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.

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.

Personalization of gamification is an alternative to overcome the shortcomings of the one-size-fits-all approach, but the few empirical studies analyzing its effects do not provide conclusive results. While many user and contextual information affect gamified experiences, prior personalized gamification research focused on a single user characteristic/dimension. Therefore, we hypothesize if a multidimensional approach for personalized gamification, considering multiple (user and contextual) information, can improve user motivation when compared to the traditional implementation of gamification. In this paper, we test that hypothesis through a mixed-methods sequential explanatory study. First, 26 participants completed two assessments using one of the two gamification designs and self-reported their motivations through the Situational Motivation Scale. Then, we conducted semi-structured interviews to understand learners' subjective experiences during these assessments. As result, the students using the personalized design were more motivated than those using the one-size-fits-all approach regarding intrinsic motivation and identified regulation. Furthermore, we found the personalized design featured game elements suitable to users' preferences, being perceived as motivating and need-supporting. Thus, informing i) practitioners on the use of a strategy for personalizing gamified educational systems that is likely to improve students' motivations, compared to OSFA gamification, and ii) researchers on the potential of multidimensional personalization to improve single-dimension strategies. For transparency, dataset and analysis procedures are available at https://osf.io/grzhp.

Gamification has been widely employed in educational contexts to improve students' engagement and enhance the learning process. In this sense, the present work investigates the impact of gamification on students' behavior and performance through learning paths, i.e., sequences of learning objects followed by students while interacting with a virtual learning environment. To achieve this, we captured, analyzed and visually represented learning paths from 139 students enrolled in an online course. As result, we observed that students using gamification interacted more with the course elements, had longer paths and better grades. The main contribution of this work is to present learning paths as a tool to investigate students' interaction in a virtual learning environment with gamified elements and to analyze these elements' impact on students' behavior and performance.

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 has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design of gamified strategies. This paper aims to create a taxonomy for the game elements, based on gamification experts' opinions. After a brief review from existing work, we extract first the game elements from the current state of the art, and then evaluate them via a survey with 19 gamification and education experts. The resulting taxonomy taxonomy included the description of 21 game elements and their quantitative and qualitative evaluation by the experts. Overall, the proposed taxonomy was in general well accepted by most of the experts. They also suggested expanding it with the inclusion of Narrative and Storytelling game elements. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is proposing a new, confirmed taxonomy to standardise the terminology used to define the game elements as a mean to design and deploy gamification strategies in the educational domain.

Abstract Gamification applies game elements in non-game contexts to improve users’ experience. One of the contexts that have mostly taken advantage of gamification is the educational one. However, the students’ experience is unique, since it varies according to their profile. Therefore, the individualities of each student must be considered to improve the students’ experience. This paper aims to explore the gamification properties and analyze the results of the user-centered application. For this, we proposed a framework focused on the user-centered gamification in the educational context, taking into account personal, functional, psychological, temporal, playful, implementable and evaluative properties. After applying the framework in the e-learning system, the controlled experiment with 139 students revealed an increase in students’ interaction, engagement and satisfaction. Thus, our main contributions are the improvement of the students’ experience with the user-centered gamification and the definition of a framework to assist in its application. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS This paper proposes a user-centered gamification framework for educational context It has been applied in an e-learning system and a controlled experiment was conducted A total of 139 students enrolled for an online course, and half of them used the gamified version Results indicate an increase in the students’ interaction, engagement and satisfaction

Learning Analytics and Gamification are examples of some strategies that have been applied in educational context as an attempt to reduce motivational problems. While learning analytics seek to analyze learners and their contexts in order to understand and improve the teaching-learning process, gamification applies all suitable game elements in learning environments to motivate and engage students. This work aims to integrate learning analytics techniques and game elements in a virtual learning environment and verify if this integration increased students' interaction and satisfaction. Through a controlled experiment, 77 undergraduate students were divided into two groups (i.e., experimental and control) and their participation in an online course was monitored. As a result, the satisfaction was higher for the experimental group, although there was no significant difference between the groups in relation to their interaction.