Hassan, Nader
Gamification design in action: the practical cases of gamification platforms for employee work motivation and citizens’ civic engagement
Gamification design in action: the practical cases of gamification platforms for employee work motivation and citizens’ civic engagement by Lobna Hassan, Hanken school of Economics, Helsinki, Finland,
[email protected] Alexan Nader, DREIDEV, Cairo, Egypt,
[email protected]
ABSTRACT The design and development of information systems that meet their intended operational objectives - let alone effectively support modern life - is a challenging endeavor (Niazi, et al, 2013; Hartman and Ashraf, 2002). Especially in environments of fast change, instability and economic uncertainty such as in emerging economies and developing countries (Hoskisson et al, 2000). IT investments in such economies are nonetheless essential to support existing poor infrastructure and support workers in their activities (Roztocki and Weistroffer, 2008). One of the challenges faced by these economies and globally is maintaining employee engagement with the organization they belong to and with the Information Systems these organizations introduce. The same problem is even present on a larger societal scale as maintaining citizens’ productive engagement with their governments online or offline in challenging (Dargan and Evequoz, 2015; Mendonca and Alawadhi, 2015; Bista et al, 2014). Gamification; understood as the use of motivational affordances to design valuecreating, gameful systems (Huotari and Hamari, 2016; Deterding et al, 2011) has shown good effects on motivation and engagement in a variety of contexts (Zuckerman and Gal-Oz, 2014; Hamari, 2013; Landers et al, 2015; Burke, 2014); and has been employed in various information systems either as an introduced add-on layer (e.g Google Waze), or as a holistic system design practice (e.g PokemonGO). However, gamification design is no exception to the challenges IT investments face in emerging economies. It additionally has its own unique challenge of designing systems that not only fulfill their operational objectives but that additionally fulfill the psychological needs of its users to keep them engaged and using the system in question (Nicholson, 2015; Asquer, 2014; Hamari, 2013; Nicholson, 2012). When designed effectively, gamification has the potential to increase worker productivity, engagement, wellbeing and job satisfaction (Nicholson, 2015; Nicholson, 2012;
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Hassan, Nader
Gamification design in action: the practical cases of gamification platforms for employee work motivation and citizens’ civic engagement
Rigby, 2015). It also has the potential to increase citizen involvement in governance and increase their levels of civic activity, which reflects in better governmental decision making and increased levels of trust in government (Asquer, 2014; Bista et al, 2014; Nelson, 2012; Deterding et al, 2011). However, there is a reported lack of validated gamification design models that illustrates how these benefits could be brought about (Nicholson, 2015; Zuckerman and Gal-Oz, 2014). Furthermore, the context in which gamification is adopted such as the economic or environmental conditions of its usage setting, dictates its own considerations on gamification implementation (Hamari, 2013). The aim of this paper is to adopt a design science approach to the examination and selection of gamification design models depending on the context of their application. The paper operationalizes the selected gamification design models and presents two development case studies from Egypt in two contexts, namely the contexts of employees’ motivation and citizens’ civic engagement as a practical illustration of gamification design in action, shedding light on potentials and challenges of gamification design and development and providing a practical illustration of how such challenges could be addressed specifically in an emerging economy in order to draw the hypothesized benefits from gamification. The case studies indicate that user centric design, and considerations of gamification usage settings are quite essential in the development of gamified platforms that meet operational objectives. While psychological theories may suggest psychological drivers of intrinsic motivation behind why users choose to engage with certain activities more than others, the environments in which these users are dictates different design patterns and combinations of motivational affordances to engage users. Additionally, it appears that strict gamification guidelines provide structure to the development process, but also force designers into design patterns that are not always suitable to the design context. Such rigidity is not suitable for gamification design in new unexplored settings, or for design settings with an unstable nature. What may be of more value is the use of guidelines that give room for designers’ judgments, or the development of gamification design models tailored to different contexts. Agile development is also helpful in this regard, as it allows for rounds of system evaluations that could detect mismatches between gamification design and their actual intrinsic value to users and usefulness when deployed in their use environment.
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Hassan, Nader
Gamification design in action: the practical cases of gamification platforms for employee work motivation and citizens’ civic engagement
Keywords: Gamification, gameful design, design science, employee engagement, civic engagement, emerging economies.
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Gamification design in action: the practical cases of gamification platforms for employee work motivation and citizens’ civic engagement
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