How Gamification Affects Software Developers: Cautionary Evidence from a Natural Experiment on GitHub

Moldon, Lukas; Strohmaier, Markus; Wachs, Johannes

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2006.02371

Cited by 1 publication

(6 citation statements)

References 43 publications

(51 reference statements)

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“…Summarized descriptions are presented in Table 1 and Table 2. #e Moldon, Strohmaier, & Wachs [29] paper was a preprint posted to arXiv. As it had not undergone peer review, its findings were not included in that analysis; it was only used in describing the nature of studies.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Notably, Günther, Kacperski, & Krems [15] applied the same gamification feature at two different times, each for 3 months. #e timing is unknown in Moldon et al [29]. A clear research question was found in only 4/8 papers, but all stated the purposes for gamifying and studying removal.…”

Section: Nature Of Gamification Removalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most (6/8) used a quasi-experimental design, with non-experimental components being lack of hypotheses, lack of randomization, lack of control groups, etc. All studies employed a longitudinal design, but timeframes varied: the shortest was 2 weeks [2] and the longest was 3 years [29]. Four studies included a baseline, which varied in length: 9.5 months [42], 5 months [15], and 3 weeks [10,33].…”

Section: Nature Of Gamification Removalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A clear research question was found in only 4/8 papers, but all stated the purposes for gamifying and studying removal. Reasons for gamifying included increasing user activity [2,15,29,42], improving performance [33,44], enhancing experience [10], and understanding the effect on motivation [12]. For removal, reasons included isolating the influence of gamification on behavior [2,10,29,42,44] and determining maintenance of effects over time [12,15,33].…”

Section: Nature Of Gamification Removalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reasons for gamifying included increasing user activity [2,15,29,42], improving performance [33,44], enhancing experience [10], and understanding the effect on motivation [12]. For removal, reasons included isolating the influence of gamification on behavior [2,10,29,42,44] and determining maintenance of effects over time [12,15,33]. Only 2 studies included hypotheses, despite the use of experimental approaches and inferential analyses.…”

Section: Nature Of Gamification Removalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Removing Gamification: A Research Agenda

Seaborn

2021

Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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The effect of removing gamification elements from interactive systems has been a long-standing question in gamification research. Early work and foundational theories raised concerns about the endurance of positive effects and the emergence of negative ones. Yet, nearly a decade later, no work to date has sought consensus on these matters. Here, I offer a rapid review on the state of the art and what is known about the impact of removing gamification. A small corpus of 8 papers published between 2012 and 2020 were found. Findings suggest a mix of positive and negative effects related to removing gamification. Significantly, insufficient reporting, methodological weaknesses, limited measures, and superficial interpretations of "negative" results prevent firm conclusions. I offer a research agenda towards better understanding the nature of gamification removal. I end with a call for empirical and theoretical work on illuminating the effects that may linger after systems are un-gamified.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Nature Of Gamification Removalmentioning

confidence: 99%