Rethinking gamification through artificial intelligence

Abstract

The concept of gamification was introduced in the early twenty-first century, but it didn’t gain traction in academic communities until the second half of 2010. Whilst gamified approaches have the potential to motivate and engage users, some argue that gamification’s one-size-fits-all approach is neither personalized nor adaptive. This impersonal and static nature of gamification has fueled the interest of researchers and designers to explore a more personalized and adaptive form of gamification, which caters for individual user differences and can potentially leverage a more intrinsic form of motivation. In this sense, Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents itself as an interesting technology for the successful implementation of such an approach to gamification through its autonomous, adaptive and personalized characteristics. This paper seeks to extend the conceptual basis of the term ‘AI-enabled gamification’ by examining the views of two game designers and two AI scientists through two focus groups. The results suggest that there is a positive understanding amongst the four experts of the potential application of AI to gamification. This includes the adoption of dynamic difficulty adjustment, dynamic reward computation, provision of personalized feedback and prediction of potential user failure/success. On the other hand, access to the right datasets in terms of both quantity and quality and the necessary privacy and ethical considerations were identified as possible challenges. Consequently, the findings suggest that AI has the potential to play a significant role in enhancing gamification; however, this requires the need for more research and further development of AI-enabled gamified systems.