Defining Gamification - A Service Marketing Perspective
📜 Abstract
During recent years “gamification” has gained significant attention among practitioners and game scholars. However, the current understanding of gamification has been solely based on the act of adding systemic game elements into services. In this paper, we propose a new definition for gamification, which emphases the experiential nature of games and gamification, instead of the systemic understanding. Furthermore, we tie this definition to theory from service marketing because majority of gamification implementations aim towards goals of marketing, which brings to the discussion the notion of how customer / user is always ultimately the creator of value. Since now, the main venue for academic discussion on gamification has mainly been the HCI community. We find it relevant both for industry practitioners as well as for academics to study how gamification can fit in the body of knowledge of existing service literature because the goals and the means of gamification and marketing have a significant overlap.
✨ Summary
The paper develops a service-marketing perspective on gamification. It argues that gamification should not be defined solely as the addition of game elements or mechanics to a service. Instead, it emphasizes the experiential nature of games and treats gameful experience as something that emerges through the user’s participation and perception. The paper frames games as service systems in which providers and users jointly contribute to value creation.
The proposed definition describes gamification as enhancing a service with affordances intended to support gameful experiences and the user’s overall value creation. This approach makes the definition independent of the specific type of core service and allows both non-game services and existing games to be gamified. It also emphasizes that gamification is an attempt to facilitate gameful experiences rather than a guaranteed outcome, and that evaluation should consider users’ subjective experiences in addition to behavioral or commercial measures.
The paper had a documented influence on subsequent scholarship. Huotari and Hamari later expanded the framework in a peer-reviewed article that retained the service-marketing definition, elaborated its theoretical implications, and identified four potential gamification providers: the core-service provider, a third-party provider, the user, and another user. (link.springer.com) A subsequent literature review used the paper’s distinction between systemic game elements and gameful psychological experiences when organizing empirical gamification research. (doi.org) Later business and information-systems research also adopted the definition to connect gamification with consumer value, engagement, and behavioral outcomes. (sciencedirect.com) The evidence supports a primarily conceptual and theoretical influence; the paper’s contribution was to broaden how gamification was defined and studied rather than to report an industry deployment or causal evaluation.