How to engineer gamification: The consensus, the best practice and the grey areas

Gamification refers to the use of game elements in a business context to change users' behaviours, mainly increasing motivation towards a certain task or a strategic objective. Gamification has received a good deal of emphasis in both academia and industry across various disciplines and application areas. Despite the increasing interest, we still need a unified and holistic picture on how to engineer gamification, including the meaning of the term, its development process, the stakeholders and disciplines which need to be involved in it, and the concerns and risks that an ad-hoc design could raise for both businesses and users. To address this need, this article reports on empirical research which involved reviewing the literature and a range of gamification techniques and applications as secondary research, and an expert opinion study of two phases, qualitative and quantitative, as primary research. Based on the results, we provide a body of knowledge about gamification and point-out good practice principles and areas of gamification that are debatable and need further investigation.