Publication
Supporting Users’ Influence in Gamification Settings and Game Live-Streams
Pascal Lessel
PhD-Thesis, Universität des Saarlandes, 2018.
Abstract
Playing games has long been important to mankind. One reason for this is the associated autonomy, as players can decide on many aspects on their own and
can shape the experience. Game-related sub-fields have appeared in Human-Computer Interaction where this autonomy is questionable: in this thesis, we
consider gamification and game live-streams and here, we support the users’ influence at runtime. We hypothesize that this should affect the perception of
autonomy and should lead to positive effects overall. Our contribution is three-fold: first, we investigate crowd-based, self-sustaining systems in which the
user’s influence directly impacts the outcome of the system’s service. We show that users are willing to expend effort in such systems even without additional motivation, but that gamification is still beneficial here. Second, we introduce “bottom-up” gamification, i.e., the idea of self-tailored gamification. Here, users have full control over the gamification used in a system, i.e., they can set it up as they see fit at the system’s runtime. Through user studies, we show that this has positive behavioral effects and thus adds to the ongoing efforts to move away from “one-size-fits-all” solutions. Third, we investigate how to make gaming live-streams more interactive, and how viewers perceive this. We also consider shared game control settings in live-streams, in which viewers have full control, and we contribute options to support viewers’ self-administration here.