Gamifying model-based engineering: the PapyGame experience.

Modeling is an essential and challenging activity in any engineering environment. It implies some hard-to-train skills such as abstraction and communication. Teachers, project leaders, and tool vendors have a hard time teaching or training their students, co-workers, or users. Gamification refers to the exploitation of gaming mechanisms for serious purposes, like promoting behavioral changes, soliciting participation and engagement in activities, etc. We investigate the introduction of gaming mechanisms in modeling tasks with the primary goal of supporting learning/training. The result has been the realization of a gamified modeling environment named PapyGame. In this article, we present the approach adopted for PapyGame implementation, the details on the gamification elements involved, and the derived conceptual architecture required for applying gamification in any modeling environment. Moreover, to demonstrate the benefits of using PapyGame for learning/training modeling, a set of user experience evaluations have been conducted. Correspondingly, we report the obtained results together with a set of future challenges we consider as critical to make gamified modeling a more effective education/training approach.

Gamification for behavior change: A scientometric review.

Gamification, which refers to the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, provides similar experiences and motivations as games do; this makes gamification a useful approach to promote positive behaviors. As a useful tool for keeping users motivated, engaged and active, there is a wide interest in adopting gamification solutions for supporting and promoting positive behaviors and behavior change (e.g. quit smoking, ecological behaviors, food choices, civic engagement, mental healthcare, sustainability, etc.). In this study, we use the CiteSpace software to examine 984 publications and their 46,609 unique references on gamification applied for behavior change. The corpus of studies was downloaded from the Scopus database and refers to studies published between 2011 and the beginning of 2022. Several methods were used to analyze these data: (1) document co-citation analysis (DCA) was performed to identify the pivotal researches and the research areas; (2) author cocitation analysis (ACA) was performed to identify the main authors; (3) and keyword analysis was performed to detect the most influential keywords and their change over time. The results of the analysis provide an overview of the influential documents, authors and keywords that have given shape to the literature of the field, and how it has evolved, showing an initial interest in motivational and persuasion techniques, and in the gamification design, and subsequently in the development of more rigorous methodologies for both design and use. As the first scientometric review of gamification applied to behavior change, this study will be of interest to junior and senior researchers, graduate students, and professors seeking to identify research trends, topics, major publications, and influential scholars.