=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3408/short-s4-02
|storemode=property
|title=Enhance Gamification Design Through End-User Development: a Proposal
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3408/short-s4-02.pdf
|volume=Vol-3408
|authors=Margherita Andrao,Federica Gini,Antonio Bucchiarone,Annapaola Marconi,Barbara Treccani,Massimo Zancanaro
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/iseud/AndraoGBMTZ23
}}
==Enhance Gamification Design Through End-User Development: a Proposal==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3408/short-s4-02.pdf
Enhance Gamification Design Through End-User
Development: a Proposal
Margherita Andrao1,2 , Federica Gini1,2 , Antonio Bucchiarone2 , Annapaola Marconi2 ,
Barbara Treccani1 and Massimo Zancanaro1,2
1
Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
2
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy
Abstract
Gamification has been increasingly used to foster motivation and engagement in adopting and maintain-
ing a desired behavior. In recent years, the tailoring of gamification, based on the users’ necessities, has
gained a central role in research. To this end, we propose an End-User Development (EUD) solution that
enables users who are not experts in programming to create and customize gamified systems accord-
ing to their specific needs and preferences. In particular, our EUD solution focuses on providing users
with intuitive verbal primitives for creating Trigger-Action rules, which are the basic building blocks
of gamified mechanics. To illustrate the potential of our approach, we provide some examples of how
users can adopt our system to create customed gamification strategies. These examples demonstrate
the flexibility of our EUD system, highlighting how it can be adapted to a wide range of applications.
Keywords
End-User Development, Gamification, Trigger-Action Programming
1. Introduction
Gamification aims to support people’s engagement and commitment to complex tasks [1].
Alongside the gamification approach has been increasingly applied to IoT in different domains,
such as smart cities, education, health, marketing, and others [2, 3] to improve engagement with
this technology. On the other hand, End-User Development (EUD) approach aims to empower
naive users - who are not programming experts - to personalize and define complex behaviors
of their applications [4]enriching their expressiveness, creativity, and goals strictly related to
the applied domain [5]. In this respect, often, EUD has been applied in the context of Internet of
Things (IoT) applications since their use is increasingly widespread in multiple contexts [6, 7].
This paper addresses and elaborates on solutions to an emerging challenge that innovatively
links EUD and gamification. In particular, we aim to study how to better design, through EUD,
solutions to personalize and define gamification rules and systems applicable to IoT technologies.
Indeed, facilitating and guiding non-programmer users in customizing gamification dynamics
IS-EUD 2023: 9th International Symposium on End-User Development, 6-8 June 2023, Cagliari, Italy
" margherita.andrao@unitn.it (M. Andrao); federica.gini@unitn.it (F. Gini); bucchiarone@fbk.eu
(A. Bucchiarone); marconi@fbk.eu (A. Marconi); barbara.treccani@unitn.it (B. Treccani);
massimo.zancanaro@unitn.it (M. Zancanaro)
0000-0003-2245-9835 (M. Andrao); 0000-0003-3427-3747 (F. Gini); 0000-0003-1154-1382 (A. Bucchiarone);
0000-0001-8699-7777 (A. Marconi); 0000-0001-8028-0708 (B. Treccani); 0000-0002-1554-5703 (M. Zancanaro)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
Workshop
Proceedings
http://ceur-ws.org
ISSN 1613-0073
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
could enhance the motivation and engagement of people using IoT and the empowerment of
application domain experts to define the operation of their digital artifacts according to their
needs, expertise, and goals.
1.1. Gamification
Gamification is commonly described as the introduction of game design elements (i.e., points,
badges, missions, avatars) in non-playful activities to create similar emotions to those expe-
rienced while playing video games [1]. In particular, gameful systems aim to increase users’
intrinsic motivation to support them in learning or maintaining a desired behavior (e.g., doing
physical activity, participating in crowdsourcing, adopting sustainable mobility) [8]. Gamifica-
tion has also been employed in EUD systems [9], improving end-user engagement in end-user
programming tasks [10, 11, 12, 13]. In this respect, our approach is different as we aim to allow
users to encode gamification by means of EUD. In the early stages of gamification, the so-called
PBL triad (points, badges, leaderboard) was vastly used in the design of gameful systems [8].
However, interpersonal, demographic, and cultural differences shape users’ perception of game
elements [14, 15, 16] and should be taken into account in the gamification design [8, 16]. In the
last few years, the literature on gamification emphasized the tailoring of gamification design
based on the target’s needs and characteristics [8, 14, 17]. Finally, Trinidad and colleagues
[18] recently underlined the need for tools that easily support gamification designers in the
implementation of their solutions. In this sense, our work represents an attempt to facilitate
designers in the creation of new gameful systems’ design and the following implementation.
2. Combining end-user development and gamification
Our goal is to identify ground principles to inspire the design of EUD solutions to empower naive
users, who have expertise in the application context but not in programming, to personalize
complex gamification and task design according to their specific needs and preferences. We
propose an architecture aimed at separating a general-purpose Gamification Engine from a
generic task-oriented system. The system architecture comprises five key components, including
Task Interface, Task Engine, Gamification Engine, Rules authoring Interface, and EUD rules (see
Figure 1). In this architecture, we separate the gamified Task Interface used by the end-users
(e.g., children using an educational IoT device) and the two engines that control respectively the
task (e.g., the IoT device - Task Engine) and the gamification mechanics (Gamification Engine).
Both engines can be customized through the Rules authoring Interface, which enables end-user
programmers (e.g., teachers) to create customized Trigger-Action rules that define how the task
and gamification elements should be executed. The two engines can retrieve the Trigger-Action
rules stored in a database (EUD rules). Overall, the architecture provides a flexible framework
for non-programmer users to create and customize gamification strategies and task logic for IoT
devices. This approach allows us to separate the specification of the task from the mechanics
of the gamification and, therefore, simplifies the architecture, makings the latter component
reusable. In this respect, it is important to specify a set of primitives (namely actions and
triggers) that fully define the gamification programming capabilities. It is worth noting that the
Trigger-Action rules need to seamlessly integrate task and gamification aspects. As explained
Table 1
Game element-based language primitives for actions, events, and states.
Game Element [DO] Action [WHEN] Events [WHILE] States
Acknowledgment: “Assign one acknowl- “User gains one ac- “User has one ac-
e.g., badge edgment” knowledgment” knowledgment”; “User
has N acknowledg-
ments”
Level:federica gini “Level up” “User reaches the level “User is at level N”;
e.g., profile level N” “ One is at a level
lower[higher] than N”
Points:federica gini “Assign points”; “As- “User gains points” “User has points”;
e.g., experience points sign a random number “User has more[less]
of points” than N points”
below, gamification actions are usually attached to rules with task-based triggers while some
specific gamification mechanics could require specific rules with gamification-based triggers.
Figure 1: Architecture of the system.
IoT Gamified
Application
Task Interface
End-Users
Gamification
Task Engine
Engine
Rules authoring
Interface
End-User
Programmer
EUD rules
We propose a preliminary attempt to explore the taxonomy of game elements in order to
select and implement verbal primitives in the Rules authoring Interface based on the notion of
Trigger-Action rules. As a first step, we analyzed the domain of game elements referring to
Toda and colleagues’ taxonomy [19] and selected some examples to be included in an EUD
platform. See Table 1 for the game elements and the related language primitives (see [19] for
the complete and detailed description of gamification elements). Similarly to the Event-State-
Condition-Action rules paradigm (ESCA; [20]), we included primitives for states, events, and
actions in order to help users and enrich their expressiveness in rules composition [21, 22, 23].
In the following paragraph, we provide an example of game- and task-related verbal primitives
combination, used to customize an IoT tangible educational device, SMARTER (Task interface,
see Figure 2), that engages children (end-users) in math exercises [24, 25]. End-users can perform
actions on the tangible tools, such as placing or removing tiles to complete math exercises. The
tool can provide end-users with visual and audio feedback (through an RGB led and an audio
component), depending on the exercise’s logic (interpreted by the Task Engine and customized
by the end-user programmer). Through the Rules authoring Interface, teachers can compose
rules to define the task logic using task-related verbal primitive, for states (e.g., “[WHILE]
There are N tiles on the board [AND] There is at least a digit tile”), events (e.g., “[WHEN] A
tile is placed on the board” or "[WHEN] The arithmetic expression becomes true"), and actions
(“[DO] Play audio N ”). So the teacher can create a customized program for arithmetic operation:
"[WHILE] The last tile inserted is a digit [WHEN] The arithmetic expression becomes true [DO]
Turn on LED blue". Combining these task-related verbal primitives with game-related ones
will allow the creation of more complex and expressive programs. Therefore, we can have
rules with task-based triggers that include gamification actions and rules with gamification
triggers that include domain actions. For example, teachers can assign points based on the task
resolution by simply adding game-related actions in the rules "[DO] Turn on LED green[AND]
Assign N points". Moreover, it will be possible to change the logic of the task based on gamified
elements, for example: "[WHILE] User is at level N [WHEN] A tile is placed [DO] Turn on LED
red". Also, an end-user programmer can define specific game-related rules to define only the
gamification aspects: "[WHILE] User has N points [WHEN] User reaches the level N [DO] Assign
one acknowledgment”.
Figure 2: On the left SMARTER, on the right a set of tiles.
3. Conclusion
In the current paper, we presented an innovative EUD solution that enables naive users to
personalize and define complex gamification dynamics and tasks. Developing EUD systems
specifically built to support users in creating and modifying gameful elements, besides being
helpful for game designers, could be a powerful tool for naive users who daily use gamified
solutions in their interaction with IoT. In future work, we aim at investigating and creating
a complete set of verbal primitives to populate the Rules authoring Interface where users can
easily select states, events, and actions in the form: “WHILE state(s), WHEN event, DO action(s)”
to create sets of rules to design new gamified tasks.
Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR)
under grant PRIN 2017 “EMPATHY: EMpowering People in deAling with internet of THings
ecosYstems”.
References
[1] J. G. Hamari, G. Ritzer, C. Rojek, The blackwell encyclopedia of sociology, 2019.
[2] A. Alla, K. Nafil, Gamification in iot application: A systematic mapping study, Procedia
Computer Science 151 (2019) 455–462.
[3] R. Xiao, Z. Wu, J. Hamari, Internet-of-gamification: A review of literature on iot-enabled
gamification for user engagement, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction
38 (2022) 1113–1137.
[4] H. Lieberman, F. Paternò, V. Wulf, End user development, volume 9, Springer, 2006.
[5] P. Markopoulos, J. Nichols, F. Paternò, V. Pipek, End-user development for the internet of
things, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 24 (2017) 1–3.
[6] B. R. Barricelli, S. Valtolina, Designing for end-user development in the internet of things,
in: End-User Development: 5th International Symposium, IS-EUD 2015, Madrid, Spain,
May 26-29, 2015. Proceedings 5, Springer, 2015, pp. 9–24.
[7] F. Corno, L. De Russis, A. Monge Roffarello, How do end-users program the internet of
things?, Behaviour & Information Technology 41 (2022) 1865–1887.
[8] J. Koivisto, J. Hamari, The rise of motivational information systems: A review of gamifica-
tion research, International Journal of Information Management 45 (2019) 191–210.
[9] F. Benzi, D. Fogli, The role of gamification in end-user development., in: CoPDA@ IS-EUD,
2015, pp. 32–38.
[10] F. Benzi, F. Cabitza, D. Fogli, R. Lanzilotti, A. Piccinno, Gamification techniques for rule
management in ambient intelligence, in: Ambient Intelligence: 12th European Conference,
AmI 2015, Athens, Greece, November 11-13, 2015, Proceedings 12, Springer, 2015, pp.
353–356.
[11] D. Fogli, M. Peroni, C. Stefini, Imathome: Making trigger-action programming easy and
fun, Journal of Visual Languages & Computing 42 (2017) 60–75.
[12] Y. M. Arif, D. D. Putra, D. Wardani, S. M. S. Nugroho, M. Hariadi, Decentralized recom-
mender system for ambient intelligence of tourism destinations serious game using known
and unknown rating approach, Heliyon 9 (2023).
[13] Z. Kakavand, A. A. Nazari Shirehjini, M. Ghosian Moghaddam, S. Shirmohammadi, Child-
home interaction: Design and usability evaluation of a game-based end-user development
for children, Available at SSRN 4150426 (2022).
[14] A. C. T. Klock, I. Gasparini, M. S. Pimenta, J. Hamari, Tailored gamification: A review of
literature, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 144 (2020) 102495.
[15] J. Koivisto, J. Hamari, Demographic differences in perceived benefits from gamification,
Computers in Human Behavior 35 (2014) 179–188.
[16] J. Majuri, J. Koivisto, J. Hamari, Gamification of education and learning: A review of
empirical literature, in: Proceedings of the 2nd international GamiFIN conference, GamiFIN
2018, CEUR-WS, 2018.
[17] W. Oliveira, J. Hamari, L. Shi, A. M. Toda, L. Rodrigues, P. T. Palomino, S. Isotani, Tai-
lored gamification in education: A literature review and future agenda, Education and
Information Technologies 28 (2023) 373–406.
[18] M. Trinidad, A. Calderón, M. Ruiz, Gorace: a multi-context and narrative-based gami-
fication suite to overcome gamification technological challenges, IEEE Access 9 (2021)
65882–65905.
[19] A. M. Toda, A. C. Klock, W. Oliveira, P. T. Palomino, L. Rodrigues, L. Shi, I. Bittencourt,
I. Gasparini, S. Isotani, A. I. Cristea, Analysing gamification elements in educational
environments using an existing gamification taxonomy, Smart Learning Environments 6
(2019) 1–14.
[20] G. Desolda, F. Greco, M. Zancanaro, M. F. Costabile, Extending task automation systems
with event-state-condition-action capabilities., in: EMPATHY@ INTERACT, 2021, pp.
48–51.
[21] J. Huang, M. Cakmak, Supporting mental model accuracy in trigger-action programming,
in: Proceedings of the 2015 acm international joint conference on pervasive and ubiquitous
computing, 2015, pp. 215–225.
[22] M. Zancanaro, G. Gallitto, D. Yem, B. Treccani, Improving mental models in iot end-user
development, HUMAN-CENTRIC COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SCIENCES 12
(2022).
[23] G. Desolda, F. Greco, F. Guarnieri, N. Mariz, M. Zancanaro, Sensation: an authoring
tool to support event–state paradigm in end-user development, in: Human-Computer
Interaction–INTERACT 2021: 18th IFIP TC 13 International Conference, Bari, Italy, August
30–September 3, 2021, Proceedings, Part II 18, Springer, 2021, pp. 373–382.
[24] M. Andrao, G. Desolda, F. Greco, R. Manfredi, B. Treccani, M. Zancanaro, End-user
programming and math teachers: An initial study, in: Proceedings of the 2022 Inter-
national Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, AVI 2022, Association for Comput-
ing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2022. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3531073.3534493.
doi:10.1145/3531073.3534493.
[25] M. Andrao, A. Cappelletti, G. Desolda, F. Greco, B. Treccani, M. Zancanaro, Smarter
than before: Empowering teachers to program a modular iot educational device, in: 9th
International Symposium on End-User Development (IS-EUD 2023), June 06–08, 2023,
Cagliari, Italy, 2023.