Meditation can enhance mental well-being, but practicing meditation regularly can be challenging. In this work, we present SoulGarden - a gamified, web-based meditation app that draws on the narrative of personal growth, a guiding avatar and several progress-related mechanics to increase users' enjoyment in meditation and thereby enhance their meditation habits, mindfulness, and mental well-being. We conducted a within-subjects field study spanning four weeks (N=30) in which we evaluated the effectiveness of SoulGarden by comparing it to a non-gamified version and baseline measures. Our results show users meditated a lot using SoulGarden and the addition of gamification increased user enjoyment, frequency of meditation, and mindfulness. Thus, we contribute evidence for the potential of gamification to increase engagement and enhance mindfulness in meditation practices, ultimately paving the way to more effective mental health interventions.

In gamification users show increased motivation and engagement towards tasks. So far, this effect has mostly been empirically tested based on the visual depiction of game elements, while research on the use and addition of auditory aspects is sparse. In this work we investigate the effect of different modalities of game elements (auditory, visual, audiovisual) on user experience, perception and performance in a gamified image-tagging task. We approached this via an online validation survey to find suitable sound effects (N=50), a main quantitative study (N=109) and a qualitative semi-structured interview (N=9). Our results show that while visual gamification increases performance, auditory and audiovisual gamification had no effect. However, they were shown to have an influence on the user's flow state. Our qualitative follow-up study shed light on underlying reasons and revealed each modality has its own drawbacks and advantages and that combining both visual and auditory aspects was preferred by participants.

Entertainment media, including video games, utilize background music (BGM) to enhance ambiance and gameplay, with a growing trend of players replacing in-game audio with personal music for potentially improved gameplay. Yet, research has not systematically investigated the connection between liked or disliked BGM and player behavior and experience. With our work, we make this step by letting users play the popular and well-researched game Tetris with BGM of their choice, and go one step further by adding music to the game that they specifically dislike, as this direction has been neglected thus far, but could prove interesting to target certain player behavior or experience. In our lab-study (N=31) we found that liked BGM increased engagement with the game and enhanced player experience, while disliked music reduced immersion. These findings suggest that music preferences should be taken into greater account in game design, e.g. by offering more options for BGM customization.

Modern, globalized lifestyles make physical separation of family members an inevitable part of life. Due to changes in routines and social roles, remaining connected to distant loved ones is challenging and adversely affects psychological well-being. To support relatedness, we created FamilyFlower, an artificial flower aimed at fostering a connection between remote households by bringing awareness of everyday activities and offering basic expressivity. In its environment, each device detects human presence, movement, sound, and touch. In the remote household, the paired prototype responds by respectively opening the flower bud, actuating the stem, altering the seeds’ color, and dispensing a fragrance. In a 2-week study of deployment between 2 family members, we collected initial impressions of our prototype, and identified key aspects our system could support in future research. From our results, we see that FamilyFlower supports an awareness of ongoing activities in a distant household and built a feeling of connectedness.

Commonly, gamification is designed by developers and not by end-users. In this paper we investigate an approach where users take control of this process. Firstly, users were asked to describe their own gamification concepts which would motivate them to put more effort into an image tagging task. We selected this task as gamification has already been shown to be effective here in previous work. Based on these descriptions, an implementation was made for each concept and given to the creator. In a between-subjects study (n=71), our approach was compared to a no-gamification condition and two conditions with fixed gamification settings. We found that providing participants with an implementation of their own concept significantly increased the amount of generated tags compared to the other conditions. Although the quality of tags was lower, the number of usable tags remained significantly higher in comparison, suggesting the usefulness of this approach.

While the use of ad blockers prevents negative impacts of advertising on user experience, it poses a serious threat to the business model of commercial web services and freely available content on the web. As an alternative, we investigate the user enjoyment and the advertising effectiveness of playfully deactivating online ads. We created eight game concepts, performed a pre-study assessing the users' perception of them (N=50) and implemented three well-perceived ones. In a lab study (N=72), we found that these game concepts are more enjoyable than deactivating ads without game elements. Additionally, one game concept was even preferred over using an ad blocker. Notably, playfully deactivating ads was shown to have a positive impact on users' brand and product memory, enhancing the advertising effectiveness. Thus, our results indicate that playfully deactivating ads is a promising way of bridging the gap between user enjoyment and effective advertising.