What is it about?
Gamification is a popular technique for improving motivation, engagement, and performance in non-game contexts. It has been widely applied in various industries and walks of life, from education to workplace onboarding to health technologies. Research has shown that its effectiveness varies. In particular, early work suggested that there could be a loss of effects or even negative effects upon its removal from a system or activity. In this paper, I reviewed all of the literature on this phenomenon. What the research shows is that very little studies have been run to answer this question. What little work exists suggests a range of results. I offer a research agenda for next steps that researchers can take to better understand the effects of removing gamification in various situations.
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Why is it important?
The idea of removing gamification is not a new one. Despite this, very little work has gone into researching it. This is despite the widespread use of gamification in societies around the globe. I provide several examples of opportunities to assess gamification removal and how, especially how to extend existing research designs and make use of large industry-based gamification platforms. We need to understand the effects of gamification removal. If the effects are negative, they could be widespread and invisible.
Perspectives
We need to directly research gamification removal. We know how and we have ample opportunity. Let's work together to make sure that ungamifying our lives has no ill effects -- and reveal what negative effects there has been and can be.
Dr. Katie Seaborn
Tokyo Institute of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Removing Gamification: A Research Agenda, May 2021, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3411763.3451695.
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