Narratives in Gamified IS

  • Background:

     

    Gamification is a novel phenomenon that aims at motivating people by taking advantage of their growing passion for games. It refers to the application of so‐called game elements (e.g., point systems, badges, leaderboards) to non‐game contexts (e.g., work, marketing, or healthcare). Thereby, research and practice mainly focused their attention on elements that one would traditionally associate with gamification, such as points, goals, badges, or leaderboards. Although famous examples such as the app “Zombies, Run!” show great motivational potential, sophisticated narratives are rarely used. One reason might be that the motivational effects of narratives are often hard to tease out. In fact, game design literature has currently started to investigate the phenomenon of ludonarrative dissonance (i.e., narrative and gameplay elements are thrown into opposition) which might apply to gamified IS as well and hinder narratives in such systems from unfolding their full potential. 

     

    Objective(s):

     

    Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

     

    • Conceptualization of narratives or ludo-narrative dissonance
    • Review of transportation theory
    • Experimental design on the effects of narratives in gamified IS

     

    This is an umbrella topic since topics of interest change rapidly. A specific topic will be selected during a first meeting.

     

    Introductory literature:

    • Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R. and Nacke, L. (2011) “From game design elements to gamefulness: defining gamification”. Proceedings of the 15th international academic MindTrek conference: Envisioning future media environments, 2011/09/28 - 30, Tampere, Finland.
    • Koivisto, J., & Hamari, J. (2019). The rise of motivational information systems: A review of gamification research. International Journal of Information Management, 45, 191-210.
    • Schmidt-Kraepelin, M., Warsinsky, S., Thiebes, S. and Sunyaev, A. (2022) "Conceptualizing Narratives in Gamified Information Systems" 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (Forthcoming).