Gamification is poised on the top of the Gardner hype-cycle, ready to come tumbling down from its faddish heights according to that model. So the time has come to ask some hard questions. What empirical evidence is there for gamification and its different techniques?
I'm not asking for information borrowed from e.g. behaviorism or utility economy, or studies of "full" games like EyeWire or Quest Atlantis. I'd like to find empirical studies of gamification-attempts in action - lab, industry or anywhere in between, where game elements are added to non-game contexts/behaviors.
Please provide references.
http://na1.www.gartner.com/imagesrv/newsroom/images/hype-cycle-pr.png;pv4a3db6f9c029a4db
You can find an special issue on Gamification in Journal of Advertising, 42(2–3) (2013).
Are you interested in this topic? I´m editing a book on brand entertainment (including gamification). The deadline to send an abstract is April 30th. If you are interested in submitting a proposal, just let me know! ([email protected])
To start, there's a review attached by Hamari, Koivisto, and Sarsa of empirical gamification studies to date. Retrieved from Juho Hamari's page on ResearchGate.
Dr. Richard Landers also has done some empirical work in gamification in both learning and in the workplace, but most is either under review or in press.
I'm working on my thesis model currently, but I should be testing some elements of gamification within the next year.
Here's a bit of empirical evidence by Landers & Callan embedded within this book chapter they authored: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230854777_Casual_social_games_as_serious_games_The_psychology_of_gamification_in_undergraduate_education_and_employee_training?ev=prf_pub
Chapter Casual Social Games as Serious Games: The Psychology of Gami...
Dear Andreas (,Carla and Michael).
As mentioned by Michael, our literature review on gamification could function as a suitable overview. Using the appendix as a guide, you can track the results for different gamification mechanics in the existing studies. However, since the literature search for that paper there probably are some new studies out as well.
We now also have quite a large review out on persuasive technologies which holds many similarities and overlapping research with gamification. You can find it here with a short introductory blog post:
Hamari, J., Koivisto, J., & Pakkanen, T. (2014). Do Persuasive Technologies Persuade? – A Review of Empirical Studies. In: Spagnolli, A. et al. (Eds.), PERSUASIVE 2014, LNCS 8462, pp. 118-136. Springer International Publishing, Switzerland. ----- http://gamification-research.org/2014/04/persuasive/
As novelty effects have been postulated to be a big contributing factor to increased engagement from gamification, it is important to have pretty long experiments in real services. As far as I recall, this is the longest experiment on gamification up to this day: http://gamification-research.org/2013/05/1-5-year-experiment-on-gamification-surprising-results/
Demographic differences in gamfiication:
Koivisto, J., & Hamari, J. (2014). Demographic differences in perceived benefits from gamification. Computers in Human Behavior, 35, 179-188. ---- http://gamification-research.org/2014/03/demographics/
(Added 12/09/14) Flow on gamification:
Hamari, J., & Koivisto, J. (2014). Measuring Flow in Gamification: Dispositional Flow Scale-2. Computers in Human Behavior, 40, 133-143. -- http://gamification-research.org/2014/08/flow/
very interesing inputs. I was also searching for studies about the effectiveness of different game elements for my phd project. But until now I found none. I also cited the papers already mentioned. Now I am doing my own research focussing on social factors used in the gamification context and its efectiveness to change consumer behaviour. I hope I can provide further knowledge on that topic...
An empirical study on "Shallow gamification – testing psychological effects of framing a activity as a game" will be out at SAGE's Games and Culture soon. The authors made thorough tests on users of gamified interfaces and propose that it is primarily the visual aspects and the framing as a game that increases user engagement and only to a secondary and marginal level the gameplay implemented.
Here we measured flow in gamifiation:
Hamari, J., & Koivisto, J. (2014). Measuring Flow in Gamification: Dispositional Flow Scale-2. Computers in Human Behavior, 40, 133-143.
Summary: http://gamification-research.org/2014/08/flow/
or
Paper: http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Pbo~2f~UVqL-z (free temp access) / http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563214004221 (normal link)
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