Towards a Framework to Assist Iterative and Adaptive Design in Gameful Systems

Over the years, gamification gained consensus among researchers and practitioners as a tool to motivate people to perform activities deemed as tedious or unexciting. Hence, there exist many and heterogeneous application domains that may benefit from gamification. However, the domain expert and the designer are often separate individuals with dissimilar backgrounds, skills, and understanding. Thus, they need a shared language to communicate and to design a gamified system in line with its ultimate goal, the implementation of which can then be left to the developers. While several studies from the literature tackled the problem of formally defining a design language able to assist designers in the code production, they rarely foresee a framework capable to include all the involved stakeholders (e.g., domain experts). Moreover, it is essential to allow those stakeholders to monitor the gameplay at runtime and intervene when necessary, as the design process is intrinsically iterative. In this work, we present a design framework that models the whole life cycle of gamification solutions, from the design to the execution and monitoring of the system. Finally, we present a prototype of the framework implemented in the Education domain.