Selecting Effective Influence Principles for Tailoring Gamification-Based Strategies to Player Roles

Resumo

Gamification is a term that refers to the use of game elements in nongame contexts with the goal of engaging people in a variety of tasks. Gami- fication can be an effective persuasive tool for motivating learners and lately we have witnessed a growing interest in gamified learning systems. However, the efforts of the research community in the last years have shown the weakness of one-size-fits-all and design-by-intuition approaches. Thus, there is room for improvement. Persuasion profiling is a promising technique to fill such a gap. This paper discusses how gamification design can benefit from persuasion pro- filing. To measure users’ susceptibility to influence principles, we employed the Br-STPS. We conducted a study on 149 subjects which examined the persuasiveness of six influence principles on five player types. The results suggest that player types indeed has a role to play in term of the perceive persuasiveness of users. Moreover, we present a list of persuasive strategies and how they can either enhance or halt user’s motivation. Thus, evidence suggest that gamifi- cation design could benefit of influence principles, although tailored solutions are necessary to minimize the risks of selecting counter-tailored and ill-defined persuasive strategies.