Mapping Negative Effects of GDEs in Gamified Education

Table of Links

Abstract and 1 Introduction

2. Background and Related Work and 2.1. Gamification

2.2. Game Design Elements and 2.3. Gamification Effects

2.4. Related Work on Gamification Negative Effects

3. Systematic Mapping and 3.1. The Research Questions

3.2. Search Strategy and 3.3. Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

3.4. Applying the Search Strategy

3.5. Data Extraction

4. Systematic Mapping Results

5. Focus Group: Developer Perception on the Negative Effects of Game Design Elements

5.1. Context and Participant Characterization

5.2. Focus Group Design

5.3. The Developers’ Perception on The Negative Effects

5.4. On the Perceived Usefulness, Ease of use and Intent of Adoption of Mapped Negative Effects

5.5. Participant Feedback

6. Limitations

7. Concluding Remarks

7.1. Future Research Directions

Acknowledgements and References

7. Concluding Remarks

This paper reported a systematic mapping of negative effects of game design elements on education/learning software. Based on data extracted from 87 identified papers, we provided a comprehensive overview with information for software engineers and designers of such software. For instance, we identified the game design elements that have most often been related to adverse effects, the most common negative effects, and the relation between game design elements and negative effects.

The visible trend found from our research is that there has been a research focus on a small subset of the field of negative effects of educational gamified software’s GDEs. Badges, Leaderboards, and Competition were the three most mentioned GDEs. Lack of Effect, Worsened Performance, and Demotivation were the three most mentioned negative effects.

Worsened Performance was the negative effect found related to the trio of GDEs mentioned above, which makes some sense. GDEs aren’t silver bullets - each one of them has different uses, and different preferences and interpretations by different people. For instance, if someone dislikes competition and competition is the main gamification driver of a gamified software, the software won’t be able to motivate that user. A lack of motivation (that can be found related to Badges and Competition) can result in a Worsened Performance related to the user’s studies.

Beyond these findings, researchers may use the mapping study results to further analyze specific relations between GDEs and effects by examining the related mapped papers. Researchers could also benefit from the overview of available evidence to identify topics on which more primary studies should be conducted.

Furthermore, we conducted a focus group with experienced developers of gamified software that employ several of the mapped game design elements. The focus group allowed to enrich the discussion of the negative effects identified in the literature from the point of view of practitioners. It also allowed us to observe that practitioners may find the mapping of potential negative effects of game design elements useful in practice. Participants of the focus group were not aware of several of the potential negative effects of game design elements and considered the mapping as a valuable asset to help taking such effects into account in trade-off discussions when selecting game design elements in practice.