Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computer Science

Committee Chair

Haeyong Chung

Committee Member

Letha Etzkorn

Committee Member

Tathagata Mukherjee

Committee Member

Joshua Booth

Committee Member

Jeff Hansberger

Research Advisor

Haeyong Chung

Subject(s)

Gamification--Research, System design, Human-computer interaction, Dynamic gamification

Abstract

With the advent of videogames as the world's first mass-market interactive media, gamification has emerged as the premier way to harness powerful behavior-affecting gamified elements and place them in other contexts, such as education, fitness, and rehabilitation. This transposition, however, ignores a key tenant of user engagement: reward ought to be aligned with effort. Most, if not all, current gamification systems dispatch static reward allocations for their spread of gamified behaviors. In this paper, an alternative is presented: dynamic gamification. This dynamic gamification reads the user's current gamified state for indicators of aptitude, dynamically remaps rewards with a tuneable evaluation algorithm, and works automatically to align user efforts with gamified rewards. A study is conducted in which this alternative is tested against existing practices, and analysis of the resulting data shows that the effort of a dynamic overhead results in changed user behavior without a change in user sentiment.

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