A multi-disciplinary research team from the University of Waterloo and the University of Minnesota have begun working together to bridge the gap between psychology and gamification.
Gamification is the use of game elements in applications that are not games - a user experience designer can borrow elements from games (such as quests, stories, and badges) to motivate users to interact with a product, system, or service.
The research that has been conducted to date has resulted in integrated models from psychology with human-computer interaction, allowing for a more deliberate, interactive connection between the two disciplines in the understanding of gameful experiences, which occur when a person is engaged in meaningful, fun, and achievable goals that motivate them in learning and working.
Lennart Nacke, a professor in Communication Arts and director of the Human-Computer Interaction in Games research group at Waterloo, hopes that by clarifying this term, gamification, is that there will now be a unifying foundation for any future work on gamification and help psychologists, user experience designers, and game developers better understand each other.
Vital to their unifying approach is the understanding that a gameful experience is a state resulting from the interaction of three psychological characteristics: perceiving presented goals to be non-trivial and achievable, being motivated to pursue those goals under arbitrary externally-imposed rules and believing that one's actions within these constraints are voluntary.
The overall hope is that with this unifying concept, researchers, designers, and developers of gameful systems will work more effectively.