Designing Gameful and Ethical Experiences

As video games become increasingly engaging, user experience designers have begun to directly translate game elements to non-game contexts in order to create more engaging and persuading experiences. The terms gamification and gameful design , have been coined to describe this process, and over the last five years a prominent industry has been established that provides gamification services to clients. While recent research demonstrates that gamification can be effective at promoting behaviour change in various contexts, studies have also found that the use of game elements may also negatively impact a user's experience. Additionally, if persuasion is a key design goal then ethical concerns are raised -- are these types of experiences manipulative or exploitative? We propose a workshop to bring researchers and industry participants together to discuss and work through the effective and ethical design of gamified, gameful and persuasive human-computer interactions.