TY - GEN
T1 - Unethical Gamification: A Literature Review
AU - Al Masalm, Samaan
AU - Xi, Nannan
AU - Hamari, Juho
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - Gamification has become a mainstay approach in designing engaging systems, practices, and cultures across practically all walks of human life. However, as gamification mainly attempts to affect individual psychological states, motivations, attitudes, and behaviors, conscious consideration of ethical aspects, as well as underlying values and premises, is very much warranted. However, gamification research and practice have sprung up rather rapidly and myopically as boosted by the contemporary hype related to technology and games, which has led to the relative dismissal of ethical considerations in relation to gamification. In order to map these considerations and the current state of the discussion in gamification literature, we systematically reviewed research related to ethics, and particularly, possible identified and discussed harms of gamification. The corpus reveals that psychological distress, exploitation, lack of performance, and privacy issues are the most commonly contemplated possible harms, with different frequencies based on the game elements, types, and contexts.
AB - Gamification has become a mainstay approach in designing engaging systems, practices, and cultures across practically all walks of human life. However, as gamification mainly attempts to affect individual psychological states, motivations, attitudes, and behaviors, conscious consideration of ethical aspects, as well as underlying values and premises, is very much warranted. However, gamification research and practice have sprung up rather rapidly and myopically as boosted by the contemporary hype related to technology and games, which has led to the relative dismissal of ethical considerations in relation to gamification. In order to map these considerations and the current state of the discussion in gamification literature, we systematically reviewed research related to ethics, and particularly, possible identified and discussed harms of gamification. The corpus reveals that psychological distress, exploitation, lack of performance, and privacy issues are the most commonly contemplated possible harms, with different frequencies based on the game elements, types, and contexts.
KW - Game, Psychological distress, Persuasive technology, Ethics, Sustainability
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
SP - 1106
EP - 1115
BT - Proceedings of the 56th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2023
A2 - Bui, Tung X.
T2 - Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Y2 - 3 January 2023 through 6 January 2023
ER -