A Multipurpose System for Gamified Experiences
Samuel Moreira Timbó, Juliana de Melo Bezerra and Celso Massaki Hirata
Computer Science Department, ITA, Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil
Keywords: Gamification, Collaborative Systems, Motivation, Gamified Experience.
Abstract: Gamification is the application of game elements and game design techniques to non-gaming contexts,
aiming to provide incentives to people overcome obstacles towards a desired engagement and behavior.
Nowadays gamification is applied in different areas such as Education, Business, Human Resources, Health,
and Entertainment. Generally, existent applications are tied to a specific context, making it hard to replicate
ideas and to adapt to new scenarios. Here, we present a multipurpose system where users are responsible for
creating their own gamified experiences. The system is based in a generalized gamification process and it
allows customizations due to its platform with predefined game elements. We conducted an experiment
where we confirmed the applicability of the proposed system by investigating aspects as potential to
motivate users, flexibility to be applied in distinct contexts, and overall usability.
1 INTRODUCTION
Gamification is the use of game design elements in
non-game contexts, aiming to engage users and
increase productiveness. Gamification design
adopts distinct game elements that address
motivating factors, such as mastery, self-efficacy,
challenge, social development and fun. The main
idea is to reward users for their achievements
(Deterding et al., 2011; Hanraths et al., 2016).
Gamification elements are generally applied in a
way to create a gamification loop that considers the
sequence: challenge, win condition, rewards,
leaderboard, badges, and social network and status.
When the user achieves a challenge driven by a
specific condition or goal, some rewards are given
accordingly to a point system. Based on the
achievements’ history, a leaderboard is established
and badges are provided to users, which may result
in changes of users’ status or conditions in the
related social network (Liu et al., 2011; Cechetti et
al., 2017).
According to Marczewski (2015), the
gamification design has to take into account the
offering of elements to distinct player types, such as
socialisers (who aim to make social connections),
free spirits (who want to create and explore),
achievers (who desire to overcome challenges),
philanthropists (who want to enrich lives of others),
and players (who aim to collect rewards). A special
attention is needed to the last type in the framework,
the disruptors, who desire to disrupt the system,
being not aligned to the system purpose.
Gamification has been used in distinct contexts.
Aziz and Mushtaq (2017) investigate the use of
gamification in enterprises, with the goal of
enhancing productivity and motivation of
employees, and also promoting engagement of
employees with the new initiatives of company. Still
in the organizations’ context, benefits, challenges
and applications of integrating gamification are
outlined by Chow and Chapman (2013) and Schuldt
and Friedemann (2017).
Syah (2016) describes a possible use of
gamification in smart buildings to make employees
contribute to energy saving using mobile
applications, for instance by turning off unnecessary
lamps. Other works regarding smart environments
were proposed by Liu et al. (2011) and Papaioannou
et al. (2017). Kazhamiakin et al. (2016) present a
service-based gamification framework which can be
used to develop games on top of existing services
and systems within a smart city, in order to facilitate
and foster positive voluntary changes of citizens.
Hanraths et al. (2016) developed a web-based
platform for gamification of seminars and classes.
They use game elements, such as avatars, levels,
rankings, experience points, and achievements, in
order to offer a versatile learning environment to
engage students. Other works also consider
536
Timbó, S., Bezerra, J. and Hirata, C.
A Multipurpose System for Gamified Experiences.
DOI: 10.5220/0006696805360542
In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Enterpr ise Information Systems (ICEIS 2018), pages 536-542
ISBN: 978-989-758-298-1
Copyright
c
 2019 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved

gamification in the education context, always
seeking to provide a fun and challenging
environment for students, for instance Morey et al.
(2016), Schäfer (2017), Azmi et al. (2016), Heryadi
and Muliamin (2016).
In the area of Health, Alimanova et al. (2017)
describe the use of gamification with virtual reality
technology for hand rehabilitation, in a way to make
the rehabilitation process more effective and
motivating for patients. Aiming the promotion of
healthy activities to treat obesity, Wen (2017)
integrates gamification and social network features
in a mobile application. Other work regarding
obesity, by Adaji and Vassileva (2017), uses
gamification to influence consumers to purchase
healthier foods in e-commerce.
García et al. (2017) argue that the application of
gamification in Software Engineering is promising.
Software projects can be seen as a set of challenges
that need to be fulfilled, for which some skills and
collective effort are required. They propose a
framework for gamification in software engineering
development. The framework is composed of an
ontology, a methodology guiding the process, and a
support gamification engine. The gamification
engine receives all the interactions of developers
with their working tools; it then evaluates them to
determine if they deserve a reward, according to the
set of gamification rules specified by the designer of
the gamified environment. The gamification engine
stores a log of all the actions completed by each
person, the gamification rules, and the rewards
corresponding to each action. The framework
provides a complete solution for applying
gamification but it is specific to Software
Engineering development.
Herzig et al. (2012) present an architecture for
gamification within enterprise systems. They reuse
prior research on system architectures, e.g., service-
oriented and event-driven architectures. They
implemented the proposed architecture in a
prototype to demonstrate its feasibility. The
architecture is a useful model but it is limited to
enterprise systems domain.
Böckle et al. (2017) have conducted a systematic
literature review that identifies main issues and
challenges in the literature on adaptive gamification.
The performed analysis provides some
contributions: a conceptual matrix of adaptive
gamification design that identifies major dimensions
of current approaches and classifies them
accordingly; a thematic overview where the
identified literature and their related studies are
assigned to the designated areas; identification of
research challenges; and a proposal of a research
agenda. The analysis is comprehensive and presents
many related issues; however, adaptive gamification
is not focus of our investigation.
Most applications of gamification are commonly
systems specialized in a given goal or area.
Therefore, those systems are hardly replicable
outside them. Kazhamiakin et al. (2016) deal with
the possibility of replication by proposing a way to
design gamification in smart cities. However there is
a lack of a multipurpose system that can be applied
to many contexts.
In this paper, we present 4DWin, a system that
allows customization of distinct gamified
experiences. The system has a set of predefined
game elements, giving the users the ability to create
their own gamified experiences from scratch in an
easy manner. This approach is especially interesting
to informal groups (Counts, 2007; Schuler et al.,
2014; Ferreira et al., 2017), which come together
online to perform work or social activities, fostering
engagement, commitment and participation through
gamification. Here, we also validate the proposed
system by applying it in different contexts in an
experiment to analyze its usability and flexibility.
Section 2 describes the multipurpose system for
designing gamified experiences. Section 3 describes
how we evaluated the proposed system. Section 4
presents conclusions and future work.
2 TOWARDS A MULTIPURPOSE
SYSTEM TO SUPPORT
GAMIFICATION
In this section we explain the characteristics of a
generalized gamification that, together with a
process to customize gamified experiences, are the
foundation for the development of the 4DWin
system to support gamification in contexts defined
by users.
2.1 Generalized Gamification
The concept of generalized gamification is a way to
create gamified experiences that is not particularly
tied to any particular context. It gives the users the
ability to create the content of their own specific
experience by using a predefined system. Below we
characterize the differences between a generalized
gamification system and the usual applications of
gamification, which are going to be referred to as
specialized. We focus on the following topics: roles,
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537

context, feedback, content, game elements, setup,
and size.
In a specialized gamification, there are two main
roles: designers and users. Designers define and
manage the gamified experience, whereas users in
fact experience the system. In a generalized
gamification, there is no formal separation between
these roles: regular users are prone to act as
designers by contributing to the gamification
configuration in distinct levels according to their
own involvement with the gamified experience.
When explaining specialized generalized
gamification, we differentiate designers and users.
When describing generalized gamification, we use
only the term users due to their empowerment in the
gamified experience.
Context represents the environment in which the
gamified experience is going to be applied. A
specialized gamified system is built from the ground
up in a way the creator thinks it best suits the
specific goals being addressed. This may be made by
choosing a set of game elements and techniques that
match the intrinsic motivations of the users. A
generalized gamification system has such elements
and techniques almost totally predefined, leaving the
users with the task of customization necessary for
the goals to be achieved.
Feedback means how the system interacts with
its users. A specialized system is prone to be
automatic in a way users receive instant feedback for
their actions. On the other hand, as generalized
gamification is not specifically attached to any
context, it is hard to define automatic hooks between
users’ actions and the tasks defined.
The content of a gamified experience built on
top a generalized gamification platform is defined by
its own users. On a specialized gamified system, the
designers behind it usually come up with the content
themselves. Even though it is theoretically possible
to allow the contribution of users with content
design in a specialized system, this feature is not
usually used, especially because these systems have
content policies that are hard to be adopted by most
users.
The game elements present on a specialized
gamified application are basically chosen and
implemented by the same agents that define the
gamified experience’s content. In a gamified
experience that uses a generalized tool, the game
elements are already defined, leaving the user
responsible for the content creation.
The users of a generalized gamified system have
a low cost way of creating their gamified
experiences, if they have an available infrastructure
to build upon. The issue here is how the
infrastructure is flexible and how difficult is to
create the gamified experience. An equivalent
specialized system, created from the scratch, would
demand development and so be more expensive.
Specialized gamification can be designed and
implemented to scale up to a huge user base. The
dynamic content generation present in generalized
systems makes them harder to scale up. In addition
to possible resource limitations, generalized
gamification are meant for small groups since there
is a need for trust between group members in order
to assure valuable content creation.
2.2 Steps of a Gamified Experience
We propose a process, shown in Figure 1, to allow
the implementation of generalized gamified
experiences. The simplicity of the process is derived
by the ideal of having a system that is replicable in
many scenarios.
Figure 1: A process to create gamified experiences.
In the first step of the process, the creator of the
group is responsible for choosing the group’s name
and writing down its goal description. The way the
group is defined should be an agreement among its
users. This simple step sets the ground for the next
steps. An example of group can be “Fit in”, whose
objective is collaboratively help each other to have a
healthier life.
In step 2, the group’s creator customizes the
permissions each user has on the group’s content
creation. He defines who is capable of performing
the tasks proposed in the “gamified experience” part
of the diagram. The roles are related to the creation
of challenges, the rating of challenges, and the
assignment of trophies. Basically there are two
options to assign roles: “all the users” or “only the
designers”. The essence of a generalized
gamification is aligned to allow all users to
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contribute in the same way. Selecting “only the
designers” means that only some users with the role
of ‘designer’ are in charge of the gamification
configuration, being a way to restrict the number of
contributors in large groups. The best configuration
for each group depends on the group’s setup. For
instance, the “Fit In” group can be defined as a
completely collaborative group, where every user
has the full access to content creation, being able to
create challenges, rating and assigning trophies on
free will.
Challenges, described in step 3, are the core
game element of the system mechanics. They
represent tasks designed to help the user to do his
part on the group’s goal. The goal of a challenge
creation is to define it in a way it motivates the users
(or a set of target users) to perform the underlying
task. For instance, in the “Fit in” group a challenge
could be “No chocolate: Resisting chocolate for two
months”.
Rating, in step 4, represents the action of giving
an evaluation to a challenge. The exact criteria for
the rating value given to a challenge should be an
agreement between the users, but the recommended
design is to rate the challenges based on a
compromise between its perceived difficulty and its
importance for the group’s goal. Here, the average
rating of a challenge is used to define the final score
value associated with it.
Trophies are the representation of achievement
inside the system’s gamified experience. They are
tokens intended to be collected by the group’s
players. Once a user performs the task proposed on a
challenge, he is able to “win” the respective trophy,
as expected in step 5, adding the correspondent score
to his own total.
The leaderboard, mentioned in step 6, is
basically an area of the system that socializes the
users’ data. It is intended to make public to the
group the users’ information, in especial, their total
score and the trophies they have won. This part of
the system was thought to create an environment of
competition inside the group. The gamified
experience continues to step 3 in a cyclic way,
always aligned to group goal.
2.3 The 4DWin System
The 4DWin system is a web application that
implements the proposed process, in order to
provide the infrastructure to users create
collaborative gamified experiences. The application
has the following features: create a group; edit a
group; leave a group; add members; change
members’ privileges; remove members; add a
challenge; view a challenge; edit a challenge; rate a
challenge; remove a challenge; add a trophy (win a
challenge); remove a trophy; check challenges tab;
check trophies tab; and check leaderboard tab.
Two interfaces of 4DWin are shown in Figures 2
and 3. In Figure 2, on the left, there is the list of
groups to which the user belongs. There are three
tabs: challenges, trophies and leaderboard. The
challenge tab is in evidence with the challenges of
group “Top Coders” (a group to enhance
programming abilities). Each challenge has a name,
an icon and a number (points to conquer if the user
“wins” the challenge).
Figure 2: Challenges tab.
Figure 3: Challenge view.
Figure 3 shows a specific challenge called “Give it a
chance!”, whose goal is to “Learn the basics of
PHP”. The stars represent the assessment of the
challenge by the user. If the user accomplishes such
challenge, he clicks on “Win” and receives a trophy
associated to it. All trophies are accessed in the
respective task. The points associated to the
challenge are added in the user score, which can be
accessed in the leaderboard tab in Figure 2.
4DWin uses the client-server architecture. The
server side was written in JavaScript running on a
Node.js environment. It was developed as a RESTful
API. In this single page application implementation,
the server is only responsible for exchanging raw
JSON data with the client, leaving all the view
A Multipurpose System for Gamified Experiences
539

rendering for the client side code. The server also
communicates with external services, such as
Facebook for user login, and Outlook for sending
user email notifications of new content.
The client side was developed as a single page
web application to be run on modern browsers. This
decision was made to maximize user coverage: since
most current platforms have access to a web
browser, the application can virtually be accessed by
any device. The single page application pattern was
chosen because it minimizes the need of page
reloading, therefore simulating the behavior of a
native application. Besides common technologies
such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the React.js
library is the main constituent backing up the whole
client side.
3 EVALUATION
We conducted an experiment to evaluate 4DWin
system in terms of motivation, flexibility and
usability. With respect to motivation, we aim to
identify the motivating features that the system
offers to the chosen gamified experience. Flexibility
refers to the possibility to use the system in different
contexts. Usability is associated to the easiness for
users to perform tasks in the system.
3.1 Design of Experiment
Fourteen voluntary participants took part in the
experiment. They were undergraduate students in a
computing engineering course. They had to perform
a set of tasks and later to respond an evaluation.
Firstly, participants should execute some offline
tasks: choose a group (including context and goal) to
create a gamified experience; and propose 5 to 10
challenges that are aligned with the chosen
gamification goal. The challenges should be
comprehensive enough to achieve the goal.
Participants should then access the system, log in
with Facebook account, and read the “Getting
Started” tutorial. Finally, participants should
perform core tasks in the system: create a new group
based on context and goal that they defined
previously; define the group settings to best match
the group’s context by allowing all users or a set of
users to contribute to gamification configuration;
add each challenge they defined previously; rate
each challenge they created based on their difficulty;
win (add it to their trophies) one of the available
challenges; check up their trophies; and check up the
leaderboard.
Participants classified the created group in a given
category, which reveals the contexts used in the
gamified experiences. As result we have: 1 group in
“entertainment” context, 1 group in “hobby and
leisure” context, 2 groups in “business” context, 2
groups in “health and fitness” context, 2 groups in
“games” context, 6 groups in “school and education”
context, 0 group in “travel and places” context.
Participants evaluated sentences related to
motivation (M1 to M7), flexibility (F1 to F3), and
usability (U1 to U4). They used a five-point Likert
scale: 1 (strongly disagree), 2 (disagree), 3 (neutral,
4 (agree), and 5 (strongly agree). Sentences are
shown in Table 1 and Table 2, with the related
results.
3.2 Results
The results of the conducted evaluation are shown in
Table 1 (regarding motivation) and Table 2
(regarding flexibility and usability).
Table 1: System evaluation regarding motivation.
Id Sentence Mean Std
M1 It is motivating to create
new groups
4.1 1.0
M2 It is motivating to add new
challenges
4.4 0.6
M3 It is motivating to rate the
challenges
3.8 1.2
M4 It is motivating to see my
trophies
4.6 0.6
M5 It is motivating to see the
leaderboard
4.7 0.6
M6 It is motivating to have
challenges added by other
members
4.3 0.9
M7 It is motivating to see the
trophies won by other
members
4.1 0.9
Regarding motivation, we observed that the main
stimulating features for the contexts used in the
experiment were trophies (M4) and leaderboard
(M5). These results were expected since in a
gamified experience, users are moved to conquer
points and see their results for personal pleasure (by
acquiring trophies) or for comparison with other
users (by checking status in leaderboard). Other
important and well evaluated aspects are the
possibility to create challenges (M2) and to have
challenges created by others (M6). These results
demonstrate the essential aspect of the generalized
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gamification, where users are up to develop content
in a self-organizing structure.
The creation of groups (M1) was well evaluated,
but it is important to mention that it is a single step
moved by the need in a given context. A not so well
evaluated aspect was to see trophies of others (M7),
which is interesting because users are interested in
their ranking but not in the others’ achievements.
The lowest evaluation was assigned to rating
challenges (M3), which needs further investigation:
in the current system, all users should evaluate
challenges before “Win” them, but maybe we could
consider sufficient the rating of the challenge’s
creator.
Table 2: System evaluation regarding flexibility and
usability.
Id Sentence Mean Std
F1 The system is adequate to
the created group
4.2 0.9
F2 The system can increase
members’ engagement in
the created group
4.4 0.6
F3 The system can be applied
to other groups
4.7 0.6
U1 It is possible to execute all
tasks that the application is
supposed to support
4.2 1.1
U2 The proposed tasks can be
performed in a timely
manner
4.6 0.6
U3 I feel satisfied with the
application
4.3 0.6
U4 The application is easy to
use and understand
4.3 0.7
The system was considered flexible in supporting
distinct contexts in the experiment, since it was
adequate to groups (F1) and it has a potential in
increasing engagement (F2). Moreover, participants
believe that the system can be employed to other
groups (F3). Regarding usability, the system was
considered effective since it allowed the execution
of desired tasks (U1), efficient as tasks are
performed in a timely manner (U2), satisfactory
(U3), and easy to use and understand (U4).
However, participants reported some obstacles
related to usability, especially due to screen sizes
where the application was not fully responsive.
4 CONCLUSIONS
Gamification is a technique that is based on the
games effectiveness on producing engagement. It
aims to increase group productivity in a given
context. This technique is based on the proposal of
motivational incentives to tasks that are aligned with
the group’s goal. In successful applications of
gamification, incentives are generated from a careful
choice of game elements and game design
techniques, taking into consideration the
peculiarities of each context. So applications of
gamification are built on top of systems usually tied
to specific scenarios.
We proposed a system that provides a set of tools
for creating gamified experiences in diverse
contexts. We created a system that is context
agnostic. It has predefined game elements that
together with a specified customization process
enable groups to define their own gamified
experiences. The goal is to help make gamification a
technique that is easy to apply by anyone. We
conducted an experiment, which confirmed positive
aspects of the system, including its motivating
potential, its flexibility to cope with distinct
contexts, and its usability.
It is interesting to notice that the system can be
improved and expanded in many ways. Interesting
modifications, specifically related to usability, were
proposed by participants in the experiment that
deserve further inspection, for instance the way data
are displayed in leaderboard. The addition of new
game elements available for the creation of groups is
likely to represent an effective approach to increase
the system’s overall usage. The field of generalized
gamification has still much to develop, but 4DWin
surely represents an innovative step towards the
spreading of usable gamification.
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