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Gamification of Business Processes: Re-designing Work in Production and Service Industry

Authors:
  • Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich)

Abstract and Figures

In this work we provide an overview of gamification, i.e. the application of methods from game design to enrich non-gaming processes. The contribution is divided into five subsections: an introduction focusing on the progression of gamification through the hype cycle in the recent years (1), a brief introduction to gamification mechanics (1) and an overview of the state of the art in established areas (3). The focus is a discussion of more recent attempts of gamification in service and production (4). We also discuss the ethical implications (5) and the future perspectives (6) of gamified business processes. Gamification has been successfully applied in the domains education (serious games) and health (exergames) and is spreading to other areas. In recent years there have been various attempts to “gamify” business processes. While the first efforts date back as far as the collection of miles in frequent flyer programs, we will portray some of the more recent and comprehensive software-based approaches in the service industry, e.g. the gamification of processes in sales and marketing. We discuss their accomplishments as well as their social and ethical implicatio. Finally a very recent approach is presented: the application of gamification in the domain of industrial production. We discuss the special requirements in this domain and the effects on the business level and on the users. We conclude with a prognosis on the future development of gamification.
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2351-9789 © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of AHFE Conference
doi: 10.1016/j.promfg.2015.07.616
Procedia Manufacturing 3 ( 2015 ) 3424 3431
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect
6th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2015) and the
Affiliated Conferences, AHFE 2015
Gamification of business processes: Re-designing work in
production and service industry
Oliver Korn, Albrecht Schmidt
University of Stuttgart, VIS, Pfaffenwaldring 5a, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
Abstract
In this work we provide an overview of gamification, i.e. the application of methods from game design to enrich non-gaming
processes.The contribution is divided into five subsections: an introduction focusing on the progression of gamification through
the hype cycle in the recent years (1), a brief introduction to gamification mechanics (1) and an overview of the state of the art in
established areas (3). The focus is a discussion of more recent attempts of gamification in service and production (4). We also
discuss the ethical implications (5) and the future perspectives (6) of gamified business processes.Gamification has been
successfully applied in the domains education (serious games) and health (exergames) and is spreading to other areas. In recent
years there have been various attempts to “gamify” business processes. While the first efforts date back as far as the collection of
miles in frequent flyer programs, we will portray some of the more recent and comprehensive software-based approaches in the
service industry, e.g. the gamification of processes in sales and marketing. We discuss their accomplishments as well as their
social and ethical implicatio. Finally a very recent approach is presented: the application of gamification in the domain of
industrial production. We discuss the special requirements in this domain and the effects on the business level and on the users.
We conclude with a prognosis on the future development of gamification.
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
Peer-review under responsibility of AHFE Conference.
Keywords: Gamification; Assistive technology; Computer-assisted instruction; Augmented reality; Human machine interaction
1. Introduction
Gamification is a delightful concept: it is a creditable idea to use “video game elements to improve user
experience and user engagement in non-game services and applications” [1]. After all, increased engagement is
claimed to have numerous benefits like improved performance and greater user satisfaction [2]. However, while the
integration of gamification mechanics (section 2) has a long tradition in health and education (section 3) it is just
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of AHFE Conference
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Oliver Korn and Albrecht Schmidt / Procedia Manufacturing 3 ( 2015 ) 3424 – 3431
starting to be established in the service industry (section 4.1.)and it is not yet established in industrial environments
(section 4.2.).
This is why we argue that an aggregated perspective as provided by the Gartner hype cycle diagrams (Figure 1) is
misleading: this highly aggregated perspective cannot not take into account the gamification’s different levels of
readiness in specific domains.
While the diagrams imply that gamification in 2015 is well on its way into the “through of disillusionment” we
argue that this perspective is focusing on the gamification of regular business processes like in the service industry.
For the gamification of health and education we will show that gamification has at least progressed a large part of
the “slope of enlightenment”, if not entered the “plateau of productivity”. For the gamification of production we
argue that gamification has not yet reached the “peak of inflated expectations”.
2. Gamification mechanics
The basic mechanics of gamification are closely related to the mechanics of game design: addressing the human
desire for socializing, learning, mastery, competition, achievement, status, self-expression, altruism, or closure [3].
An important element of games and thus gamification is to make small steps of progress visible and thus look
greater. This can be achieved by progress bars, badges, levelling, achievements and similar elements. Such elements
are usually easy to integrate as they use existing data which is just portrayed differently. For example the data of a
counter which identifies individual visitors of a website could be used to generate a levelling system, promoting
visitors every ten visits. A similar element which can be easily exploited for gamification are posts in forums. Such
reward structures effectively address the desire for social progression. To add a sense of competition, leaderboards
can be integrated. If social aspects play an important role, elements like avatars and reputation systems are good
options.
Fig. 1. The rise and decline of the concept of gamification in the years 2011 to 2014. The highly aggregated perspective of the hype cycles
provided by Gartner cannot not take into account different areas of application. Copyright granted by Gartner Public Relations.
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The list of possible gameplay mechanics to be exploited for gamification is long and growing as is the list of
employable game mechanics. Often such lists contain redundancies and overlaps as well as buzzwords like “epic
meaning” or “blissful productivity” (both popularized by the heroine of gamification, Jane McGonigal [2]). In
practice,the choice of suitable game mechanics and their implementation in a gamified solution will be strongly
driven by the targeted users and the targeted domain. A good example of a domain-specific mapping of gamification
to general business processes wasgiven in 2009 by Reeves &Read [4]. Their work meticulously maps game
elements like avatars, leaderboards, leveling and reputation to general business processes.
However, more recently the application of gamification is also discussed controversially as a potential threat to
intrinsic motivation and a potential source of quarrels between employees (section 5: Ethical Implications of
Gamified Work). These discussionsmight have to be considered when selecting suitable elements from game design
for work environments.
3. State of the art:Gamification of education and health
In this section we will portray some examples of gamification in the domains health and education which in
spite of their structural differences as resulting from the high level of regulation and governmental control for this
purpose are considered as business sectors.
It was in educational contexts that some years ago the term “serious games” was established for learning software
with multimedia elements and small games. This origin is natural, since “learning games” are probably as old as
institutionalized learning: countless illustrated stories and mnemonic tricks show that pedagogy and games are
strongly related. The serious games approach, i.e. the use of elements from game design to improve learning, is an
example of “gamification” before that term was widely used.
The difference between regular and “serious” games is that the latter promote “serious” purposes, such as
learning a foreign language or traffic signs. If we follow the philosopher Bernard Suits’ sententious definition of
gaming, that “playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” [5], serious games as
well as gamified applications in other areas are no “real games” because they have a purpose outside of themselves
they have “necessary obstacles”.
Like education, healthcare is an area where often only repeated exercises lead to success. So in both learning and
training or rehabilitation, motivation and the ability to tolerate a certain amount of repetitiveness are key success
factors. Thus it was a natural step from “serious games” to “games for health” and later “exergames” (a portmanteau
of exercise and games). One of the first examples of a game with a medical aim was Re-Mission developed by
HopeLab in 2007 a shooter game where children with cancer could actively fight against virtual tumor cells.
Playing the game led to a significantly higher reliability in the children’s medicine intake [6]. In 2007 the “games
for health” approach (i.e. the gamification of health) reached a new level with the release of Nintendo’s Wii,which
uses the accelerator-based Wii Remote and Balance Board. They allow to detect movements in three dimensions and
made the user interact more directly with various health applications. Soon scientists and physicians started to
exploit the motion analysis capabilities for therapeutic exercises. The effects were promising: an analysis of efficacy
between traditional and video game based balance programs showed positive evidence for the latter [7]. A well-
documented example is the game VI-Bowling which helped visually impaired users to increase their throwing skills
[8]. An example targeting elderly users is SilverPromenade which simply allows players to go on virtual walks [9].
When the Kinect was launched in 2010 the technological cycle of adopting and adapting video game motion
technology initiated by the Wii started anew. An increasing number of researchers and therapists wanted to make
use of the new markerless motion tracking capabilities to “gamify” medical and health treatment. One of the first
Kinect-based games built for therapeutic purposes wasmotivotion60+ (Figure 2) which includes several gamified
balance and strength exercises that help senior citizens to prevent falls [10].
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Fig. 2. A senior woman (a) using one of the exergamesdeveloped for balance training (b).
Another medical condition frequently covered by gamification approaches are strokes. These often imply
therapies requiring highly repetitive exercises, either on the physical or on the cognitive level and in many cases on
both. An example is Break the Bricks which helps stroke patients to recover their psychomotor abilities [11].
4. Gamification in service and production industry
In the first part of this section we portray gamification attempts in service industry, e.g. the gamification of sales
and marketing. In the second part we present arecent approach of applying gamification in the domain of industrial
production.
4.1. Gamification in the service industry
After gamification has been successfully applied in the domains education (serious games) and health (games for
health, exergames) it is spreading to other areas. In recent years there have been attempts to “gamify” business
processes. As mentioned above, the concept of applying gamification to general business processes has been
described by Reeves &Read [4].A more recent discussion of gamification as a “social technology” for companies
is provided by Hugos[12]. However, decades before there have been predecessors of gamification in business. A
commonly known example are frequent flyer programs. Starting in 1972 these awarded members with special
bonuses or “rewards”. Nelson [13] describes another predecessor: the 1990s-2000s American management trend of
“fun at work” proposed reimagining the workplace as a fun and playful locale rather than one of work and drudgery,
recapturing some of what was seen as an intrinsic, child-like play. Nelson even claims there was a tradition of
gamification in the Soviet Union, where factories were awarded points for performance and could win
commendations as they surpassed various point thresholds.
This exemplifies that the business approach “management by objectives” already implicitly has taken a step into
the world of games. In gaming, missions and goals need to be stated explicitly to make them transparent for the
players and measurable for the software (section 2). Thus it is not surprising that gamification was very well
received in business contexts: in 2011, at the begin of the gamification hype cycle, Gartner very optimistically
predicted that 70 percent of Global 2000 businesses will manage at least one “gamified” application or system by
2014 [14]. Such predictions or the corresponding high market volumes become more reasonable, if “employers can
use Gamification to incentivize employees by establishing clear goals and rewarding those employees that achieve
those goals.” In such a very broad understanding of gamification as put forward in the 2013 article “The
Phenomena of Gamification The Next Big Thing for Employers[14], the gamification of business processes
primarily is a visualization of management by objectives.
With respect to its application in the service industry Huotari & Hamari define gamification as “a process of
enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences in order to support user’s overall value creation” [15].
They argue that the gamification in service industry cannot be based on a set of methods or mechanics, but has to be
understood more broadly as a process in which the gamifier is attempting to increase the likelihood for the gameful
experiences to emerge by imbuing the service with affordances for that purpose (be it badges or more implicit cues).
ab
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The term affordance in this context refersto any qualities of the service system that contribute to the emergence of
gameful experience. Thus the authors favor the broad understanding of gamification described above.
Castellan et al. illustratedhow gamification can be used in the service industry, in work environments like call
centers to help agents and supervisors managing their performance [16].They also describe a private social network
designed by PlayVox for contact centers including a gamified training system. The system has been advertised by
quoting the customer GroupOn Latin America as follows: “PlayVox lets us detect and make a quick diagnosis of
underperforming agents or those who ignore certain important procedures in serving our customers.” Here
gamification is used as a tool to find and dismiss underperforming employees. With respect to the creditable idea of
using video game elements to improve user experience and user engagement in non-game services and applications
(see introduction) this might be seen as a perversion of gamification. However, most games are designed to have
both winners and losers so while the application of gamification in this example might be unethical, it is not
unnatural and definitely not unusual as a cost-cutting strategy in the service industry.
The fascination for gamification in the service sector seems to be fueled by the increased measurability of service
processes which are per se difficult to standardize and structure especially in comparison to processes in industrial
production environments.
4.2. Gamification of production
It is surprising that gamification has not yet spread into industrial production: many processes in this domain
have physical outcomes (e.g. the number of parts produced at a specific machine per hour). These outcomes usually
are already measured and transferred to business intelligence systems like ERP or PPS (Enterprise Resource
Planning; Production Planning System). Thus gaming elements like progress visualization, scores and leaderboards
could be implemented with little effort and their use seems like a natural step.
However, the assistive systems currently used in industrial production do not incorporate gamification elements.
Their purpose is regulating production time and serving as a “quality gate”. This means they are designed to support
a steady production speed and identify and remove “waste” (i.e. failed products) from the workflow. Until recently
the user experience of the workers when working with these systems was a minor concern. Most manufacturers are
very conservative when changing human machine interaction (HMI) and prefer “safe and slow” over “new and
intuitive”. As a Fraunhofer HMI-study explains, from the variety of modern interaction techniques, so far only touch
screens (Figure 3, left) found their way into production environments [17].
This conservative attitude is a result of their higher security and reliability requirements. New forms of HCI are
more readily implemented in HMI environments if they have become part of an accepted standard such as ISO 9241
[18]. However, social engineering methods such as gamification are not yet in their focus: if current assistive
Fig. 3. (a) A workplace-integrated assistive system typical for the current state of the art. It uses a monitor to display instructions for upcoming
assembly tasks. (b) A workplace integrating gamification (here: apyramid). The visual elements are projected in front of the work area.
ab
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systems in production use visualization at all, they focus on describing the upcoming working steps on a display,
usually as a combination of an image and a technical text (see Fig. 2, left).
This has changed recently. In 2012 Korn introduced a first concept for gamification of industrial workplaces [19].
In the research project motionEAP (2013-2016),ways to improve assistive systemsin production environments are
explored. One targeted improvement is the implementation of gamification elements.
As the above discussion of HMI in production shows, gamification in this domain has to meet specific
requirements. In opposition to games or computer-based office work,the user’s default focus in production work is
not a software but the physical product itself and several machines and tools. This results in a dilemma: gamification
elements might distract the user from the main work focus. This is why the visualization of gamification has to be
kept simple, e.g. by avoiding moving elements. This also implies that a direct interaction with the gamification (e.g.
pressing a like-button) should be avoided. This can be achieved by using motion recognition to allow implicit
interaction [20]. However, the integration of motion sensors in a work context represents another step on the way
towards a “quantified self” and will surely raise legal and ethical questions. Another way to reduce distraction is
projecting the elements directly into the workplace [21] instead of using a monitor. Both requirements were
addressed as shown in Fig. 3 (right).
The gamification approach uses a pyramid to visualize a production sequence (e.g. the assembly of a component).
Each work process (e.g. picking the first part) is a step on this pyramid which is climbed by a user avatar. To
provide the user with feedback on quality and speed within a single work process, the pyramid-gamification
approach uses color-coding to visualize the progression of time. The current work process starts in dark green and
slowly changes color to yellow, orange and finally red. The duration of that color change is derived from calibration
runs, so it is user-specific. As only the color of one step changes, the amount of change within the whole
gamification visualization is deliberately kept at a minimum. At the end of a sequence the visual result is a pyramid
with one colored plateau per process. If there was no mistake, the figure also reaches the cup on the pyramid’s top.
The importance of reaching this goal is heightened by (optionally) personalizing the figure’s head with a photo of
the worker. A completed pyramid is moved up to the board on the top right while its color is changed to show
average performance: if half of the processes were done quickly (= green bar) and the other half slowly (= red bar),
the resulting pyramid is colored orange. However, the pyramid is always completely red if a mistake was made.
First studies [22] show that the users like the pyramid-implementation more than previous concepts and that it
has a positive effect on the overall motivation. However, the longevity of this motivational effect needs to be
validated in long-term studies. Also it is possible,that such an integral form of gamification influences long-term
motivation, i.e. the removal of the system might lead to a strong decrease in motivation and performance. Such
ethical issues are discussed in more detail in the following section.
5. Ethical implications of gamified work
As the discussion of the approaches in the service sector shows, new issues arise as soon as gamification is
implemented in work contexts. Apart from obvious potentials of misuse, there are structural and even philosophical
questions. Recently the concern was raised that replacing intrinsic rewards with explicit ones may in the long run
reduce work motivation [23]. In the meanwhile the discussion of the downside of gamification has reached the
blogosphere as the article “The dark side of gamification[24] illustrates. Amongst other problems it claims that
gamification can trivialize serious issues, reinforce the wrong mindset and again –contaminate motivation. This
discussion shows the principal ethical or even philosophical dimensionsof the gamification of work.
The issues of modeling and adapting to users in assistive systems (which is the core of what gamification does)
have recently been formalized in a model for the “ethical evaluation of socio-technological arrangements” in the
domains care and health [25]. The approach separates three layers of analysis: the societal, the organizational and
the individual. Within these layers seven topics are addressed: care, self-determination, security, justice, privacy,
participation and self-concept.Based on this analysis, the approach differentiates between four ethical verdicts:
1. The application is completely uncritical from an ethical point of view.
2. The application is ethically sensitive, however the issues can be addressed in practical application.
3430 Oliver Korn and Albrecht Schmidt / Procedia Manufacturing 3 ( 2015 ) 3424 – 3431
3. The application is ethically highly sensitive; it either has to be permanently monitored or should not be
introduced.
4. The application should be rejected from an ethical point of view.
Currently already the distribution of verdicts (one neutral, three critical) shows that the model focuses on
negative effects as might be expected in the sensitive areas care and health, where autonomy plays an important
role.
This is structurally different in work environmentswhere in spite of flat hierarchies and partner leadership
people are hired and paid to work and usually get “released” if they fail or refuse to do so. In work contexts people
are willing to accept a higher degree of external control and thus a loss of autonomy. However, while in business
gamification might primarily be a means towards improved work results, the path towards this goal implies
changing the employees’ mindset. Thus the ethical obligations when applying gamification are higher than in usual
work scenarios. Especially if gamification is used to conceal a user’s performance monitoring (section 4.1.), its use
has to be considered unethical.
6. Conclusion
If we follow Gardner’s hype cycle (section 1), gamification in 2015 is well on its way into the “through of
disillusionment.” However, we argue that this perspective is only focusing on the gamification of regular business
processes like in the service industry (section 4.1). For the gamification of health and education (section 3) we
showed that there are solutions which have at least progressed a large part of the “slope of enlightenment”, if not
entered the “plateau of productivity”. In contrast, for the gamification of production (section 4.2.) we argue that it
has not yet reached the “peak of inflated expectations”.
While the adaptation of gamification mechanics (section 2) for the domain of production proved to work well in
the first field studies, it will take considerable time until this innovation permeates the thick layer of standards and
security requirements established in the industrial domain.
We think that the future development of gamification is not primarily narrowed by technical problems. In fact, the
ubiquitous use of advanced sensor technologies and the societal trend towards a “quantified self” join well with
gamification and further its progression into business domains. The challenge lies more on the ethical and potentially
also on the legal level. Only ifthese challenges are successfully addressed,gamification has the potential to become
an accepted, vital and constantly evolving part of modern business processes, both in the service and the production
industry.
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... Korn and Schmidt, (20) describe that GM has yet to be extended to industrial production as surprising. Many processes in this area generate physical outputs, which are measured and transferred to business intelligence systems. ...
... For this reason, the visualization of the GM should be simple, avoiding, for example, moving elements. (20) In the authors ' opinion, the extension of GM in industrial processes is seen as its main disadvantage in the high cost of technological facilities to be applied to the industry, the qualification needs of the personnel, and its risks. ...
... It is argued that GM may trivialize serious issues, reinforce the wrong mindset, and taint motivation. (20) Recent studies suggest that differences in the perceived legitimacy of games and employee perceptions of the role of GM itself play a role in determining the effectiveness of gamified systems. (4) The main limitations of the present study are its bibliographic nature, that only bibliographies in 2 languages were assessed, and that all the necessary bibliography was used without discarding studies based on their methodological validity. ...
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Introduction: preliminary findings clearly suggest that games and gamified systems have motivational potential for workplaces. The use of gamified systems in work environments could be a positive and innovative solution to address contemporary problems in organizations such as: high levels of stress, reduced social capital, reduced loyalty and rapid changes in workforce demographics. The objective was to characterize the application of gamification in the work context.Method: a total of 23 articles in Spanish and English, from Science, Scielo and Dialnet, were reviewed; using as keywords: gamification, game, work environment, being more than 50% of the last five years.Result: it is considered a technology with a potentially high impact in industries such as retail, media, consumer goods and marketing, manufacturing. Gamification in intra-organizational environments can affect employee attitudes and behaviors, make workplaces more attractive, create opportunities for productive collaboration, improve customer service, build loyalty, and increase productivity.Conclusions: gamification in the work environment uses game-like experiences to promote organizational and personal performance; It seems to be associated with improvements in motivation, productivity, performance, immediacy and remuneration according to true effort. However, its degree of applicability is still unclear.
... The use of gamification in the workplace comes with some ethical issues and hence deserves some lending of the ear. The potentially negative effects of wrongdoing in gamification include the creation of competition between coworkers, which could potentially lead to demotivation of the workers if intrinsic motivational tools replace the external ones (Korn & Schmidt, 2015). From the study by Korn and Schmidt (2015) on gamification in the marketing field, this technique has been applied to screen and fire underperformers in organizations. ...
... The potentially negative effects of wrongdoing in gamification include the creation of competition between coworkers, which could potentially lead to demotivation of the workers if intrinsic motivational tools replace the external ones (Korn & Schmidt, 2015). From the study by Korn and Schmidt (2015) on gamification in the marketing field, this technique has been applied to screen and fire underperformers in organizations. Thus, it implies that while applying the concept of gamification, certain precautions should be taken to avoid the situation which can turn into a dangerous pressure cooker where the employees' positive emotional and social experiences at work could be overshadowed with negative shading, or into useful means for the change of the climate in the team and employees' engagement (Shahri et al., 2014). ...
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The combination of gamification and Building Information Modeling (BIM) can be described to support user participation, decision-making, and collaboration in design contexts. Within this aim, this paper presents a literature review on the potential of using gamification in the BIM framework to create immersive participatory design environments. Active involvement of stakeholders by the corporation of gamified components such as challenges and interactive simulations into the design process enables better decisions and enhances user experience. Further, gamification integrated into BIM brings the potential to improve user behavior and decision-making at all stages of the design lifecycle but also the limitations and challenges. It can encourage stakeholder interaction and provide real-time input allowing various stakeholders to make meaningful contributions towards sustainability goals. This study examines recent developments and trends in extended reality (XR), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). These advances significantly enhance gamified Building Information Modeling (BIM) environments as being immersive. In addition, it points out some challenges, and ethical concerns encountered with these technologies. Furthermore, this paper highlights some tools and their advantages, disadvantages, pricing, and key elements. Designers can create interactive experiences by combining these technologies with virtual and physical environments. BIM environments powered by gamification can be used in BIM workflows to reach their full potential in shaping future design practices. These include ways to advance cooperative design processes by creating immersive spaces for different stakeholders’ interests and keeping up with emergent technology.
... When considering implementing a gamified experience, ethical issues such as exploitation and exposure of the participant emerge as a matter of concern, especially in work environments. The substitution of intrinsic rewards for extrinsic rewards may, in the long term, reduce the motivation to work, which is undesirable; also, there are apparent potentially negative consequences of the misuse of gamification, such as stimulating competition among coworkers and promoting a "witch hunt" for workers who need to improve their performances [18]. ...
... Authors such as [31][32][33] argue about the negative results of gamification strategies if they are not correctly applied. Ref. [18] mention in their research studies on gamification in the marketing area that the technique has been used to identify and dismiss employees with unsatisfactory performance. Therefore, gamification is a fine line between a positive tool to motivate employees and a source of stress and pressure that could affect the workplace's social and mental well-being [20]. ...
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This paper investigates how gamification in the workplace has developed from 2016 to 2023 in the production sector and what ethical safeguards have been adopted. The paper presents a state-of-the-art Systematic Literature Review (SRL) performed in the Scopus and Web of Science databases to identify empirical studies involving the adoption of gamification solutions in the manufacturing and construction industries. Twenty-three articles were found and examined regarding the problems evidenced in each workplace, the methodological perspective, the gamification elements considered, the reported psychological and organizational impacts, and the ethical aspects of the research. The SRL highlighted two research gaps: the lack of ethical discussion around the gamification of workplaces and the lack of gamification applications in the construction industry. Only four studies mention ethical issues concerning the participants, and only four studies are related to construction. On the other hand, there is a tendency to use collaborative platforms to share knowledge and increase engagement.
... This is especially true for the younger Generations Y and Z who grew up with games and seek meaning or at least joy in their work activities. As predicted in a 2015 paper on the progression of gamification through the Gartner hype cycle [6], gamification is beyond the "trough of disillusionment", moving across the "slope of enlightenment" towards the "plateau of productivity". ...
... Huotari and Hamari [37] define service-oriented gamification as "a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences to support user's overall value creation". As Korn and Schmidt [6] already stated in 2015, "the fascination for gamification in the service sector seems to be fueled by the increased measurability of service processes". Clearly, digital tools like Jira for task management or Salesforce for organizing sales processes make processes transparent, which formerly have either just been written down or in many cases never left the user's head. ...
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Gamification is increasingly successful in the field of education and health. However, beyond call-centers and applications in human resources, its utilization within companies remains limited. In this paper, we examine the acceptance of gamification in a large company (with over 17,000 employees) across three generations, namely X, Y, and Z. Furthermore, we investigate which gamification elements are suited for business contexts, such as the dissemination of company principles and facts, or the organization of work tasks. To this end, we conducted focus group discussions, developed the prototype of a gamified company app, and performed a large-scale evaluation with 367 company employees. The results reveal statistically significant intergenerational disparities in the acceptance of gamification: younger employees, especially those belonging to Generation Z, enjoy gamification more than older employees and are most likely to engage with a gamified app in the workplace. The results further show a nuanced range of preferences regarding gamification elements: avatars are popular among all generations, badges are predominantly appreciated by Generations Z and Y, while leaderboards are solely liked by Generation Z. Drawing upon these insights, we provide recommendations for future gamification projects within business contexts. We hope that the results of our study regarding the preferences of the gamification elements and understanding generational differences in acceptance and usage of gamification will help to create more engaging and effective apps, especially within the corporate landscape.
... GE's moderating role GE in supply chain activities creates game-like systems, supporting positive experiences (Tomé Klock et al., 2021;Winkelhaus and Grosse, 2020), which can be combined to create a powerful mechanism, motivating and improving supply chain performance. Many tasks in supply chain practices, such as production and process engineering, production planning (Korn and Schmidt, 2015;Neto et al., 2014), factory floor-related operational tasks, warehousing, production execution, supply chain design and planning, transportation planning, and execution (Hense et al., 2014), utilize gamification to improve individual behavior and organizational performance (Huotari and Hamari, 2017). Gamification essentials, such as reward points, leaderboards, and badges can be extensively used in business environment practices to foster better engagement and motivation, creating a sense of competition and progress (Pereira et al., 2022). ...
... Although the first documented use of the concept of gamification was in the early parts of this millennium (Dale, 2014;Kapp, 2012), gaming principles have been used for a long timefor example, in the military (Dicheva et al., 2015). Gamification has gone from being a buzzword to denoting a popular way of thinking, and it is implemented to improve production (Warmelink et al., 2018), improve communication with stakeholders (Trittin et al., 2019), provide better conditions for training , enhance education (Bevins and Howard, 2018;Dicheva et al., 2015) and even improve people's health (see Korn and Schmidt, 2015 who also provide a good overview of the uptake of the concept). Gamification is also an important design principle in the contemporary capitalism of the "interface economy", incorporated in algorithms in a variety of Web-based services such as Uber, Airbnb and so on (Finn, 2018). ...
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how gamification may be used for project stakeholder engagement. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents the results of a systematic literature review of extant research concerning the gamification of projects. Based on this, an agenda for future studies is outlined. Findings Extant research on the gamification of projects is scarce and scattered among various disciplines, but the engineering fields dominate. The research performed does indicate that gamification may be used for involving stakeholders in projects, primarily by promoting learning, but also by engaging them, motivating action and solving problems. Research limitations/implications In several cases, extant research display poor quality in research design and a lack in cross-disciplinary perspectives, which means that more research is needed. The users’ perspective is often lacking. Furthermore, the ideas gamification might be “hidden” within other technologies. Practical implications The findings of this research may assist project management practitioners in the endeavor of adopting gamification principles to better involve stakeholders. Originality/value The study fills a gap in summarizing the research on how gamification may be used to promote project stakeholder engagement. Based on this, it proposes a research agenda for future research on the use of gamification to promote project stakeholder engagement.
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Gamification is an ever more popular method to increase motivation and user experience in real-world settings. It is widely used in the areas of marketing, health and education. However, in production environments, it is a new concept. To be accepted in the industrial domain, it has to be seamlessly integrated in the regular work processes. In this work we make the following contributions to the field of gamification in production: (1) we analyze the state of the art and introduce domain-specific requirements; (2) we present two implementations gamifying production based on alternative design approaches; (3) these are evaluated in a sheltered work organization. The comparative study focuses acceptance, motivation and perceived happiness. The results reveal that a pyramid design showing each work process as a step on the way towards a cup at the top is strongly preferred to a more abstract approach where the processes are represented by a single circle and two bars.
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During recent years “gamification” has gained significant attention among practitioners and game scholars. However, the current understanding of gamification has been solely based on the act of adding systemic game elements into services. In this paper, we propose a new definition for gamification, which emphases the experiential nature of games and gamification, instead of the systemic understanding. Furthermore, we tie this definition to theory from service marketing because majority of gamification implementations aim towards goals of marketing, which brings to the discussion the notion of how customer / user is always ultimately the creator of value. Since now, the main venue for academic discussion on gamification has mainly been the HCI community. We find it relevant both for industry practitioners as well as for academics to study how gamification can fit in the body of knowledge of existing service literature because the goals and the means of gamification and marketing have a significant overlap.
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Anyone can master the fundamentals of game design - no technological expertise is necessary. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses shows that the same basic principles of psychology that work for board games, card games and athletic games also are the keys to making top-quality videogames. Good game design happens when you view your game from many different perspectives, or lenses. While touring through the unusual territory that is game design, this book gives the reader one hundred of these lenses - one hundred sets of insightful questions to ask yourself that will help make your game better. These lenses are gathered from fields as diverse as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, writing, puzzle design, and anthropology. Anyone who reads this book will be inspired to become a better game designer - and will understand how to do it.
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Can the workplace be redesigned to include avatars, three-dimensional environments, and a host of virtual rewards that form newly transparent reputations for you and your team? This grounded and thought-provoking book by Byron Reeves and Leighton Read argues that it is not only possible, it is inevitable. Massive multiplayer online games (MMOs) are a new cultural phenomenon at the intersection of electronic entertainment and social networking. Borrowing the key design principles from these games can address a host of classic challenges in the workplace including collaboration, innovation, leadership, and of course, boredom. No longer the sole domain of adolescent boys, today’s best complex social games capture countless of hours of attention from men and women across the age spectrum who are carrying out activities in these entertainment titles that look surprisingly like the same tasks being performed by enterprise information-workers. There is a lot to be learned from the context that makes this behavior engaging, for example: positioning tasks within compelling stories that matter to the player, providing the tools for internal marketplaces where economic behavior replaces command and control, and affordances that help solve the problem of “what do I get when we win” Reeves and Read show how to choose and implement the right elements for your business. Of course, the psychological power of game design can have both positive and negative consequences for the workplace. That’s why it’s important to put them into practice correctly from the beginning–and Reeves and Read explain how by showing which good design principles are powerful antidotes to the addictive and stress-inducing potential of games. Supported by specific case studies and years of research, Total Engagement completely changes the way you view both work and play.
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Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) von Maschinen und Anlagen tragen zur Alleinstellung, zur Kundenzufriedenheit und Produktivität bei. Die Studie beschreibt Qualitätsmerkmale für HMI-Entwicklungswerkzeuge, darunter u.a. Darstellungsmöglichkeiten, verfügbare HMI-Elemente, Usability der Entwickungsumgebung. Damit unterstützt die Studie bei der Bewertung und Auswahl von Werkzeugen, aber auch bei der Ausrichtung konzipierter HMI an gegebene Einschränkungen.