An environment to support the design, implementation and evaluation of gamification in social systems

Abstract

Gamification has become a popular strategy to increase the engagement and participation of users in social systems. Despite the popularity that now reigns, we identified that gamification can not be treated simply as award points and provide badgets for users. Care must be taken, since the choice of the game mechanics must consider the profile of the user as a player. If such considerations are not made properly, the desired goals by the developer cannot be obtained. In other words, one needs to understand the relationship between the developer's goals, the game mechanics and the profile of users (players). The lack of computational tools to support the developer to consider how these three aspects relate to and impact, led us to propose GameWork. It is a Service-oriented Architecture to support gamification in general, especially to help monitoring the system and the players behaviors with respect to the incentives provided. This article describes GameWork and an example of its implementation in a commercial social network.