=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1641/paper6
|storemode=property
|title=The Role of Gamification in End-User Development
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1641/paper6.pdf
|volume=Vol-1641
|authors=Francesco Benzi,Daniela Fogli
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/iseud/BenziF15
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==The Role of Gamification in End-User Development==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1641/paper6.pdf
The Role of Gamification in End-User Development
Francesco Benzi, Daniela Fogli
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione
Università degli Studi di Brescia, Brescia, Italy
{f.benzi, daniela.fogli}@unibs.it
Abstract. This paper discusses the application of a gamification framework in
an end-user development context, in order to investigate a possible solution to
the problem of participation and collaboration overload often affecting end-user
development activities. Indeed, it has been observed in the literature that when
users are required to develop or adapt a system for the sake of other people (be-
longing or not belonging to the same community) and not just for personal use,
motivation mechanisms should be implemented. With the help of an example in
the field of ambient intelligence, we propose the integration of end-user devel-
opment environments with gamification elements.
Keywords: end-user development, cultures of participation, gamification
1 Introduction
Nowadays there is a high demand on users to become producers of information, co-
designers of systems, active contributors in system maintenance over time. These
activities are encouraged not only in participatory design and end-user development
(EUD) projects, but also and more simply in social networks, wikis and advanced web
services. This trend opens up novel opportunities for users, who may acquire more
control on the software artifacts they contributed to create and make their voice heard
within a community. However, alongside these opportunities, users often find the
drawbacks and disadvantages of being engaged in activities that are secondary with
respect to their main work or daily tasks and that require additional resources not only
for participation but also for training.
Therefore, it is urgent reflecting upon this situation and proposing solutions for
mitigating the drawbacks of such a request of participation and collaboration.
Gamification is recently considered a useful technique for one’s own business or
organization [16]. The introduction of gamification elements such as points, badges
and leaderboards - the so-called PBLs elements in [15] - has proven to be a successful
solution to support collaborative work, increase sells in e-commerce web sites, and
foster participation in social networks. Gamification is neither making an application
a game nor creating 3D simulations or serious games; therefore, it is substantially a
different approach with respect to that proposed in the field of EUD in [13][14].
32
Proc. of Third International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2015
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The research question we would like to investigate with this position paper is
whether the recent studies on gamification techniques could inspire new solutions for
supporting the long-term sustainability of EUD activities.
2 Motivating End Users to Become End-User Developers
In EUD, end users are called on to participate in software design and development, by
carrying out activities that range from requirement specification through domain-
specific modeling to more advanced activities, such as system customization and
modification, or even creation of new software artifacts. Differently from participa-
tory design, EUD research advocates end-user participation mainly during system
usage; in this way, as underlined in [2], EUD overlaps with end-user programming
(EUP). EUP originally referred to end-user creation of formulas within spreadsheets
and is currently intended as “programming to achieve the result of a program primari-
ly for personal, rather public use” [12].
To clarify the differences between EUP and EUD, Cabitza et al. [4] have proposed
an original taxonomy for classifying EUD activities. In this taxonomy, there is a first-
level classification of EUD into individual EUD and public EUD. Individual EUD
encompasses all those activities that lead to the creation, modification or extension of
a software artifact for personal use only. Therefore, individual EUD is actually what
is usually called EUP. Public EUD, on the other hand, denotes all those situations
where end users either program or configure software artifacts that are used by (or
also by) other people. These people may belong to the same community, e.g. col-
leagues and co-workers, and thus public EUD refines into inward EUD; however, it
may also happen that people work in different departments or belong to different
communities, and thus public EUD can be regarded as outward EUD. In both cases,
the outcome of the EUD activity is aimed at being shared and publicly available to
others than the end user involved in the programming activity.
The above taxonomy is useful to analyze the possible drawbacks that EUD may
bring about. Indeed, whilst individual EUD is usually pushed forward by user’s in-
trinsic motivation, namely by the goal of a user to improve his/her own work or daily
life, public EUD often needs external motivation to take place and be sustained over
time. In the first case, a typical situation is that of a geoscientist that decides to spend
a few months in acquiring programming knowledge, in order to be able to develop a
software application to analyze the data he collected [8]. The second case has been
addressed in our experiences about the design of EUD environments [7][9, 10], where
we observed that playing an active role in system evolution or new artifact creation is
often regarded by end users as a further burden and not as an opportunity for improv-
ing oneself or one’s own community; this occurs especially when end users should
work for the sake of other people and not only for their own direct goals.
Therefore, social and technical mechanisms for motivating users involved in public
EUD must be studied and integrated in EUD tools. We suggest that gamification is a
possible answer.
33
Proc. of Third International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2015
Madrid (Spain), May 26th, 2015 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
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3 Introducing Gamification in a EUD context
In this section, we introduce an example case study related to the ambient intelligence
domain, where the adoption of public EUD mechanisms could represent a suitable
approach to address some of the emerging issues. Then, we illustrate a literature gam-
ification framework and some ideas for introducing gamification in the above men-
tioned domain.
3.1 An Example Case Study
The domain we take into consideration is that of ambient intelligence (AmI), with
specific reference to the smart home. A smart home could be roughly characterized by
its components, namely sensors, actuators, and ambient inhabitants, and by its behav-
iors, which are determined by the interactions occurring among the components and
by some configuration rules [3]. Such rules could be predefined in the system at de-
sign time or, more interestingly, could be continuously created and modified by the
family members inhabiting the smart home. Proper mechanisms for easy rule creation
should therefore be made available to users without programming knowledge, in or-
der to support them in rule definition and ambient configuration. Some works that
propose user interfaces based on the Event-Condition-Action (ECA) paradigm are
being developed in the AmI areas (e.g., [1][11][17]).
An ECA rule could be for example:
IF (01:00 A.M.) and (nobody in the living room)
THEN turns off the lights
where 01.00 A.M. is an event related to the clock, nobody in the liv-
ing room is a condition that may be checked by presence sensors, turns off
the lights is the action to be carried out.
Actually, ECA rules appear as an effective and suitable paradigm for end users [6].
However, even though we may assume the existence of a usable interface that allows
end users adapting rules to their needs or creating new ones, a fundamental challenge
remains to be considered, which is related to various questions, like the following:
1. Why users (inhabitants) should be willing to adapt or create rules?
2. Which mechanisms could be implemented to motivate users adapting or creat-
ing rules?
3. How one may sustain system evolution over time?
4. How one may avoid that users are overloaded by participation requests?
The above questions, such as (3) and (4), could be also in trade-off: indeed, an in-
telligent environment should evolve over time, but this may require user participation
in rule creation and modification.
The literature framework for gamification, illustrated in the following, will help us
respond to the above questions and solve possible trade-offs.
34
Proc. of Third International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2015
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3.2 A Gamification Framework
In [15], a general gamification framework is proposed encompassing three types of
elements, namely dynamics, mechanics and components. Dynamics are the highest-
level elements that provide motivations for participation; mechanics are the elements
that drive player involvement and allow implementing the dynamics; and finally com-
ponents are the low-level tools that allow implementing the mechanics. Dynamics
include, in turn, constraints, emotions, narrative, progression, and relationships. In-
deed, since games are always a matter of choices and tradeoffs, constraints are fun-
damental for defining a game and providing a sense of tension and accomplishment.
Fostering engagement requires activating different emotions, such as curiosity, com-
petitiveness, happiness, etc. An explicit or implicit narrative can make users live an
experience that connects up to a larger story line. Progression in the user experience is
fundamental to avoid that the user abandons the system. Finally, designing for rela-
tionships is important because users are social and social interaction is a powerful
human drive.
We suggest taking into consideration all these elements in the smart home exam-
ple, because they are the milestones to foster user participation and collaboration.
Mechanics encompass challenges, chance, competition, cooperation, feedback, re-
source acquisition, rewards, transactions, turns and win states [16]. Supporting coop-
eration within a family or enabling competition among different families could be
valuable mechanics for the smart home case. Equally, providing feedbacks and re-
wards to the inhabitants who participate in rule creation and modification could be
another important tool. Challenges and resource acquisition could stimulate user-
system co-evolution over time [5], whilst turns and win states probably could be ig-
nored in our case since they do not exactly match with the problem at hand.
Components can be considered as “the tactics to achieve the goals of the higher-
level elements” [16]; therefore, they include a variety of elements that may be con-
cretely implemented and that sometimes appear also on the user interface of a gami-
fied system, such as avatars, badges, leaderboards, levels, points, gifting, quests, and
many others [16]. In the following, we illustrate the role that these elements could
play in the smart home configuration and management through a rule-based approach.
3.3 Gamification in the Smart Home Example
Figure 1 shows a mock-up of a system for rule creation and adaptation in the smart
home case study. The system allows managing different set of rules, each one associ-
ated to a registered user (in the example “Dad”, “Mum” and “David”). Let us focus on
the rules that apply to everyone (“All users” in the mock-up). In the system, these
have the highest priority, while the rules specific to, for example David, can be acti-
vated only when David is in the room and have a lower priority.
35
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Fig. 1. Mock-up of a gamified system for rule management.
To simplify the view, rules are grouped according to the places (for example, the
different rooms) where they apply. Note that this filter may also help users manage
the participation overload in rule checking and creation. Therefore, when “Living
Room” is selected in the left list, only the rules that involve the living room are shown
in the central part of the interface. In this part, one can go through the list of rules,
search for a specific rule, or create a new rule. The number “2” in the red circle over
“Add new Rule” means that two requests for creating new rules have been made by
some users. Requests for new rule creation are an example of social interaction relat-
ed with rule management. Another example is the request for a modifica-
tion/improvement of an already existing rule (see the number “1” in the red circle
over the “Roomba” rule). Prizes are offered to motivate the satisfaction of the above
requests. The prize mechanism is managed through a Karma Marketplace where kar-
ma points, gained when someone satisfies a request, can be converted into prizes de-
fined by those who made the requests. For example, Mum will give 20 euros to the
user who pays 300 karma points in the marketplace. Every rule modification by some
user that is not the rule creator is made effective only after a poll is made and the
majority of the voters accept the modification.
In the right-hand side of the user list on the top of the interface, a “Major” user is
displayed. A major is specific to every single place selected on the left list of places.
The major of a place is the registered user who spent most time in that place. He/she
has some advantages: for example, his/her vote in a rule modification poll has a high-
er weight than the vote of other users.
A rule gains experience every time it is activated, and eventually gains a level. It
starts from level “Sketchy” and ends at level “Advanced”. If a user reports that a rule
is not doing what he/she expected, that user will tick the “Error” box close to the rule.
When this happens, that rule is colored red and every time it is activated it loses expe-
rience. If experience goes under zero, the rule level becomes “Defective”, and the rule
cannot be activated anymore. Rule levels allow solving conflicts among rules.
36
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At the bottom of the interface three savings counters (Energy, Water and Gas) are
displayed: every time an active rule turns off a device (or reduces its operation), the
corresponding savings counter increases by one. For example, if a light bulb is turned
off, the “Electricity” counter will increase. This is a rough approximation of the re-
sources saved, since a perfect reckoning of the savings is obviously impossible. Fur-
thermore, a savings counter is not reliable, because a user could artificially increase it
by making repeatedly a rule goes off (indeed, cheating is possible). For this reason,
the savings counters are not associated to any sort of rewarding system.
Rewards are instead associated to quests (see the right-hand side of the interface).
Quests can be for example: “Consume less than X kilowatts in a week period”. In-
deed, information about actual consumption over a period of time can be reliably
collected. Quests are a way to keep the users going back to modify the rules, even
after they have completed the configuration of the smart home. This happens because
quests provide the users with difficult goals to achieve, which may require an unusual
set of rules and an increased living effort by all the family. Quests must be tailored to
the specific family in order not to be too difficult or too easy. They could possibly be
generated automatically or set by an administrator (for example of a condominium).
Completed quests give virtual rewards (gold/silver/copper coins) that can be re-
deemed in the form of discounts on real stuff. This could be a way for energy supply
companies to compensate the gain loss due to energy savings in the houses.
4 Conclusion and Future Work
The aim of this position paper is introducing the gamification theme in the EUD re-
search area, with particular reference to the case of AmI environment configuration.
As an example, the paper discusses rule creation for the smart home, but other kinds
of AmI environments could be considered, where more actors should be necessarily
involved, such as schools, hospital wards, workplaces, and so on. In these cases, par-
ticipation, collaboration and information overload could represent a much more im-
portant problem; however, we claim that proper gamification mechanisms, which help
users filter out uninteresting requests and solve emerging conflicts, could contribute
to cope with this problem.
In the future, we plan to experiment gamification in the context of rule creation in
smart home settings; then, we would like to apply and generalize this idea to other
AmI domains and EUD contexts, in order to study the role that gamification could
play in motivating users to participate and collaborate in EUD activities.
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Proc. of Third International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2015
Madrid (Spain), May 26th, 2015 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.