Gamification of Workplace Activities - Smart Information Systems: Computational Intelligence for Real-Life Applications - page 241

the content of an image as their teammates. Differing from the ESP game, which
exploits “human computation” for the annotation of images, Dogear focuses on pro-
viding methods to learn more about colleagues and their expertise, hence increasing
familiarity within a company. They report that within the first month of the release
of the system, they had 87 active players from 10 different countries. A detailed
analysis is still missing though.
Farzan et al. [ 10 ] examine the impact of game mechanics, more precisely the
introduction of a points system, on a social enterprise network system (Beehive,
IBM). They evaluate the impact of this points system by performing A/B testing, i.e.,
one half of all users are made aware of the points system, while the other half (i.e., the
control group) cannot see this feature. They observe that overall, the introduction of
the points system increased the activity level of the users within the system. However,
they also report that 72% of the users in the experimental group never visited the
page which describes how to earn points. Besides, they argue that a large portion did
not even notice the existence of points.
Addressing this issue further, Farzan et al. [ 8 ] also studied if there is any noticeable
effect on the usage when the points system is explicitly explained to the users.
Therefore, they provided further details via email and repeated the experiment. They
conclude that points systems can successfully be employed to motivate users to
contribute more in an enterprise social network system, especially if combined with
email notifications. Further, they conclude that the type of contribution can directly
be controlled by the type of gamification applied, i.e., increasing the points for certain
types of contributions will indeed result in an increase of contributions of this type. In
a follow-up experiment, Farzan et al. [ 9 ] increase the social interaction and diversity
of content even further by introducing a badge based approach on promoting content.
Although they observe an increased activity due to the introduction of gamification
methods, the authors argue that they cannot make any statement about the quality of
the contributions. Further studies are needed to examine this in detail.
Evaluating the effect of gamification methods from a different perspective, Thom
et al. [ 32 ] study whether the removal of gamification features from an enterprise
social media system has any measurable effect on user activity. They report a sig-
nificant decline of user activities after removing gamification features, concluding
that extrinsic rewards influence user behavior. Interestingly, the authors also noticed
some relation between user activity and their geographical location. This supports
our premise that there are many factors that can have an impact on the success of
workplace gamification.
Hamari [ 12 ] evaluates the use of badges in a peer-to-peer trading service. He
observes that the introduction of gamification mechanisms does not automatically
result in an increased use of the system by all users, but that those users who actively
inspect their own badges becomemore active. This supports our assumption that indi-
vidual behavior plays an important role in the successful application of gamification
methods in an office scenario.
Summarizing, previous research reports an increase of users' activity in an
enterprise due to diverse game mechanics. However, these studies also indicate
that individual behavior has a significant influence on the success of gamification.