Defining gameful experience as a psychological state caused by gameplay: Replacing the term ‘Gamefulness’ with three distinct constructs

Gameful Self-Regulation: A Study on How Gamified Self-Tracking Features Evoke Gameful Experiences

“…To motivate engagement with activities that may not be inherently inviting, such as exercise [18] or routine work activities [50], there has been a pervasive effort to make these activities, and the systems and services employed around them, more game-like through several techniques [13]: gamification [21,31], exergames [41], serious games [28], game-based learning [17,24] games-with-a-purpose/human computation [37,49], quantified-self (e.g. [14,18]), and persuasive technologies/behavior change systems [55]; all of which generally belong to the larger class of motivational information systems [26].…”

“…While traditional understanding still often regards gaming as a pure leisure activity without further benefits to an individual, gamified and gameful services combine dimensions of hedonism and utility [26,30,31]. The goal in gameful system design is to employ gameful design practices, which would in turn induce gameful experiences [22].…”

“…The goal in gameful system design is to employ gameful design practices, which would in turn induce gameful experiences [22]. The gameful experiences would then motivate and support the user of a gameful system to perform intended behaviors [31]. Hence, gameful systems always contain a goal that is external to system use itself, and consequently, the experiences produced by such systems are not limited merely to the enjoyment of using the system.…”

“…While "gamefulness" as a construct has been considered difficult to define for a long time [6,21], the construct has generally referred to a latent idea of experiences related to playing games [6,21,31]. Gamefulness in the context of gamification and gameful systems has perhaps come to be more concretely conceptualized as an interactive state in which an individual is voluntarily motivated to pursue meaningful goals, under pre-known conditions and evaluation techniques [31]. Recently, instruments for measuring the gameful experience have been developed: Högberg et al [22] conducted an extensive study to identify dimensions of gamefulness in gamified services.…”

“…Such experiences of gamefulness would sustain engagement with activities in non-game contexts [6,13,21]. and thus, support user's motivation [13,21,30,31,36]. Gamification has, hence, been utilized pervasively especially across contexts where persistence and long-term continuance of activity are key to the realization of results; i.e.…”