CHI PLAY, now in its second year in London, is an international and interdisciplinary conference by the ACM Special Interest Group Computer-Human Interaction for researchers and professionals across all areas of play, games and human-computer interaction (HCI) working in “player-computer interaction”. Continue reading
Labour’s Love Won? Gamifying Industrial Production
CFP: CHI 2015 Workshop Gamifying Research
After our successful workshops at CHI 2011 and CHI 2013, we’re happy to continue our bi-annual tradition and announce the CHI 2015 workshop “Gamifying Research“, taking place in Seoul, Korea on November 19, 2015. Submission deadline is January 2 5, 2015. Read on for the full Call for Participation, and find a linkable version here.
Continue reading
Flow in Gamification
Flow – a state of optimal experience characterized being fully focused and engaged in an activity – has been regarded as one of the most important psychological outcomes of gamification and games. It is most commonly understood to comprise of nine dimensions: challenge-skill-balance, clear goals, control, (immediate) feedback, autotelic experience,loss of self-consciousness, time transformation, concentration, and merging action-awareness. Currently, there are few studies investigating flow particularly in the context of gamification (See Hamari, Koivisto & Sarsa, 2014) and therefore there is little knowledge as to which dimensions of flow would be especially emergent in the context of flow. To this end we conducted a two-fold study: 1) We investigated the salience of the different dimensions of flow in gamification and 2) the psychometric properties of the DFS-2 flow measurement instrument. Continue reading
Gamification Absolved?
The study by Mekler and colleagues doesn’t disprove the undermining potential of gamification: It shows that simplistic debates whether gamification “does” or “doesn’t work” are obsolete – as are mere effect studies. From this point on, without proper theories and mediation studies testing them, gamification research won’t learn anything new or important. Continue reading
Gamification Considered Harmful?
Points, levels and leaderboards are often perceived as the bread and butter of gamification. Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham (2011) even call them “the heart of any gaming system” and “an absolute requirement for all gamified systems”. Game designer Margaret Robertson (2011) on the other hand decries this practice as pointsification and deems it “the thing that is least essential to games”. Similarly, Chris Hecker (2010) warned game designers not to blindly resort to achievements (or points, levels and leaderboards for that matter), because they could stifle players’ intrinsic motivation, that is, their desire to engage with a game (or gamified service). Continue reading