How to engineer gamification : the consensus, the best practice and the grey areas

Gamification typically refers to the use of game elements in a business context in order to change users’ behaviors, mainly increasing motivation and engagement, towards a certain task or a strategic objective. Gamification has received a good deal of emphasis in both academia and industry across various disciplines, e.g., psychology and human computer interaction, and application areas, e.g., education and marketing. Despite the increasing interest, we still need a unified and holistic picture of how to engineer gamification including: the meaning of the term; its development process; the stakeholders and disciplines which need to be involved in it; and the concerns and risks an ad-hoc design could raise for both businesses and users. To address this need, this paper reports on a review of the literature on a range of gamification techniques and applications, followed by empirical research which involved collecting expert opinions using qualitative and quantitative methods. Based on the results of this research, we provide a body of knowledge about gamification and highlight good practice principles and areas of gamification that are debatable and require further investigation.