Gamification

During the last decade, games have become an established vein of entertainment, consumer culture, and essentially, a common part of people’s daily lives (36). In the United States alone 59% of the population plays computer games while revenues of the computer games industry exceed US $15 billion (4). However, in addition to the increased penetration of games, the ways in which people play and employ games have also become more varied. There are more different kinds of games available for a multitude of different platforms, mediated through different technologies that cater for differing gaming needs (15,20,24,41) for widening audiences (8,9,10,26,36,40) and which use a wide variety of business models (1,2,13,14,25,27,28,29).

As a result, our reality and lives are increasingly game-like, not only because video games have become a pervasive part of our lives, but perhaps most prominently also because activities, systems and services that are not traditionally perceived as game-like are increasingly gamified. Gamification refers to designing products, services and organizational practices in order to afford similar experiences to games, and consequently, to attempt to create value and affect people’s behaviour (3,16,21,30,39). In recent years, the popularity of gamification has skyrocketed and is manifested in growing numbers of gamified applications, as well as a rapidly increasing amount of research (See e.g. 17,18,33).

However, beyond intentional gamification, gamification also refers to the general ludic transformation of our reality, culture and everyday lives (35,39). For example, recently we have witnessed the popular emergence of augmented reality games (32) and virtual reality technologies that enable a more seamless integration of games into our physical reality. Moreover, recent emerging phenomenon such as eSports (19,38) and streaming (37) have also penetrated the cultural membrane allowing games to seep into domains hitherto dominated by traditional media.

We encourage a wide range of submissions: empirical and conceptual research papers, case studies, and reviews in addition to practitioner reports related to gamification, games, information systems, commerce and users/players as well as the area between them.

Accepted papers will be included in the Conference Proceedings published by the IEEE Computer Society and maintained in the IEEE Digital Library. HICSS publications account for the top 2% downloads of all IEEE conferences, and have been consistently ranked as the most cited papers in top journal publications. Extended versions of selected papers will be invited to be submitted to a Gamification special issue in the Journal of Business Research. The tentative deadline is February 15, 2018. https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-business-research/

Relevant topics include (not limited to):

Impact of games and gamification
Individual impact
Behaviour
Psychological states
Well-being
Organizational impacts
Business benefits
Societal impacts
Areas of ludification of culture
eSports
Streaming
Conceptual improvements
Definitions
Frameworks
Affordances / mechanics
Game business
Free-to-play
Virtual goods
Player retention
Game design as marketing
Motivations and players
Player typologies
Motivations / gratifications
Demographic differences
Adoption and continued use
Technology and design
Virtual Reality (VR)
Augmented reality (AR)
Mixed reality (MR)
Mobile and web applications
Gamification in enterprise
Health applications
Education technology (serious games, game-based learning)
(Action) Design research
Track Chairs

Juho Hamari (Primary Contact)
Gamification Group, Tampere University of Technology / University of Turku / University of Tampere
Email: juho.hamari { a } tut.fi

Petri Parvinen
University of Helsinki
Email: petri.parvinen { a } helsinki.fi

References

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