Scientific publishing can take a very long time. This week, Juho Hamari and I submitted an article on gamification to a scientific journal. We’ve gone through four review rounds since March 2013 and we hope that this fifth submission will finally be accepted.
In our article, we anchor gamification in the service marketing literature. We feel that it’s important to ground the concept of gamification on an existing body of scientific literature, in order to be able to build new theory on top of it. We felt that service marketing is a suitable theoretical framework, as the term gamification is often used in the context of services.
In the paper, we define gamification as follows:
Gamification refers to a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences in order to support users’ overall value creation.
In order to be as precise as possible, every word of the definition has been carefully chosen and refers to pre-existing concepts. However, this inevitably makes the definition a little clumpy and hard to use outside the scientific context. In layman’s terms, one could say that gamification means to improve an activity with gameful experiences.
The important thing to understand is that gamification should first and foremost render the original activity a better experience. The activity can refer to product use, to service consumption or to any other activity for that matter. In other words, when gamifying one shouldn’t be thinking of trying to design the best possible game, but instead to understand how the customer experiences the original activity and to try to make this experience more pleasant or engaging by making it more gameful. It is also important to understand that people experience gamefulness differently from one another.
Let me illustrate this with an example. There are plenty of wearable devices, for instance, that render physical exercise more gameful. With these devices, users can set exercise goals for themselves and monitor their progress. Some systems even let users share this data with other people, which allow users to compete with each other. Some of the users of these devices are happy with goal setting and self-monitoring but for some the gameful experience rises from the social interaction.
With Juho, we are on the last mile (hopefully) with our article. I just hope the scientific journals would gamify the publication process and make it more enjoyable.
P.S. Please refer to the list below if you are interested in reading our former articles on gamification.
Hamari, J., Huotari, K., & Tolvanen, J. (2015). GAMIFICATION AND ECONOMICS 5. The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications, 139. MIT Press, 2015
Huotari, K., & Hamari, J. (2012, October). Defining gamification: a service marketing perspective. In Proceeding of the 16th International Academic MindTrek Conference (pp. 17-22). ACM. Link
Huotari, K., & Hamari, J. (2011, May). ”Gamification” from the perspective of service marketing. In Proc. CHI 2011 Workshop Gamification
Off the top of my head 