Personalized gamification: A literature review of outcomes, experiments, and approaches

Abstract

Personalized gamification has gained substantial interest due to the expectation that it can improve gamification's success. Considering some secondary studies on this topic, they lack to present the characteristics of empirical studies and some aspects on how personalization approaches were designed. In this paper, we present a literature review based on previous research to address these gaps. Based on our analysis, our results provide: insights on how experiments to compare personalized gamification and non-personalized gamification are designed and evaluated; evidence on the effectiveness of personalized gamification found in primary studies; and an overview of how personalization approaches were designed. Our analysis converged in possible guidelines and a research agenda revealing five main needs: i) empirical studies comparing one size fits all and personalized gamification; ii) qualitative user studies; iii) personalization approaches that consider contextual characteristics as well as iv) rely on a broader, unambiguous set of game elements; and v) a benchmark of established resources to increase research reproducibility.