we created a thematic framework that focuses on the frictions and tensions that may arise between design and player. This framework may be used to understand how players engage holistically with serious games, but also to improve such games to maximize engagement with the content while acknowledging and allowing for player agency and emergent behavior.

Due to the datafication of our society the necessity to increase data literacy is at an all time high. In this brief paper we present the design of the gamified application GANDALF, aiming to promote data literacy and used in experiment-based research. Following a methodology of research through design, we account for the different phases of the process and frame them as explorative and insightful epistemic stages. Such recount allow us some critical reflection over the design of GANDALF and to formulate five key design considerations that we hope will be useful in the future for the creation of software with similar purposes.

Contemporary digital technologies have facilitated practices related to games whereby users often produce and consume content for free. To date, research into consumer interactions has largely focused on in-game factors, however, the intention to both play the game and to make in-game purchases are influenced by outside factors, including game streams and game-centred communities. In particular, the growth of competitive gaming, known as esports, offers a new channel for consumer engagement. This research explores the potential for esports to be a significant factor in understanding both intentions to play and spend money on games. Our study draws from Motivations Scale of Sports Consumption to empirically investigate the relationship between esports spectating motivations and game consumption: Watching Intention, Gaming Intention, and Purchasing Intention. This survey uses structural equation modelling (SEM) to analyse data collected from a sample of video game players (n = 194). This research contributes empirical evidence of the relationship between esports spectating and game consumption, with the relationship between Watching Intention and Gaming Intention found to be particularly strong. Finally, while the MSSC is an adequate measure for esports spectating, additional aspects specific to esports require further investigation, consequently, there may be more optimal measures which can be developed.

The current study investigates the motivation to explore the expansive possibilities online games provide for identity development, in addition to the widely studied gaming consumption value motivations. This study develops an integrated framework from the perspective of the identity, self-congruity, self-efficacy, and consumption value theories for a holistic appreciation of online gaming motivations. Data were collected from active online gamers and structural equation modelling was employed to test the hypotheses. The findings suggest that self-expressiveness positively influences continued intentions to play games and, in turn, is impacted by self-congruity. Self-efficacy is also found to impact users’ continuance intention for online games. Further, the results re-affirm the importance of hedonic (perceived enjoyment) and utilitarian (perceived usefulness) consumption values on gamers’ continuance intentions in an online gaming context. Through multi-group analysis, this study also highlights the influence of perceived risk in shaping the continuance intentions. Findings suggest that the impact of perceived enjoyment, perceived usefulness, self-expressiveness, and self-congruity on continuance intention is enhanced in the presence of high risk; the reverse holds true for self-efficacy. The key practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Engagement is a common goal pursued by most social and technical systems, because of its widely acknowledged effects on enhancing user acceptance and performance. Previous research has shown that a system’s ability to engage users involves two known aspects: the technology foundation that determines the interactive paths for engaging users and the design methodology that determines the atop user experience to be conveyed through those paths. In recent years, an emerging and promising engagement approach that integrates both an advanced technology stack and novel design methodology, i.e. IoT-enabled Gamification (IeG), has attracted wide interest from both public and private sectors. This article aims to conduct a systematic review to answer some fundamental questions. 75 papers were reviewed under a 3-axis analysis framework of user engagement, the majority of which indicated that IeG is linked to increased engagement in a variety of application domains, stages, and population scales.

The design and development of playful wearable devices is a challenging and complicated problem. It entails not only multidisciplinary expertise but also a comprehensive understanding of player experience. There is a scarcity of evidence-based studies in current state-of-art literature that investigate general design practices and provide pragmatic design implications and suggestions based on solid user-centered research. To bridge the gap, we developed five experience prototypes based on the speculative design concepts from previous studies, and a Wizard of Oz experiment was conducted to elicit end users' feedback regarding general gaming experience as well as specific design themes in different gaming scenarios. The user experiment results were analyzed qualitatively following a rigorous thematic analysis, generating five major design implications as output. We believe this study will offer forward-looking insights to designers, developers and the research community, facilitating future work in this field.

With the advent of consumer grade virtual reality (VR) headsets and physiological measurement devices, new possibilities for mediated social interaction emerge enabling the immersion to environments where the visual features react to the users’ physiological activation. In this study, we investigated whether and how individual and interpersonally shared biofeedback (visualised respiration rate and frontal asymmetry of electroencephalography, EEG) enhance synchrony between the users’ physiological activity and perceived empathy towards the other during a compassion meditation exercise carried out in a social VR setting. The study was conducted as a laboratory experiment$(\text{N} = 72)$(N=72)employing a Unity3D-based Dynecom immersive social meditation environment and two amplifiers to collect the psychophysiological signals for the biofeedback. The biofeedback on empathy-related EEG frontal asymmetry evoked higher self-reported empathy towards the other user than the biofeedback on respiratory activation, but the perceived empathy was highest when both feedbacks were simultaneously presented. In addition, the participants reported more empathy when there was stronger EEG frontal asymmetry synchronization between the users. The presented results inform the field of affective computing on the possibilities that VR offers for different applications of empathic technologies.

Recent studies on gaming wearables show that wearables can contribute to the gaming experience by bolstering performativity, facilitating social interaction, and accommodating distinct interaction modalities. Still, these studies focused on contexts such as role-playing, casual, or festival games. Stakeholder-oriented research that explores the integration of wearables for mainstream gaming platforms such as game consoles is scarce. To fill this gap, we have conducted an exploratory study through 6 participatory design workshops focusing on different aspects of wearables with 33 participants from different stakeholders. As a result, we have created fifteen design themes and three gaming wearable concepts that led to seven actionable design implications which can be adopted by designers and researchers for designing gaming wearables.

User modeling in gamified educational systems is a contemporary challenge. In particular, modeling the students' flow experience (i.e., challenge-skill balance, action-awareness merging, clear goals, unambiguous feedback, total concentration on the task at hand, sense of control, loss of self-consciousness, transformation of time, and autotelic experience) during a gamified system usage is highly challenging. It is because measurement' instruments usually are invasive, removing the users from the flow experience and/or cannot be applied massively (e.g., participant observation, questionnaires or electroencephalogram). We faced this challenge by conducting a data-driven study (N = 23), where we used a robust statistical method (i.e., partial least squares path modeling) to model the students' flow experience, based on their interaction data (e.g., number of mouse clicks) in a gamified educational system. The main results indicate a relationship between the interaction logs and four flow experience dimensions. Our finds contribute to the area of gamified educational systems, through the students' flow experience modeling. Finally, based on our results, we also provided a series of recommendations for future studies.

In this pictorial, we depict our design process on gaming wearables starting from participatory design workshops to concept creation. Wearables possess strong qualities for gaming such as performativity, sociality and interactivity. However, it is an emergent field and there is a dearth of design knowledge especially when it comes to designing wearables for mainstream gaming platforms such as game consoles. Our aim is to explore this field elaborately with a research through design approach and also clearly exemplify how our design process progressed through different phases. Our results, apart from helping wearables designers to understand critical features for mainstream gaming, will also demonstrate the techniques and methods for extracting knowledge from PD workshops and incorporating it in a conceptual design phase.

Abstract Recently, there has been a burgeoning of immersive virtual reality (VR) applications in a variety of shapes, including gameful social VR. Despite a longstanding tradition of studying social factors in gameful computing, this perspective in the specific experiences of VR is only gaining traction. This highly multidisciplinary area of interest is immensely complex with potential consequences on individuals and social groups alike. To aid in constituting and systematizing this area of research from the early days, this paper explores 14 state-of-art publications on experimental research of social aspects in gameful VR. These were analysed predominantly based on the included manipulations and the studied outcomes resulting in the extraction of five and seven thematic wholes, respectively. Finally, based on the findings, four broad avenues to consider were emphasized as suggested paths for a comprehensive future of embodied gameful social VR application and research across a variety of disciplines.

Video games have risen as a popular medium with the potential to become a powerful tool for public climate change engagement. However, little is known about how existing digital games can fulfill this role. This study systematically compiles 150 video games that represent climate change, including serious (n = 109) and for entertainment (n = 41). The games are analyzed by adapting an existing framework (15 dimensions: achievable, challenging, concrete, credible, efficacy-enhancing, experiential learning, feedback-oriented, fun, identity-driven, levelling-up, meaningful, narrative-driven, reward-driven, simulating, social) and statistically compared. The analysis reveals that most games comply with most recommended attributes, but credibility, achievability, meaningfulness, and social features are uncommon or rare. Statistical results comparing serious games and games for entertainment associate six attributes with serious games (achievable, challenging, credible, efficacy-enhancing, experiential learning, feedback-oriented), and one (narrative-driven) with games for entertainment. The findings suggest that researchers would benefit from widening their lens to detect previously overlooked opportunities for game-based climate change engagement, communication, and education. The study also provides a systematic mapping of extant games depicting climate change for interested developers, designers and educators.

Abstract Gamification has been discussed as a standout approach to improve user experience, with different studies showing that users can have different preferences over game elements according to their user types. However, relatively less is known how different kinds of users may react to different types of gamification. Therefore, in this study ( $$N=331$$ N = 331 ) we investigate how user orientation (Achiever, Disruptor, Free Spirit, Philanthropist, Player, and Socializer) is associated with the preference for and perceived sense of accomplishment from different gamification designs. Beyond singular associations between the user orientation and the gamification designs, the findings indicate no comprehensive and consistent patterns of associations. From the six user orientations, five presented significant associations: Socializer orientation was positively associated with Social, Fictional, and Personal designs, while negatively associated with Performance design; Player orientation was positively associated with Social (Accomplishment), Personal, and Ecological designs, while negatively associated with the Social design (Preference); Disruptor orientation was positively associated with Social design; Achiever orientation was positively associated with Performance and Social designs; and Free Spirit orientation was negatively associated with Social design. Based on the results, we provide recommendations on how to personalize gamified systems and set further research trajectories on personalized gamification.

The current trends related to 'smart cities' are bringing the cityscapes of movies such as Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077 closer to our immediate reality. The question of what will the cities of the future look like is at the heart of urban studies. In parallel, a similar question is posed by (trans)humanists about the future of humanity and its possible technological enhancements. However, (trans)humanity and future cities are defined in a bi-directional dependency. Therefore, we have to answer the questions of future humans and cities simultaneously. This paper maps several ways of interacting between transhuman communities and smart cities to understand their possible effects on governing, design and society at large resulting in a framework that will work as a cautionary tale and an inspirational blueprint for imagining future urbanity.

Gamification is increasingly becoming a pertinent aspect of any UI and UX design. However, a canonical dearth in research and application of gamification has been related to the role of individual differences in susceptibility to gamification and its varied designs. To address this gap, this study reviews the extant corpus of research on tailored gamification (42 studies). The findings of the review indicate that most studies on the field are mostly focused on user modeling for a future personalization, adaptation, or recommendation of game elements. This user model usually contains the users’ preferences of play (i.e., player types), and is mostly applied in educational settings. The main contributions of this paper are a standardized terminology of the game elements used in tailored gamification, the discussion on the most suitable game elements for each users’ characteristic, and a research agenda including dynamic modeling, exploring multiple characteristics simultaneously, and understanding the effects of other aspects of the interaction on user experience.

Gamification is increasingly employed in learning environments as a way to increase student motivation and consequent learning outcomes. However, while the research on the effectiveness of gamification in the context of education has been growing, there are blind spots regarding which types of gamification may be suitable for different educational contexts. This study investigates the effects of the challenge-based gamification on learning in the area of statistics education. We developed a gamification approach, called Horses for Courses, which is composed of main game design patterns related to the challenge-based gamification; points, levels, challenges and a leaderboard. Having conducted a 2 (read: yes vs. no) x 2 (gamification: yes vs. no) between-subject experiment, we present a quantitative analysis of the performance of 365 students from two different academic majors: Electrical and Computer Engineering (n=279), and Business Administration (n=86). The results of our experiments show that the challenge-based gamification had a positive impact on student learning compared to traditional teaching methods (compared to having no treatment and treatment involving reading exercises). The effect was larger for females or for students at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Abstract Graphical user interfaces are widely common and present in everyday human–computer interaction, dominantly in computers and smartphones. Today, various actions are performed via graphical user interface elements, e.g., windows, menus and icons. An attractive user interface that adapts to user needs and preferences is progressively important as it often allows personalized information processing that facilitates interaction. However, practitioners and scholars have lacked an instrument for measuring user perception of aesthetics within graphical user interface elements to aid in creating successful graphical assets. Therefore, we studied dimensionality of ratings of different perceived aesthetic qualities in GUI elements as the foundation for the measurement instrument. First, we devised a semantic differential scale of 22 adjective pairs by combining prior scattered measures. We then conducted a vignette experiment with random participant (n = 569) assignment to evaluate 4 icons from a total of pre-selected 68 game app icons across 4 categories (concrete, abstract, character and text) using the semantic scales. This resulted in a total of 2276 individual icon evaluations. Through exploratory factor analyses, the observations converged into 5 dimensions of perceived visual quality: Excellence/Inferiority, Graciousness/Harshness, Idleness/Liveliness, Normalness/Bizarreness and Complexity/Simplicity. We then proceeded to conduct confirmatory factor analyses to test the model fit of the 5-factor model with all 22 adjective pairs as well as with an adjusted version of 15 adjective pairs. Overall, this study developed, validated, and consequently presents a measurement instrument for perceptions of visual qualities of graphical user interfaces and/or singular interface elements (VISQUAL) that can be used in multiple ways in several contexts related to visual human-computer interaction, interfaces and their adaption.

In recent years, augmented reality games (ARGs) such as Pokémon Go have become increasingly popular. These games not only afford a novel gaming experience but also have the potential to alter how players view their physical realities. In addition to the common experiences and gratifications people derive from games, (location-based) ARGs can afford, for example outdoor adventures, communal activities, and health benefits, but also create problems stemming from, for example privacy concerns and poor usability. This raises some important research questions as to what drives people to use these new applications, and why they may be willing to spend money on the content sold within them. In this study, we investigate the various gratifications people derive from ARGs (Pokémon Go) and the relationship of these gratifications with the players’ intentions to continue playing and spending money on them. We employ data drawn from players of Pokémon Go (N = 1190) gathered through an online survey. The results indicate that game enjoyment, outdoor activity, ease of use, challenge, and nostalgia are positively associated with intentions to reuse (ITR), meanwhile outdoor activity, challenge, competition, socializing, nostalgia and ITR are associated with in-app purchase intentions (IPI). In contrast with our expectations, privacy concerns or trendiness were not associated with reuse intentions or IPI.

Mobile app markets have been touted as fastest growing marketplaces in the world. Every day thousands of apps are published to join millions of others on app stores. The competition for top grossing apps and market visibility is fierce. The way an app is visually represented can greatly contribute to the amount of attention an icon receives and to its consequent commercial performance. Therefore, the icon of the app is of crucial importance as it is the first point of contact with the potential user/customer amidst the flood of information. Those apps that fail to arouse attention through their icons danger their commercial performance in the market where consumers browse past hundreds of icons daily. Using semantic differential scale (22 adjective pairs), we investigate the relationship between consumer perceptions of app icons and icon successfulness, measured by 1) overall evaluation of the icon, 2) willingness to click the icon, 3) willingness to download the imagined app and, 4) willingness to purchase the app. The study design was a vignette study with random participant (n = 569) assignment to evaluate 4 icons (n = 2276) from a total of pre-selected 68 game app icons across 4 categories (concrete, abstract, character and text). Results show that consumers are more likely to interact with app icons that are aesthetically pleasing and convey good quality. Particularly, app icons that are perceived unique, realistic and stimulating lead to more clicks, downloads and purchases.

In this paper, we present the development and validation of an instrument for measuring users’ gameful experience while using a service. Either intentionally or unintentionally, systems and services are becoming increasingly gamified and having a gameful experience is progressively important for the user’s overall experience of a service. Gamification refers to the transformation of technology to become more game-like, with the intention of evoking similar positive experiences and motivations that games do (the gameful experience) and affecting user behavior. In this study, we used a mixed-methods approach to develop an instrument for measuring the gameful experience. In a first qualitative study, we developed a model of the gameful experience using data from a questionnaire consisting of open-ended questions posed to users of Zombies, Run!, Duolingo, and Nike+ Run Club. In a second study, we developed the instrument and evaluated its dimensionality and psychometric properties using data from users of Zombies, Run! (N = 371). Based on the results of this second study, we further developed the instrument in a third study using data from users of Duolingo (N = 507), in which we repeated the assessment of dimensionality and psychometric properties, this time including confirmation of the model. As a result of this work, we devised GAMEFULQUEST, an instrument that can be used to model and measure an individual user’s gameful experience in systems and services, which can be used for user-adapted gamification and for informing user-modeling research within a gamification context.

Studying information diffusion and the spread of goods in the real world and in many digital services can be extremely difficult since information about the information flows is challenging to accurately track. How information spreads has commonly been analysed from the perspective of homophily, social influence, and initial seed selection. However, in virtual worlds and virtual economies, the movements of information and goods can be precisely tracked. Therefore, these environments create laboratories for the accurate study of information diffusion characteristics that have been difficult to study in prior research. In this paper, we study how content visibility as well as sender and receiver characteristics, the relationship between them, and the types of multilayer social network layers affect content absorption and diffusion in virtual world. The results show that prior visibility of distributed content is the strongest predictor of content adoption and its further spread across networks. Among other analysed factors, the mechanics of diffusion, content quality, and content adoption by users’ neighbours on the social activity layer had very strong influences on the adoption of new content.

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) have enabled the rise of so‐called “Collaborative Consumption” (CC): the peer‐to‐peer‐based activity of obtaining, giving, or sharing the access to goods and services, coordinated through community‐based online services. CC has been expected to alleviate societal problems such as hyper‐consumption, pollution, and poverty by lowering the cost of economic coordination within communities. However, beyond anecdotal evidence, there is a dearth of understanding why people participate in CC. Therefore, in this article we investigate people's motivations to participate in CC. The study employs survey data (N = 168) gathered from people registered onto a CC site. The results show that participation in CC is motivated by many factors such as its sustainability, enjoyment of the activity as well as economic gains. An interesting detail in the result is that sustainability is not directly associated with participation unless it is at the same time also associated with positive attitudes towards CC. This suggests that sustainability might only be an important factor for those people for whom ecological consumption is important. Furthermore, the results suggest that in CC an attitude‐behavior gap might exist; people perceive the activity positively and say good things about it, but this good attitude does not necessary translate into action.