No abstract

Gamification, the idea of inserting game dynamics into portals or social networks, has recently evolved as an approach to encourage active participation in online communities. For an online community to start and proceed on to a sustainable operation, it is important that members are encouraged to contribute positively and frequently. We decided to introduce gamification in an online community that we designed and developed with the Australian Government's Department of Human Services to support welfare recipients transitioning from one payment to another. We first defined a formal model of gamification and a gamification design process. In instantiating our model to the online community, we realised that our context applied a number of constraints on the gamification elements that could be introduced. In this paper, we outline the design and implementation of a gamification model for online communities and its instantiation into our context, with its specific requirements. While we cannot comment on the success of gamification to drive user engagement in our context (for lack of the possibility of a controlled experiment), we found our implementation of badges-based gamification a helpful way to provide a useful abstraction on the life of the community, providing feedback enabling us to monitor and analyze the community. We thus show how feedback provided by such gamification data has a potential to be useful to community providers to better understand the community needs and addressing them appropriately to maintain a level of engagement in the community.

It is widely acknowledged that obesity is a serious health issue. Despite governments' campaigns and initiatives to raise the level of awareness, the proportion of adults classified as overweight or obese is increasing steadily. As a result, there has been a growing interest in Human Computer Interaction and User Modelling to study how to support health behaviour change. While most of the work to date has focused on individuals, medical research has shown that family engagement plays an important role on health behaviour. To consider the family context, we are developing technology that facilitates health discussions and encourages supportive behaviour within the family. We investigate how to motivate members of a family to reflect upon their lifestyle and think of ways in which they can make it healthier. In particular, we have looked at whether providing explicit goals and tailored feedback can have an impact. During a two week trial with families in which we explored these strategies, we found that setting a collective goal for the family influenced how much the family as a whole contributed, and that feedback increased significantly mothers' participation. Our results also suggest that establishing a family goal encouraged families to work together and, in particular, to help each other find ways to be healthier. Finally, 76% of participants reported discussing the task with someone in their family, and, also discussing it together as a family (57%).

Engagement with computer games causes children and adolescent users to spend a substantial amount of time at sedentary game playing activity. We hypothesise that this engagement can be leveraged to motivate users to increase their amount of physical activity. In this paper, we present a novel approach for designing computer games, according to which the users' physical activity reinforces their game character. This way the users are seamlessly motivated to perform physical activity while maintaining their enjoyment of playing the game. General TermsDesign, Human Factors.