Authors:
(1) Clauvin Almeida, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil;
(2) Marcos Kalinowski, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil;
(3) Anderson Uchoa, Federal University of Ceara (UFC), Itapaje, Brazil;
(4) Bruno Feijo, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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
The academic gamification research does not ignore game design elements causing negative effects. Algashami [39] cataloged various negative effects, which the author called “gamification risks”, dividing them into five categories of risk factors: performance, societal & personal, goals, tasks, and gamification design. The author identified 20 gamification risks, amongst them: performance misjudgments, lowering self-esteem, counterproductive comparison, lack of group coherence, lack of engagement, reduce the quality, and kill the joy. In comparison with our work, Algashami’s research [39] is not focused on gamification elements and neither on gamification applied to education, but on risk factors’ identification and management strategies in large-scale businesses using gamification in their workplaces.
Hyrynsalmi et al. [40] pointed a lack of secondary studies about the negative effects of gamification. They categorized adverse gamification implications into limiting and harmful issues: the first category discusses gamification limiting the full capabilities of an artifact, and the second concerns the harmful consequences of gamification. We also found examples of both categories in [41]. In the mentioned context of a lack of secondary studies on the harmful effects of gamification, we decided to focus our research on them.
Hence, we searched for related secondary studies (synthesis of their findings in Table 2) but noticed variations concerning our purpose. We found significant differences for at least one of the following: subject, data analysis, date range, or a lack of focus on the negative effects of game design elements in gamification. Peixoto and Silva’s review [42] had a different focus, aiming at building a gamification requirements catalog connecting game design elements to Bartle’s Personality Types. Majuri et al. [43] present a review of 128 empirical research papers on gamification of education and learning and point out an excessive focus on quantifiable performance metrics and positive aspects. However, their work is not focused on negative effects and only covers the literature until 2015. Klock et al. [32] did also not focus on negative effects, besides having a data range limited from 2013 to 2016. Alhammad and Moreno’s secondary study [44] had its scope scoped to gamification in software engineering education.
Finally, the secondary study by Toda et al. [27] is the work closest to ours, as they also focus on negative effects. However, as we noticed a significant amount of work in recent years, and their study identified only 17 papers within the date range from 2012 to the first half of 2016. Considering the existence of new evidence, we identified the need for an update [45]. Nevertheless, we decided to run a completely new mapping study, to allow us to apply a search strategy following the advice provided by [15] and to address our specific purpose more precisely, e.g., focusing directly on game design elements and identifying the type of empirical studies that revealed the negative effects.
Indeed, comparing our mapping study to the previously conducted secondary studies, as can be seen in Table 3, we expanded the time range covered until the end of 2020 and our search strategy allowed us to significantly increase the number of papers covered (87) when compared to the number found (17) by the closest related paper about negative effects of gamification in education [27]. Details on our mapping study follow.
