Gamification vs. Privacy: Identifying and Analysing the Major Concerns

Abstract

Gamification, the use of game design elements in applications that are not games, has been developed to provide attractive environments and maintain user interest in several domains. In domains such as education, marketing and health, where gamification techniques are applied, user engagement in applications has increased. In these applications the protection of users’ privacy is an important aspect to consider, due to the applications obtaining a record of the personal information of their users. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify if applications where gamification is applied do respect users’ privacy. For the accomplishment of this aim, two main steps have been implemented. Since the main principle of gamification is the existence of game elements, the first step was to identify the set of game elements recorded in the literature that are commonly applied in various applications. Afterwards, an examination of the relationship between these elements and privacy requirements was implemented in order to identify which elements conflict with the privacy requirements leading to potential privacy violations and which elements do not. Α conceptual model according to the results of this examination was designed, which presents how elements conflict with requirements. Based on the results, there are indeed game elements which can lead to privacy violations. The results of this work provide valuable guidance to software developers, especially during the design stages of gamified applications since it helps them to consider the protection of users’ privacy in parallel from the early stages of the application development onwards.

The Role of Gamification in Privacy Protection and User Engagement

“…Each study mentions and describes an amount of game elements [24][25][26]. In [27], all mentioned game elements have been presented by conducting a review that recorded all game elements and introduced them in the relevant literature. In Table 1, the amount of game elements is presented along with the explanation of their concept.…”

“…Additionally, some examples of gamified applications in several sectors are given out with the respective elements that have been assigned to them. In this work [27], the connection among elements can be identified. For instance, in order for a user to win badges, levels have to be passed or points have to be collected [39].…”

“…Many relevant engineering methodologies have been published which describe these requirements and explain how they can be analyzed within the systems [13,17,18,[50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58]. In [58], all requirements that were mentioned and used in [27] for the conduction of the results are described. These requirements are presented in Table 2 along with their aim.…”

“…These requirements are presented in Table 2 along with their aim. An in-depth combination between gamification and this aspect, focusing on the peculiarity of gamified services related to the privacy requirements is provided in [27]. This relation has been examined, paying particular attention to the impact of gamification on privacy domain.…”

“…Afterwards, a more detailed analysis has been published in [26], where authors presented their findings by designing a metamodel. In detail, after the first investigation of the relation between game elements and privacy requirements [27], authors selected some existent gamified services and recorded the used elements in order to examine their findings on real environments. According to the results [27], the game elements that have been implemented in these gamified services may harm users' privacy by violating the privacy requirements.…”