First attempt at a thesis abstract

From my initial idea I worked my way through some litterature and quite a few articles to come up with my first attempt at an abstract for my gamification thesis:

“User collaboration is a goal for many business applications today, but they are often faced with challenges motivating users to voluntarily engage in providing information and/or take part in collaborative activities [Ellis, Clarence A., Simon J. Gibbs, and Gail Rein, 1991].

Gamification as “a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences in order to support user’s overall value creation.” [Huotari and Hamari, 2012, Defining Gamification] has been suggested as a possible approach to address these problems. Many computer games today can boast with extensive and elaborate activities and as such are a natural source of inspiration for such an endeavor.

The hypothesis is that the use of game mechanics from existing online computer games can be used to help design a solution that engages people to actively participate and collaborate in a ‘gamified application’.”

From here I started looking for a collaborative context that would be a suitable target for this endeavor and ended up with open innovation. Open innovation being a paradigm that to me represents a perfect environment for testing this hypothesis. It would introduce a unique platform for businesses and individuals to find and create new ideas, discover and develop solutions and work as toolbox to inspire and motivate for collaborative efforts to take on existing and future challenges. But the big questions remains; will it work?

Master thesis background

The background for my thesis is related to the use of gamification as a method to motivate and enable collaboration in an open innovation process. If I look at massive online games today there are two different concepts for collaborative gaming that seem to be able to motivate gamers beyond what one would expect. Within the general gaming community these two concepts are referred to as PvP (player versus player) and PvE (player versus environment – in this case the game world and its virtual content). My reason for bringing up these two topics can best be described by giving two examples:

1. For PvP the game EVE had a massive battle involving around 4000 players that came together within a very short period of time to help out their teammates and fight other teams of players. To motivate players to be ready for such a battle as well as be willing and able to collaborate with their team members requires an enormous amount of planning as well as coordination during the actual battle. There are very few business activities that can muster this kind of manpower within such a time frame and enable them to collaborate that this level.
2. For PvE it is natural to mention World of Warcraft (WoW) and its team activities. When launched the game had challenges that required its players to team up with 39 other players whom would spend several hours during a game session collaborating to overcome these challenges within the game. This form of collaboration is widely referred to as ‘raiding’ and is common in many MMORPGs today, but most games have cut down from the 40 player version into smaller teams (WoW today using 10- and 25-man teams for their ‘raid’ challenges). Having personally participated in multiple such raids they represent to me a very high level of player commitment and willingness to collaborate that I find rare elsewhere in society today.

Contained in both these games and other software used in conjunction with them are complex collaborative systems used both plan and execute such activities. They also utilize a wide range of social structures and communication techniques that together makes for an impressive toolbox. To me the combination of game mechanics, used in these games to create the environment for motivating its players to collaborate, felt like a pattern of sorts. Would it be possible to transfer such a pattern into a gamified solution? I could say that my initial hypothesis was that the use of these patterns from online games can be used to motivate and enable people to actively participate and collaborate also in a gamified application.

Digital academic tracking…

This is the main reason for creating this blog. Having started the my Master thesis during the fall of 2013 it has become clear that I need a channel to store thoughts, ideas and draft rants as well as a place to build my thesis. And it will also work as a portal for any other academic publications I produce as a result of focusing on the topic of gamification…