User-based Adaptive Software Development for Gamified Systems

Abstract

During the last few years many researchers have attempted to find a way to implement gamified systems that are adaptively personalized based on user types. Gamification, which is the use of game elements in a non-game context in a way that makes it like a game helps in increasing users' engagement. Thus, software engineers cannot follow the approach of "One size fit all" anymore as in the traditional software design. That is because different people are motivated with different ways and with different mechanics and dynamics based on their needs and personalities. This paper focuses on devising means to develop personalized gamified systems based on user types. We suggest achieving that by changing the gamification elements themselves and not to only adapt the game mechanics and dynamics values based on user types to get the most users' engagement, satisfaction and performance while using the developed software. We propose a method that provides a systematic process that guides the software engineers in designing adaptive gamified systems based on user types by mapping them to gamification elements. Moreover, to formalize the proposed method we develop an ontology that implements the mappings between game elements and user types by defining rules that govern their usage. The method also provides a systematic means to modify the system at runtime (i.e. while the system is in use) based on the users' preference and behavior by changing the existing elements based on the usage of each user.